Empire State Building
Lobby

The original main lobby is accessed from Fifth Avenue, on the building's east side, and is the only place in the building where the design contains narrative motifs. It contains an entrance with one set of double doors between a pair of revolving doors. At the top of each doorway is a bronze motif depicting one of three "crafts or industries" used in the building's construction—Electricity, Masonry, and Heating. The three-story-high space runs parallel to 33rd and 34th Streets. The lobby contains two tiers of marble: a wainscoting of darker marble, topped by lighter marble. There is a pattern of zigzagging terrazzo tiles on the lobby floor, which leads from east to west. To the north and south are storefronts, which are flanked by tubes of dark rounded marble and topped by a vertical band of grooves set into the marble. Until the 1960s, there was a Longchamps restaurant next to the lobby, with six oval murals designed by Winold Reiss; these murals were placed in storage when the Longchamps closed.

The western ends of the north and south walls include escalators to a mezzanine level. At the west end of the lobby, behind the security desk, is an aluminum relief of the skyscraper as it was originally built (without the antenna). The relief, which was intended to provide a welcoming effect, contains an embossed outline of the building, with rays radiating from the spire and the sun behind it. In the background is a state map of New York with the building's location marked by a "medallion" in the very southeast portion of the outline. A compass is depicted in the bottom right and a plaque to the building's major developers is on the bottom left. A scale model of the building was also placed south of the security desk.

The plaque at the western end of the lobby is on the eastern interior wall of a one-story-tall rectangular-shaped corridor that surrounds the banks of escalators, with a similar design to the lobby. The rectangular-shaped corridor actually consists of two long hallways on the northern and southern sides of the rectangle, as well as a shorter hallway on the eastern side and another long hallway on the western side. At both ends of the northern and southern corridors, there is a bank of four low-rise elevators in between the corridors. The western side of the rectangular elevator-bank corridor extends north to the 34th Street entrance and south to the 33rd Street entrance. It borders three large storefronts and leads to escalators (originally stairs), which go both to the second floor and to the basement. Going from west to east, there are secondary entrances to 34th and 33rd Streets from the northern and southern corridors, respectively. The side entrances from 33rd and 34th Street lead to two-story-high corridors around the elevator core, crossed by stainless steel-and-glass-enclosed bridges at the mezzanine floor.

Until the 1960s, an Art Deco mural, inspired by both the sky and the Machine Age, was installed in the lobby ceilings. Subsequent damage to these murals, designed by artist Leif Neandross, resulted in reproductions being installed. Renovations to the lobby in 2009, such as replacing the clock over the information desk in the Fifth Avenue lobby with an anemometer and installing two chandeliers intended to be part of the building when it originally opened, revived much of its original grandeur. The north corridor contained eight illuminated panels created in 1963 by Roy Sparkia and Renée Nemorov, in time for the 1964 World's Fair, depicting the building as the Eighth Wonder of the World alongside the traditional seven. The building's owners installed a series of paintings by the New York artist Kysa Johnson in the concourse level. Johnson later filed a federal lawsuit, in January 2014, under the Visual Artists Rights Act alleging the negligent destruction of the paintings and damage to her reputation as an artist. As part of the building's 2010 renovation, Denise Amses commissioned a work consisting of 15,000 stars and 5,000 circles, superimposed on a 13-by-5-foot (4.0 by 1.5 m) etched-glass installation, in the lobby.
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