New light show for Empire State Building

In the middle of the night, as most of New York slept, something big and bright lit up the Manhattan skyline for just seconds -- a tightly kept secret to all but a handful of people.

It was a tiny test for the huge public surprise four days later: the flipping of a switch at the Empire State Building to turn on its new dancing LED lights. They burst from the skyscraper, synchronized with R&B star Alicia Keys singing "Empire State of Mind" on nationwide radio.

The LED system has "16.7 million color possibilities, in digital combinations of ripples, sparkles, sweeps and strobes," said Phil O'Donnell, of Burlington, Mass.-based Philips Color Kinetics, which is responsible for the system and worked with a resident lighting designer. "It's the sum of all possibilities -- a huge palate."

The old lights came in only 10 colors.

From Manhattan and the Bronx to Staten Island and even New Jersey, "there were hundreds of thousands of people on the streets looking up, filming and videoing, clustered on street corners," when the new lights came on Monday night, said Anthony Malkin, whose family controls the iconic Art Deco building.

Malkin and his technical team wanted to test the new lighting system with as few people noticing as possible and chose early Thanksgiving morning.

"We decided to do it facing west, in very short bursts between 2:30 a.m. and 3 a.m., because we knew we didn't have a camera trained on us from there," Malkin said.

No images of the Empire State Building alight that night appeared anywhere, as far as Malkin knows.

To stage the Monday night show, he worked with Clear Channel radio, which has 239 million monthly listeners in the United States.

The lights are part of a larger effort to modernize the 81-year-old skyscraper. The computerized LED system will cut energy consumption by more than half, while delivering light and vibrancy superior to the old floodlights, O'Donnell said.