Backstory: An electrifying job atop an American icon

F. Scott Fitzgerald, in his 1932 essay, "My Lost City," wrote: "Full of vaunting pride the New Yorker had climbed here and seen with dismay what he had never suspected, that the city was not the endless succession of canyons that he had supposed but that it had limits...[He] saw for the first time that it faded out into the country on all sides, into an expanse of green and blue that alone was limitless. And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining edifice that he had reared in his imagination came crashing to the ground."

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On a recent hot summer day, as some of the year's 3.8 million visitors stood in line for the observation deck, Tortorelli walked me through the electrical plant on the 84th floor – "Not the bowels, but the throat of the building!" he says – to check the temperature of rooms holding massive generators and voltage switches.

"It's good to do a physical check – keeps me in touch with the building," Tortorelli says, proudly standing in his grey plaid workshirt, name stitched on the right and "Chief Electrician, Empire State Building," stitched on the left.

"We have monitors that tell us, but it's always good to take a physical check once in a while, so I'll stop off at least twice a week in every room, just to get an eyeball of what's going on, what's working where, and what's happening in the building."

Tortorelli's father taught him to develop such a physical feel for a building's electrical system and to be wary of monitors and gauges, which can easily malfunction.

His father had been an electrical inspector for the City of New York, and father helped son get into the union as a teenager.

After working as an electrician for almost 30 years, Tortorelli simply answered an ad for the position at the Empire State Building and was hired. As chief electrician, he usually works alone, making sure everything is running smoothly.

The exception is when he is overseeing what may be the building's most distinctive feature: the three-tiered, multi-colored illumination that every evening commemorates various historical or local events.

A series of 204 1,000-watt floodlights, beginning at the 72nd floor, light up the building, but the colored plastic gel cover that slips over each spotlight must be individually changed, a painstaking two- to three-hour process that requires help.

"I remember when Frank Sinatra died – Old Blue Eyes, fellow paisano – so we made the building blue," Tortorelli explains. "And when the Pope came to visit, we made it gold – yellow – and it almost felt like a prayer to me, if you believe in prayer." When Queen Elizabeth II celebrated 50 years on the throne in 2002, the lights were purple and gold.

"Hey, you know, this is the Empire State Building – this is probably the most famous building in the world," Tortorelli says. "So that probably makes me the most famous electrician in the world."

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