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NEW YORK (AP) ― Born in the Great Depression, it has weathered economic hardship, world war, labor strikes, murder, terrorist fears, and even its own plane crash. On Monday, the Empire State Building turns 75 years old, a diamond jubilee for New York City's crown jewel.

The building plans a yearlong celebration -- consisting mainly of monthly "light shows," according to Lydia Ruth, spokeswoman for the corporation that runs the building. The celebration will begin with a "surprise" display of color on the birthdate, she said.

Like London's Crystal Palace and the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Empire State Building represented in its time "what we were capable of," says Carol Willis, an architectural historian and founder-director of lower Manhattan's Skyscraper Museum.

Seventy-five years later, it still "stands alone" -- both as a symbol of America's industrial and business culture and as an isolated presence in the middle of Manhattan, Willis said.

"Most skyscrapers are built in clusters, so the Empire State Building is something of an anomaly," she said, "It suggests the perpetual, spiritual idea of the pole, the axis around which everything revolves."

The construction of the Empire State Building was one of the most remarkable feats of the past century. It took only 410 days to build -- by a 3,400-member construction crew that included droves of men desperate for work at the height of the Depression. The workforce was made up largely of immigrants, along with hundreds of Mohawk Indian iron workers.

It opened on May 1, 1931 with President Herbert Hoover pressing a button in Washington D.C. to turn on the lights. Architect William Lamb, the chief designer, messaged New York Gov. Al Smith from a ship at sea: "One day out and I can still see the building."

Built of granite, Indiana limestone, steel and aluminum, it was for 40 years the world's tallest edifice until surpassed in 1972 by the World Trade Center. It again became the city's tallest after jetliners flown by terrorist hijackers destroyed the 110-story twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001. It now ranks ninth in the world, and second in the United States behind Chicago's Sears Tower.

Its 200-foot tower, designed as a mooring mast for dirigibles, was never used because of dangerous updrafts, but it did serve movie "King Kongs" as a perch from which to swat attacking fighter planes.

Gotham's famously jaded citizens may no longer be awed by this art deco masterpiece, but out-of-towners still flock to its 86th-floor observation deck where city sounds fade to a distant hum, and the view on a good day extends west to Pennsylvania and as far north as Massachusetts.

Winston Churchill visited the observatory in 1932, during a trip in which he also was run down by a New York taxicab. Other famous visitors include Queen Elizabeth II, Cuban President Fidel Castro, the late Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev and Lassie.

Legend says it was boycotted by auto magnate Walter P. Chrysler, whose own 77-story art deco skyscraper a few blocks away was briefly the world's tallest until eclipsed by the Empire State Building.

On July 28, 1945 -- three weeks before the end of World War II -- an Army B-25 bomber, lost in morning fog, crashed into the north side of the Empire State Building, killing three crew members and 11 people in the Catholic War Relief Office on the 70th floor.

The impact shook the building, but its steel skeleton forestalled a World Trade Center-type collapse. One of the plane's engines flew out the other side, striking a roof far below, and an elevator operator set a Guinness Book record by surviving a 1,000-foot plunge in a runaway lift. The 14 deaths matched the number of workers killed in constructing the building.

In 1997, a mentally disturbed man killed a Dutch tourist and wounded seven others on the observation deck. As panic ensued, the gunman shot himself in the head. He was perhaps the only person to commit suicide at the Empire State Building by means other than jumping.

The toll of those is uncertain; a young man who climbed the fence and dove to his death in 2004 was either the 31st or the 34th, according to news reports at the time. At least two would-be suicides survived when wind gusts blew them back onto the building.

Just this week, a daredevil tried to parachute off the building, but the stunt was foiled by officers.

After Sept. 11, then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said the Empire State Building was among New York landmarks likely targeted for further terrorism, and the observation deck was closed for months as a security precaution.

Along with "Kong" movies, the skyscraper was featured in such films as "An Affair to Remember" and "Sleepless in Seattle." In one of Japan's "Godzilla" films, the flying monster Rodan borrowed King Kong's perch to wail at the moon. In 1964, Andy Warhol set up a camera several blocks away and shot "Empire," an 8-hour, 6-minute silent film of the Empire State Building from a single perspective, punctuated only by intermittent flashes of light.

Starved for tenants during the Depression -- never more than 60 percent occupancy -- it was ridiculed by comedians as the "empty state building." Today it is 90 percent occupied by 800-plus tenants with 9,000 employees, Ruth said. Among them are Alitalia, the Boy Scouts, architects, and Metronap, a British firm that rents spaces for business people to take naps during the day.

After the WTC's north tower fell on 9/11, the Empire State's 1,435-foot spire was for a time the city's only functioning TV broadcast antenna. Now the transmitter site for 30 TV and FM radio outlets, it also absorbs about 100 lightning strikes a year.

In many ways the silver sentinel jutting upward from the heart of Manhattan is as wreathed in superlatives as it is in clouds on stormy days. While it may sway the hearts of urban poets, it does not, as is popularly supposed, sway in the wind. Its rigid frame allows a "give" of less than two inches.

For all the superlatives, no one was more lyrical about the Empire State Building than the blind, deaf and mute author Helen Keller, who said after a visit: "Let cynics and supersensitive souls say what they will about American materialism and machine civilization. Beneath the surface are poetry, mysticism and inspiration that the Empire State Building somehow symbolizes."

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