Pour yourself something warm. May 1 is one of the most layered dates in the calendar – a day for workers, a day for dreamers, and a day that produced one of sport’s most enduring griefs.
1931 — A skyscraper rises from the ruins of the Depression
On May 1, 1931, President Herbert Hoover officially dedicated New York City’s Empire State Building, pressing a button from the White House that turned on the building’s lights for the first time.
The timing was extraordinary. America was in the depths of the Great Depression. Banks had failed. Unemployment had reached catastrophic levels. And yet, in 14 months of frenetic construction — involving around 3,400 workers at its peak, erecting up to four and a half floors per week — the most famous building in the world had risen from a demolished hotel in the heart of Manhattan.
The Empire State Building stood 1,250 feet tall and remained the world’s tallest building for 40 years. It was built with 10 million bricks, 200,000 cubic feet of Indiana limestone, and 6,400 windows. Its construction came in $20 million under budget. F. Scott Fitzgerald, watching the skyline change, wrote: “From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building.” It has appeared in more than 250 films. It receives 4 million visitors a year. It is still, 94 years later, one of the most beautiful things human beings have ever built.
1891 — Queensland shearers march for dignity
On May 1, 1891, the first May Day marches in Australia were held at Barcaldine, Queensland, in support of a shearers’ strike. Under a ghost gum tree that still stands today — the Tree of Knowledge, as it became known — striking shearers and their supporters gathered in the Queensland heat to demand fair conditions and the right to organise. The strike was ultimately crushed, but the movement it sparked became the foundation stone of the Australian Labor Party. The Tree of Knowledge was poisoned with herbicide in 2006, almost certainly deliberately. It was preserved, memorialised and remains in Barcaldine today — a reminder of what ordinary working people did when they decided that enough was enough.
1994 — The day Formula One lost its greatest
Ayrton Senna achieved 41 wins, 65 pole positions and three world championships in Formula One, and remains a legendary figure within motorsport for his raw speed and uncompromising driving style. He was 34 years old and leading the San Marino Grand Prix at Imola when his car left the track at the Tamburello corner and struck a concrete barrier. His state funeral was attended by over a million people. He was the last fatality in Formula One for twenty years, because his death changed the sport forever — circuits were redesigned, cars were rebuilt, safety became the overriding imperative. Brazil declared three days of national mourning. Senna’s passing was declared a national tragedy, and the legacy left by the driver in his home country was perhaps more than any before or since.
Also on this day…
In 1997, HM Prison Pentridge in Coburg, Victoria — the site of the last execution in Australia — closed after 145 years of operation. And in 1967, Elvis Presley married Priscilla Beaulieu in a private eight-minute ceremony in Las Vegas before just 14 guests, determined to keep the world out.
Some days carry the full weight of what human beings are capable of — the building, the fighting, the grieving, the hoping. May 1 is one of them.
Come back tomorrow for another spin through the calendar.