 | Well no, not really, but visitors will get something like a queue
experience. This article (which requires registration, alas, and
will only be available thru the 25th or 26th):
January 19, 2005
COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE
Empire State Building to Update Its Tourist Experience
By JOHN HOLUSHA
says in part:
The view, just about everyone agrees, is terrific from the 86th-floor
observation deck. But visitors are often treated more like cattle than
people, forced to wait in long lines in a hot basement to board the
elevators to the top floor.
That will begin to change this spring. The waiting areas will be
transformed with additional security checkpoints and ticket windows to
minimize delays and add a dash of entertainment for those who wait.
The managers have hired BRC Imagination Arts which has extensive
experience in theme park and museum design, to create tourist-friendly
attractions within the building, and the two parties recently held a
daylong meeting to produce specific plans.
Among other things, it was decided that starting in the spring,
visitors will not be sent to the basement but will instead go up an
escalator to a waiting area on the air-conditioned second floor. Not
much can be done about the carrying capacity of the elevators to the
80th floor, so the waiting will remain, but in an area that offers
entertainment focusing on the building's history and its connections
with celebrities. Technology that projects images on the floor in a
darkened room will try to give visitors the illusion that they are
standing on a girder 50 stories high during the construction of the
building in the 1930's.
The 80th floor is the upper limit of the building's high-speed
elevators. There, visitors have to wait for slower elevators to
complete the trip to the top, causing a buildup of people in the
corridors.
To break up the long lines, the waiting area will be divided into a
series of connecting rooms where plasma screens and other visual
devices will tell the story of the construction of the building and
will show excerpts from films that use it as a backdrop. "The
different areas can change an hour wait into six different 10-minute
waits," said Bob Rogers, the chairman of BRC.
Later in the article, it says of BRC:
BRC, which is based in Burbank, Calif., has done projects for Disney,
General Motors and NASA and designed the Texas State History Museum in
Austin and the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in
Springfield, Ill.
Which projects for Disney, I don't know.
--
William December Starr
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