High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World's Greatest Skyline (23 page)

HEROES

A few weeks after the ironworker James Bennet climbed into the steel trestle of the Hell’s Gate Bridge, the exuberance of the 1920s came to an abrupt end. The stock market crashed in late October and the economy tumbled wildly. In a matter of months, businesses shut their doors and thousands of workers found themselves on the street with nowhere to go and little to do but loiter on corners and watch the escapades in the air.

The ironworkers were lucky, at least initially. Many of the buildings conceived in the height of the boom were too far along to halt. Among these was the grandest and tallest of them all, the Empire State Building.

The Empire State Building was the brainchild of two immigrants’ sons who rose to the height of power in New York. John Jacob Raskob was a prominent millionaire; Al Smith had been the governor of New York. The wisdom of adding 85 stories—2,158,000 square feet—of office space to a city that needed exactly none was questionable, but when it came to the construction of the building, the decisions of Raskob and Smith were generally sound. Their best decision was to hire the construction firm of Starrett Brothers & Eken.

The Starrett brothers, William and Paul, were living biographies of the skyscraper age. Born in Kansas, they moved as children to Chicago with their three other brothers (two of whom also became well-regarded builders). They were young men in Chicago as skyscrapers began to rise there. Both Paul and William eventually went to work for the George A. Fuller Company and moved to New York in time to help build the Flatiron Building. Since then, a Starrett had had a hand in nearly every important skyscraper in the city.

The Starrett brothers had a reputation for working fast; these were the contractors, after all, who managed to erect the steel of the Bank of Manhattan Building in three months. Now they resolved to
outdo every record of construction they or anyone else had ever set. The average rate for setting steel in those days—it’s still true today—was about two floors a week. The Starretts, with Post & McCord as their steel erector, intended to set four floors a week at the start, then five floors a week as the building rose and narrowed, and they intended to do this without resorting to costly overtime. The only way to succeed was with planning and organization, and with a force of ironworkers willing to work like hell.

Post & McCord hired two companies to fabricate the steel, American Bridge Company and McClintic-Marshall. The order for 57,000 tons of steel—almost 50 percent more steel than had been used in the Chrysler and the Bank of Manhattan
combined
—was the largest in history. U.S. Steel milled the shapes at its plants near Pittsburgh, then shipped them to the fabrication shops, where the columns and beams were cut and hole-punched to specifications. The steel was then shipped by rail to Bayonne, New Jersey, stacked and sorted, floated by barge to docks on the East River, and finally hauled by truck to 33rd Street and Fifth Avenue. Enormous derricks bowed and lifted whole loads in a single pick. As the building rose beyond 30 stories, relay derricks lifted the steel partway, then erection derricks lifted it to the top. From the moment the rolled steel came out of the mill to the moment the raising gangs slipped in the first temporary bolts, the journey took as little as 80 hours.

None of the Starretts’ methods of construction were exactly revolutionary; most were techniques that had been honed since they were young men in Chicago, and since that day long ago when William Starrett hired Sam Parks to push his riveting gang. The incredible speed they achieved, as Paul Starrett acknowledged, was facilitated by the simplicity of the structure. The frame of the Empire State was made up of classic box-shaped grids, with lots of repetition from floor to floor. As a result, the builders could achieve an assembly line–like efficiency. In many ways, the Empire State was the ultimate triumph of Taylorism applied to construction. But this
was a humanized version of Taylorism. The Starretts did not use men up and spit them out; indeed, they paid a good deal of attention to their employees’ comfort and safety. Rumor had it that as many as 48 men died during the building’s construction; in fact, just five men died, a remarkably low number for the day.

“[W]hile the theorists lament that the machine age is making robots and automatons of all men,” wrote Margaret Norris after visiting the Empire State during its construction, “here is one type of workman, the steel man, the very spirit of the skyscraper, a direct product of the power age, whose personality the machine exalts.” Ironworkers reconciled the two opposing ideas of a worker, one as an efficient automaton, the other as an autonomous individual of spectacular achievement. It was a combination that both capitalists and the proletariat alike could share, admire, and mythologize.

As it happened, the perfect mythmaker was on hand. He was Lewis Hine, a shy 56-year-old photographer who’d made his reputation years earlier photographing the poor and the vanquished inside coal mines, sweatshops, and overcrowded tenements. The assignment to photograph workers on the Empire State Building was an odd one for Hine, as his employers were the capitalistic builders. In lesser hands, the job might have amounted to that of corporate flak. Hine turned it into exhilarating art. He climbed out onto the steel with the ironworkers and dangled from a derrick cable hundreds of feet above the city to capture, as no one ever had before (or has since) the dizzy work of building skyscrapers. His subjects sit or stand on minuscule purchases, the street a thin gray strip below. They hang off guy wires and catch forbidden rides on the steel balls of derricks. To Hine, many of these men were “heroes,” and he portrayed them in heroic poses, shirtless and musclebound, with strong jaw lines and sun-bleached hair.

