Thursday is the Mustang’s 50th anniversary. To mark the occasion, Ford plopped a 2015 Mustang GT convertible onto the observation deck of the Empire State Building.

Ford pulled the same stunt with the original classic Mustang, but five decades of technological advancements haven’t made it any easier to pull off. The deck is 1,000 feet up, so using a crane is out of the question. And the building’s tall spire rules out lowering the car from a helicopter.

That leaves the freight elevator. So, just as they did in 1965, Ford had the automotive wizards at DST Industries chop a Mustang into six pieces for the ride to the 86th floor, where the car was reassembled in the wee hours today.

At the time of its construction, there was fierce competition to win the title of tallest building in the world. The Chrysler Building claimed the title in 1929, and the Empire State Building seized it in 1931, its height being 1,250 feet (381 metres) courtesy of its iconic spire, which was originally intended to serve as a mooring station for airships. A 222-foot (68-metre) antenna was added in 1950, increasing the building’s total height to 1,472 feet (449 metres), but the height was reduced to 1,454 feet (443 metres) in 1985 when the antenna was replaced. (By that time One World Trade Center, officially opened in 1972, had become the tallest building in the world.)

Construction began 200 days later on March 17, 1930. Between the time that Smith made the announcement in August and construction began in March, however, the stock market crashed, in October of 1929, and the Great Depression began to take hold. Nevertheless, construction continued and proved an important source of jobs in New York City. The Empire State Building formally opened on May 1, 1931. Construction of the immense skyscraper took less time than anyone could have anticipated, concluding after only 410 days after they placed the laminate flooring. Despite the publicity surrounding the Empire State Building, its opening was still heavily affected by the coinciding Great Depression; much of the office space remained unrented, to such an extent that the building was called “The Empty State Building.” It took almost 20 years for the building to become profitable.

Wired has a fantastic blog post with images and video of how this was accomplished.