View of NYC atop the Empire State Building
by John Dearing c1952
Toronto. This photo of the big apple reminds me of PHSC member, the late Boris Spremo in his heyday a top the CN tower to shoot Toronto. In 1952, the RCA TV tower was the world’s highest TV antenna high above 34th Street and 5th Avenue in Manhattan.
John (Jack) Dearing was an Engineer for RCA as well as a photographer who took this fish-eye view of the area surrounding the Empire State Building. Much of the antenna connection line was built with metal supplied by Anaconda Copper Mining who owned Anaconda American Brass in New Toronto where my father-in-law once worked running the high speed Sendzimir or Zee-Roll that squeezed the copper rolls to their final thickness.
Before we married, my wife and I visited the Empire State Building. We entered a small hole in the wall door off 5th Avenue that led to a grubby corridor and on to a payment desk and high speed elevator that (once we paid) shot us up to the observation tower floor, a crowded space that let us see much of the area shown in the above left photo. The observation floor was down below the bow tie antennae you see here, roughly where the base of the shadow seems to touch the tower.
Thanks to George Dunbar who spotted this interesting photograph in the April 7th, 1952 issue of the wonderfully pictorial and long lamented LIFE magazine based in the big Apple.
