Why I Hate the Empire State Building
I’ve been to a number of tall buildings, and I can say without a doubt, that the Empire State Building was the worst managed, with the longest wait for the least payoff. The only thing I’ve ever waited longer to get on than the Empire State Building was the Maverick at Cedar Point, and while the Maverick was a rip-roaring good time, the Empire State Building was a crowded hellhole with a mediocre view and one of those diagonal fences that makes it impossible to take good photos.
If you have never been to the Empire State Building, let me break it down for you so that you can skip it and not waste two hours of life.
1. You pull up to the Empire State Building in a cab and stride through the doors, full of hope and happy to be seeing an American icon.
2. You go up an escalator and into a lobby with high ceilings, nice carpeting, and lots of velvet rope. There is a very long line, but it moves very quickly. When you get to the first wall, a cheerful man hands you a brochure with ticket prices and all the extra add-ons you can ever hope to not buy. The man also offers to sell you an “Express Pass” for $45 per person, and you decline because you are an idiot.
3. After 10 or 15 more minutes, you round a corner and arrive at an airport-style security station. They make you take off your belt, empty your pockets, and run all your belongings through a scanner. This is annoying and humiliating as always.
4. After security, you walk down a hallway and around a divider and end up in another, even longer line to buy tickets. The ticket line winds back and forth across a room, then up and down the length of the room before depositing you at a ticket booth. It moves very, very slowly.
5. 20 minutes later, you buy tickets ($20 each, unless you were stupid enough to buy any of the add-ons except for the Express Pass). You walk down a hall into another line, which winds past the restrooms. At this point you have been in line about 40 minutes, so you sneak out of line for a pee and when you get back in, you find it has moved approximately 7 feet. This new and improved line moves down another lobby, into a side hallway, and then back into the same hallway, and then you come to a ticket booth.
6. Except it’s not a ticket booth, it’s a place where they take your picture in front of a green screen, so they can Photoshop in a picture of the New York skyline you’ll never be able to get from the actual observatory and sell it to you for 30 bucks.
7. After you get your picture taken, you stand in an unprecedented sixth line, but at the end of this one is the elevators. You see people coming down from the top, looking flushed and tired. You assume this is because it is windy outside.
8. At long last, you get to an elevator, which is very small and takes 55 seconds to get to the top of…
9. The eightieth floor. The observatory is on the 86th floor. That’s right, there are two elevators. After the first one, you turn left and get to stand in yet another line!
10. By this time the people around you are starting to slump against the walls and pillars and curse the building owners, the city of New York, and their mothers for ever bringing them into this shitty world. Meanwhile they’re stuck in a curving line that winds in and out of rooms, down what look to be service corridors, and past the gift shop, finally arriving at a second set of elevators.
11. It’s been an hour and fifteen minutes since you stepped onto the escalator on the first floor, and now you’re stepping into an elevator on the 80th. This last pointless elevator takes you up six floors to the indoor part of the observatory, which has no view whatsoever.
12. Because you would like to collect a souvenir of this monumental waste of an hour and a half, you push your way outside onto the outdoor observation deck. At that point you realize that there is still no view because (a) the walls outside the building are five feet high, except in the spots where they’re five and a half feet high, and (b) there are seven hundred people clogging every inch of fence. The slats of said fence are those annoying diamond-shaped things that make it impossible to balance a camera, so unless you are a robot with uncannily steady hands or are content to get shots that are seven-eighths night sky, your entire trip has been for nothing.
13. I should pause here to say that this is one of the better views I’ve seen, second only to the Vegas Strip at night. Manhattan looks cool from up high, but you won’t have any time to enjoy it because a family of foreigners from a country unfamiliar with deodorant is busy elbowing their way in front of you, and three Germans (why don’t you ever see just one German?) are yelling and joking loudly in your ear.
14. After about 10 minutes of this, you will have had enough. You go back inside and follow the sign marked “Exit”. This sign, of course, leads you into a line.
15. It takes you roughly as long to get to the first set of elevators as it has taken you to see the observation deck. You ride down six floors again, and then you stand in what you hope is the final line of the night, for the elevators back to the lobby. Your feet ache, small children are slumped on the floor, wives are leaning on husbands, and some annoying hippie teenagers are joking loudly in a foreign language acting like they hadn’t been haven’t just waited in line for an hour and forty-five minutes and everything is peachy. They’re either high, or they paid for the Express Pass.
16. You ride down the elevator, and it’s the longest 55 seconds of your life. All you want is to slump into a cab and drink something alcoholic so you forget about the goddamn Empire State Building.
17. As a final, cruel, M. Night Shyamalanesque twist, you walk out of the elevator smack into a line. Fortunately it takes you 10 seconds to realize that this is the line to buy your shitty greenscreen photo, and you can bypass it. This is exactly what you should do.
In conclusion: The Empire State Building is terrible. If you go there, you will regret it unless you buy the Express Pass, in which case you will only regret the fact that you can’t see anything from the observation deck because of pushy smelly people and angry Teutons.
