The Ford Mustang in the passenger elevator of the Empire State Building
12/12/2013
You are probably familiar with the joke quiz question about how to get an elephant into a fridge (open the door, put the elephant in, close the door). But we don't want to make jokes here, we want to describe real events.
In 1965, Ford and the Empire State Building, the world's tallest building at the time, decided to make headlines together. To this end, a Ford Mustang was to be exhibited on the observation deck on the 86th floor.
Dropping the car on the outside platform by helicopter was out of the question because of the risks involved. So Ford employees measured the passenger elevator and all doors and passages and prepared a new Mustang for transportation. They decided that the car had to be cut into four parts, and it was important that the reassembled car did not look like this.
After extensive preparatory work, the "Mustang on the Empire State Building" project began on October 20, 1965 at 22:30.
The Ford men rolled the car off the truck and dismantled it into the four prepared parts on site.
The parts were separated and prepared for transportation in the lift.
Each of the parts was then placed on a rolling dolly and taken to the 86th floor in the passenger elevator.
There were only difficulties with one part. The front section was 0.6 cm too large and did not fit through the elevator door. With a bit of weighing and pushing, it finally worked.
At the top of the 86th floor, the car was then reassembled by 04:30 in wind speeds of around 60 km, just in time for the first news helicopters and photographers to arrive.
At around 11 o'clock in the morning, the news hype was over, the car was disassembled again and then displayed in an interior room for several months. On the first day alone, 14,000 visitors are said to have viewed the high-altitude wonder.
The effort involved in this marketing coup was certainly enormous, but it seemed to pay off. In 1966, Ford sold 607,568 Mustangs, and by March 1966 the first million had been sold since the launch. At the same time, the white Mustang left the highest salesroom in the world.
