Holiday Lights In The Skies

'Tis the season...for lights. Of course, some holiday lights stand out in the crowd... towering above it all. If you live in a city - almost any city - odds are there's a building aglow in the spirit of the holiday.

But it all began at New York's Empire State Building.

Bill Tortorelli and his team of electricians have inherited a decades-old legacy.

"You know, this is the most famous building in the world," Tortortelli tells CBS Sunday Morning's Charles Osgood, "and I guess that makes us the most famous electricians in the world."

But behind this tradition is a lot of hard work. Changing all those lights on the Empire State Building is a very hands-on activity. It takes Tortorelli and his team six hours working some seventy-floors above Manhattan to make sure the Empire State's lights glow brightly.

Time was, not every building basked in light.

"To floodlight buildings in the '20s and '30s was not common," says John Tauranac, who has written a history of the Empire State Building.

"It really wasn't until the Empire State Building, that started it in the 1970s, that other buildings started to become floodlit."

Tauranac says the very first lighting atop the Empire State was the result of a scheme to use its Art Deco mast as a mooring post for dirigibles.

It never happened, but the glowing crown endured.

Then, in 1976, Douglas Leigh, the man behind some of Times Square's most legendary signs, brought a bit of Broadway to the tower - bathing its walls with beacons of red, white and blue to mark the nation's bicentennial.

And - in a flash - a star of the cityscape was born.

"And so the idea there was to add color with a meaning," remembers Leigh, "Green for St. Patrick's Day. Red, White and Blue for George Washington and the fourth of July, and then special events along the way."

It hasn't all been rave reviews. Over the years, the Empire State's lighting had some folks seeing red.

Among them, Paul Goldberger, architecture critic for The New Yorker - but you could say that lately, he's lightened up.

"I see a great beauty in the lighting of skyscrapers," Goldberger told Osgood when asked if his views had changed, "I guess I've just become a little more tolerant of, you know, it's your call how it's lit."

Goldberger says he's even come to view these buildings - clad in coats of many colors - as something of a civic statement.

"It absolutely has a human quality of enhancing beauty," he said, "But it also enhances and underscores the fact that a building in a city, even a private building, has a public role."

In Boston, the city's John Hancock Building actually does play a vital role.

You could look on it as the world's tallest weatherman. Atop the 26-story building sits a four-story weather beacon.

Paul Crowley is the Hancock's manager.

"Well, there's a poem that goes along with this weather beacon," Crowley tells Sunday Morning, "dating back to the early 1950s. It's "Steady blue, clear view. Flashing blue, clouds are due. Steady red, rain ahead. And flashing red, snow instead."

In Chicago, the 110-story Sears Tower's lights are so high - they are literally in the weather.

Over the years, changing technology has made for ever-more sophisticated lighting displays. Last summer, the 1,800-foot C-N Tower in Toronto was outfitted with 13 thousand high-tech LEDs that can be programmed to display more than two million color schemes.

Back in New York City, Bill Tortorelli says the demand for different lighting for different occasions has never dimmed.

"I would say there about a hundred different color requests per year."

Martin Luther King Day? The colors of the African Liberation Flag.

Breast Cancer Awareness? Hot pink.

Frank Sinatra's birthday? Blue. You know... "Old Blue Eyes"!

The list goes on...

This time of year, New Yorkers gaze on a Christmas card of red, white and green.

'Tis the season ... for an illuminating experience.