Issue #1: Verticality

And the street and avenue facades are a disappointment. As in the case in so many high buildings, a soaring and carefully composed grandeur above disintegrates near the ground level. Great tower scale and pleasant street scale seem difficult to reconcile...Superficial and obvious, its generally merely satisfactory proportions, its rich materials cannot redeem its heavy-handed detail, its basic lack of that creative imagination that distinguishes the tower. To the thousands passing, it brings no lift, no "kick"-it is just another building to walk past-adequate perhaps, but humdrum.

- Talbot Faulkner Hamlin criticizing the Empire State Building's relationship to street