The first time I had visited the foyer of the Empire State Building was late at night and there were very few people around.  Subsequently, we walked past it often and there were usually huge queues out of the foyer, into the street and snaking around the block.   We finally went up about 10pm one night when the queues were not so bad but then we had to wait at several queues inside the building.  It probably still took us half an hour to get up to the top and it was quite crowded up there.

Here we are looking SSW towards a distant lower Manhattan including Wall Street and where the twin towers would have been a few years previously.  The Flatiron Building is at the fork of the intersection on the lower left and the Hudson River is at the upper right.  You can just see the Statue of Liberty if you click on the image to expand it.  If you start from the big building in the distance and go to the right, there is a big block of yellow at the edge of the other side of the river.  The faint vertical line just in front of that is the Statue of Liberty.

This looks WNW towards Brooklyn on the other side of the river.  The Chrysler Building has the art deco roof lit up in white at the left and just visible behind it is the Brooklyn Bridge.

Here we have another view looking towards Lower Manhattan but from a different viewpoint and at a wider angle than the first image.