What is it about the Empire State Building?

[280plus]

I was on the 86th floor not too long ago. I passed on the jump.

Man dies in jump from Empire State Building
21-year-old New York City man apparently leaped from 66th floor
Updated: 6:47 a.m. ET Feb. 2, 2006
NEW YORK - A New York City man jumped to his death Wednesday afternoon from the Empire State Building in an apparent suicide, police said Thursday.

Lt. John Grimpel said Dovid Abramowitz, 21, jumped from a vacant office on the 66th floor.

Officials discovered his body on a landing on the sixth floor of the building, one of New York's key tourist destinations.

More than 30 people have committed suicide at the Empire State Building since it opened in 1931. The most recent is believed to have been in 2004, when a man jumped from the 86th-floor observation deck of the skyscraper.

It is 1,454 feet to the top of the Empire State Building's lightning rod.

[charby]

probably because you will go splat when you hit the pavement (not attempted suicide and live to tell about it) and it bring a bunch of attention to your death.

[TarpleyG]

Symbolic perhaps?  I dunno.

Greg

[MaterDei]

Maybe it's the fact that the windows seem to be openable.

[onions!]

I always thought that suicide off of a tall building was like giving the finger to the rest of the world.

A lot more dramatic than just eating a bullet/opening a vein.

I wonder if it's true that jumpers take their glasses off first?(CSI "factoid")

[Harold Tuttle]

86 floors
~15 feet per floor

=1290 feet

~150 feet per second

=~100 mph

~9 seconds to regret your latest spin of Shiva's wheel

[Azrael256]

Actually, I think it would be a good deal slower than that.  I don't know the surface area of a clothed human body, but I think that terminal velocity would be a good deal lower than 100mph.  IIRC, mythbusters calculated the terminal velocity of a penny to be something like 65mph.

[Marnoot]

Terminal velocity of a clothed human (skydiver w/o deployed chute) averages around 120 MPH in the lower atmosphere. Google has many references. Terminal velocity for very-high-altitude jumps farther up in the atmosphere is closer to 750 MPH! Until they get down to thicker air, of course.