One of Hine’s heroes was a young connector named Victor Gosselin, known as “Frenchy.” Born and raised in Montreal, Frenchy had
been an ironworker for 15 years when he got to the Empire State Building. Before that, he’d been a sailor, a lumberjack, and a deep-sea diver. He’d traveled all over the country, and to France and Persia. He’d been everywhere and tried everything. In Hine’s photographs, Frenchy is shirtless and wears cut-off blue jeans that reveal scrapes and bruises on his legs. Why a connector, who slides up and down rusted steel columns all day, would wear shorts is beyond imagining, but there he is, riding the derrick ball, handsome and swashbuckling, a half grin on his face. In one shot, his cut-off shorts ride up his legs like a chorus girl’s.

“Frenchy” on the Empire State by Lewis Wickes Hine.
(Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)

“It’s funny about this business,” Frenchy said one afternoon while chomping a huge steak sandwich on the edge of the 84th floor. “Everybody seems to think you have to be a superman or something to work on steel. Of course, it ain’t no picnic, but then there’s lots of jobs I’d pass up for this. I wouldn’t wanna be no taxi driver, for instance. Looka them down there, dodging in and outa that traffic all day long. A guy’s apt to get killed that way.”

Frenchy himself had come close to getting killed in falls several times. He’d seen dozens of men die. He’d seen many men lose their nerve. And what did his wife think of his work?

“She don’t think nothin’ about it,” shrugged Frenchy. “You don’t see Lindbergh’s wife telling him he can’t fly around in airplanes, do you? All she ever said about it was, ‘Good-by, baby; don’t get hurt.’”

Sometimes titled “Lunchtime on a Beam” or simply “Men on a Beam,” this famous photograph was shot in late September of 1932, 800 feet over Sixth Avenue during the construction of the RCA Building, as part of an elaborate Rockefeller Center publicity effort. It is often taken, incorrectly, for a Lewis Hine photo; in fact, it was shot by a publicity photographer named Hamilton Wright, Jr. As for the identity of the ironworkers, many Mohawks are convinced that the fourth from the left is Joe Jocks of Kahnawake, while Newfoundlanders insist that the shirtless man in the middle is Ray Costello of Conception Harbour. Captions on other photographs taken that same day identify the three men on the far left as John O’Rielly [
sic
], George Covan, and Joseph Eckner. The shirtless man whom Newfoundlanders believe to be Ray Costello is identified elsewhere as Howard Kilgore (though people who knew Costello swear it’s he) and the next three are identified as William Birger, Joe Curtis, and John Portla. The name of the man on the far right, drinking from a flask during Prohibition, is not recorded.

(The Rockefeller Center Archive Center)

J
oe Lewis sat in the kitchen of the small row house in Park Slope, Brooklyn, resting his meaty forearms on the Formica tabletop. As his wife, Beverly, looked on beside him, he opened and closed the fingers of his right hand, clenching a fist, then letting it go. “I’ll tell you what it’s like,” he said. “It’s like you’re playing ball, right? And the ball comes in and hits you on the fingers. Your hand goes all numb, right? That’s how mine is all the time. It’s not so bad. Just strange, really.”

Outside the air was muggy and sooty, but here in the kitchen it was cool and dim and smelled faintly of Pine Sol. Seven men usually boarded in the row house without benefit of female company. They took turns cleaning and thought they did a pretty nice job of it. Then one of their wives would drop in, Snow White–like, and discover dirt in places it had never occurred to the men to look. Since Beverly arrived a few weeks earlier to visit her injured husband, the auto magazines were neatly stacked, the curtains were laundered, the floors were mopped, the windows were washed. To Joe, it was still a revelation that windows needed washing. “Windows?” he would say to Beverly. “We don’t wash
windows.
”

Joe and Beverly had the row house to themselves. The other men who boarded here—this included Joe and Beverly’s three grown sons, Bob, Joe Jr., and Rickey—had gone back home to Newfoundland for the summer. Beverly would be returning home soon, too. Then Joe would be here alone in the doldrums of August, filling out endless paperwork, waiting for doctors and lawyers to tell him when he could get back to work. He’d already seen practically everything the Discovery Channel, his favorite, had to offer. Once a day he went on a walk, following doctor’s orders, lugging his numb appendage through the borough of Brooklyn.

Nine months earlier, Joe had been working as a signalman in the raising gang on the Ernst & Young building on Times Square with Brett Conklin. The job had been going well, and the gang had shaped up nicely. They’d started several floors behind, but by Christmas they’d caught up and passed the other gang. Then Jeff, the tagline man, got hurt; a beam hit him in the chest and his ankle twisted sharply and snapped in the corrugation of the decking. Two months later, Brett had his accident, falling from the column on that dreary February morning. Two months after that, it was Joe’s turn—the third man in the five-man gang to be disabled within six months.

Joe’s accident occurred on a May morning on the corner of 59th Street and Sixth Avenue, just east of Columbus Circle (and the Time Warner Center), across the street from Central Park. What remained of the old gang from the Ernst & Young building had come here to add a few floors to a luxury hotel. Joe’s brother-in-law, Billy Moore, was superintendent. Joe’s sons, Rickey and Joe Jr., were on the job, too. They’d all wake up in the row house in Brooklyn and travel to work together—a big happy family.

