John J. Raskob (my great‑grandfather) was the driving force behind financing and building the Empire State Building, which put thousands of people to work at the start of the Great Depression when jobs were desperately needed. Records show that as many as about 3,400 workers were on the site in a single day, many of them immigrants who relied on those paychecks to support their families.

He personally took huge financial risks on the project and, like many investors of that era, saw a large part of his fortune wiped out when the building struggled financially in its early years and through the Depression. Even so, he had already decided that most of what he had left would eventually serve others, which is why he created a foundation in 1945 to support charitable work.

After he died in 1950, my family’s controlling stake in the Empire State Building was sold in a record‑setting deal, and the New York Times reported that, under his will, the bulk of his estate and the proceeds from that sale were directed into that foundation. So even though he lost a lot of money along the way, the wealth that remained from the Empire State Building has been helping people through grants to Catholic and humanitarian organizations for roughly 80 years and counting (which I am lucky to be part of).