<P> The structural steel for the building was laid on April 30 . From there, construction proceeded at a fast pace . During one stretch of 10 working days, the builders erected fourteen floors . This was made possible due to the extremely precise coordination of the building's planning, as well as the mass production of common materials such as windows and spandrels . For instance, after a supplier of dark Hauteville marble could not deliver enough material on time, Starrett switched to using Rose Famosa marble from a German quarry that was purchased specifically to provide the project with sufficient marble . </P> <P> The scale of the project was massive, with trucks carrying "16,000 partition tiles, 5,000 bags of cement, 450 cubic yards (340 m) of sand and 300 bags of lime" arriving at the construction site every day . There were also concession stands on some of the incomplete floors so workers did not have to descend to ground level to eat lunch, and small railway systems on each floor carried materials from the elevator shafts . The 57,480 short tons (51,320 long tons) of steel ordered for the project was the largest - ever single order of steel at the time, comprising more steel than was ordered for the Chrysler Building and 40 Wall Street combined . According to historian John Tauranac, the materials for the building came from far and wide, with "limestone from Indiana, steel girders from Pittsburgh, cement and mortar from upper New York State, marble from Italy, France, and England, wood from northern and Pacific Coast forests, (and) hardware from New England ." </P> <P> By July 27, half of the steel skeleton had been completed . The steel structure was completed on September 19, twelve days ahead of schedule and 23 weeks after the start of construction . The Empire State Building surpassed the heights of both the Chrysler Building and 40 Wall Street on April 11, 1931, twelve days ahead of schedule and 410 days after construction commenced . </P> <P> The project involved more than 3,500 workers at its peak, including 3,439 on a single day, August 14, 1930 . Many of the workers were Irish and Italian immigrants, with a sizable minority of Mohawk ironworkers from the Kahnawake reserve near Montreal According to official accounts, five workers died during the construction, although there were unfounded rumors of up to 42 deaths, as stated by a headline in the socialist magazine The New Masses . Lewis Wickes Hine took a myriad of photographs providing not only a documentation of the construction, but also a glimpse into common day life of workers in that era . According to Jim Rasenberger, Hine "climbed out onto the steel with the ironworkers and dangled from a derrick cable hundreds of feet above the city to capture, as no one ever had before (or has since), the dizzy work of building skyscrapers". In Rasenberger's words, Hine turned what might have been an assignment of "corporate flak" into "exhilarating art". These images were later organized into their own collection . </P>

How long did it take workers to build the empire state building