By Tom deignan

THIS week, on May 1, New York City celebrated the 75th anniversary of the opening of the Empire State Building.

The skyscraper on Fifth Avenue, between 33rd and 34th Streets, is not only the world’s most famous. It also has Irish roots which reach deep under Manhattan’s asphalt.

From the millionaire power brokers who envisioned the unprecedented project to the laborers who got the thing built in just one year — that fact is worth reading again, in a day when a plan for Ground Zero has barely gotten off the ground some five years later — Irish Americans were central to the construction of the Empire State Building.

To begin with, there is a man considered to be one of the more tragic figures in Irish American history — Al Smith.

Smith, a child of the Lower East Side, made a doomed run for the presidency in 1928, the first Catholic candidate to run for the White House. Middle America would have no such behavior from what they considered to be an agent of Rome from that mongrelized hell they viewed as big city America. Crosses were burned and Smith was trounced by Herbert Hoover.

What is often forgotten about Smith, though, is that after this political loss, he was named president of the Empire State Building corporation, whose job it was to erect a magnificent structure on the former site of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel.

Whose idea was it to name Smith? Well, accounts differ, but all agree that as key a figure in the Empire State’s planning was John J. Raskob, whose decidedly non-Hibernian last name (his father was actually Alsatian) fails to acknowledge the fact that Raskob’s mother was Irish Catholic.

The self-made man from Lockport, New York, got a job with the Du Pont family in the early 1900s and made enough money so that he would eventually become a member of a investment group who believed Manhattan real estate would be a good bet in the roaring 1920s.

Naturally, the bigger the real estate, the bigger the payoff. That’s what Raskob, Smith and other Empire State investors had on their mind when they announced the project on August 29, 1929.

Of course, the stock market would crash just over a month later. Nevertheless, the Empire State show went on.

Now it was up to the muscle men to build this thing. Men like Michael Briody.

Briody, in real life, was the great uncle of New York novelist Tom Kelly. He was an Irish immigrant who worked on the Empire State Building. Kelly didn’t know very much about his great-uncle, other than the fact that he mixed up in some shady business, was murdered and buried in the Bronx.

From that information, Kelly began to weave what would eventually become his latest novel Empire Rising, which has just been released in paperback to coincide with the skyscraper’s anniversary.

In Kelly’s telling — which is borne out by historical fact — the Irish (as well as Scandinavian Americans) had a heavy presence among the laborers who erected the building.

Don’t forget, the Empire State went up as the stock market crashed and the Great Depression hit. That was the late 1920s and early 1930s.

That’s also when a new wave of Irish immigrants came to New York City. As with the Irish immigrants who founded the Transit Workers Union in 1934, more than a handful of Empire State laborers were Irish Republicans on the run from the grueling civil war which broke out in Ireland following the Easter Rising and partition.

For these Irish immigrants — who fled a war-ravaged land just in time to hit a great depression in the U.S. — a job on a project such as the Empire State Building was (if you will) a blessing from the sky. It was a chance to put the past behind them and forge a new identity working on what not a few people have called an American icon.

Of course, in Kelly’s fast-paced novel, things are not so clean and easy for the fictional Michael Briody, nor his Irish nemesis in the book, Johnny Farrell.

Historically speaking, however, the majority of those Irishmen were able to finally rely on a paycheck and build a lasting legacy, one which still stands 75 years later.

(Contact Sidewalks at tomdeignan@earthlink.net.)