“So I’ll tell you what happened,” said Joe now, speaking in his thick Newfoundlander’s brogue as he sat with his wife at the kitchen table in Park Slope. “We were finished up on top. We come down and we were shagging around some stairwells. We had the stairwells
planked over, but this weren’t that really good plank. You’d put ’em across a long span and there’d still be a give to them, right? So we put plywood on ’em to make sure we wouldn’t go through. Well, I walked toward the wall, and there was a couple planks with no plywood—and soon as I stepped on ’em, I was gone. They snapped in two, and I went through the floor. As I was going down, I grabbed onto a big brace. It was just luck, I guess. I was reaching to grab something and that’s where I hung up. I held there. I couldn’t get back up because my arms—the strength was gone. Below was the floor, a good 15 feet, easy, that. When I look up, the guys are looking down at me. They say, “You all right?” I say, “I’m all right, man, but I can’t let go. If I let go, I’ll break my legs.”

There wasn’t much the men could do but watch. Joe managed to work his way down the diagonal of the X brace and get to the column. He slid down the column to the floor. The other men insisted that he go to the hospital, but Joe refused. He felt fine. So he went back to work.

Ten days later, something strange began to happen to his arm. It felt tingly when he woke up that morning, and as the day wore on, it became increasingly numb, and by supper he could hardly feel it at all. The nerves had apparently been damaged. Joe was not a tall man, but he was stout, nearly 230 pounds, and as he’d reached out and grabbed the diagonal section of brace to stop his fall, his right hand caught first on the higher end. That arm had taken most of Joe’s falling weight. The doctors subjected the arm to a battery of high-tech tests—MRI, nerve scans, CAT scans—and one rather medieval treatment that involved Joe dipping his hand in a bucket of hot candlewax. Joe had no idea what this was supposed to accomplish, but he was fairly sure it accomplished nothing, since he still could not feel a thing.

Beverly sat next to Joe at the table and listened to his story quietly. They had known each other most of their lives, since they were children in Newfoundland. But, like many Newfoundlander couples,
they had spent more of their lives apart than together, in different countries and different environments. You could see it in their complexions. Hers was pale and smooth, evidence of a life spent on an island that was moist and foggy most of the time. Joe’s face was tanned and lined, his cheeks ruddy. As Joe spoke of his accident, Beverly’s expression remained placid. Men getting hurt at ironwork was something she knew all too well.

“I was used to it,” she said when Joe got up to leave the kitchen for a moment. “My father was at it, and my brothers. Both my grandfathers. My father broke both his legs once. The only thing that saved him was he fell onto another guy. Then my brother Terry got hurt. How many floors did Terry fall, Joe?”

“Terry didn’t fall, toots,” said Joe, returning. “Terry got jammed up with a column. It was wintertime. One big huge column lying on top of another, and the skids—those wood pieces between them—must have been frozen. The column slid and it happened he was close by. It almost cut his leg off.”

Joe Lewis was not a man to complain. The way he saw it, most ironworkers got injured sooner or later, and he had managed 37 years in the business without so much as a—well, come to think of it, there was that one time he fell fifteen feet from a ladder. Then there was that time a beam rolled over onto his fingers and cut the tips off, but the tips had all been collected and sewn back on, good as new. Those injuries were hardly worth mentioning. Even this newest affliction, this numbness that began in his hand and crawled up his forearm, wasn’t so bad, not compared to what happened to some.

Joe tried not to think too much about the worst part of it, what it meant to his music. He was a gifted musician who played nearly every stringed instrument—fiddle, banjo, guitar. He was fairly good on accordion, too, and could make his way around a piano keyboard. For much of his life he’d played in bands after work, all over Canada and America. Country, Irish, rock. Joe liked all of it. Here in Brooklyn, he and his brothers—they called themselves the Lewis
Brothers—had played regular gigs at a few pubs and clubs. That would have to end now, at least temporarily. Joe could still bow and he could strum rhythm, but he could no longer pick or finger the strings. Everything felt off, strange, like it wasn’t quite him doing the playing. This was a cruel irony. Music was the thing he’d always relied on to take his mind off his troubles. Now, when he really could have used it, it was unavailable to him.

And here was another irony: For the first time in his adult life, Joe had an opportunity to be home in Newfoundland for a long stretch. He’d yearned for this for years. What better time to go back than now, since he could not work anyway? But the doctors and lawyers, the endless appointments and paperwork, stuck him here in Brooklyn in August. That was especially cruel.

THE ROCK

Newfoundland is a place out of whack with the rest of North America. Separated from the continent by the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Cabot Strait, the island is closer to Europe than to most of Canada or the United States. By car, Brooklyn to Newfoundland is a three-day journey, east-by-northeast along the seaboard of New England, then eastward across New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, then due east by 16-hour ferry across the North Atlantic. By the time a traveler arrives in the port of Argentia, he has covered almost 1,400 miles, is as near to Greenland as to Brooklyn, and is one and a half hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time. Newfoundland is one of a handful of places on earth where the time, relative to Greenwich Mean, runs on the half.

Guidebooks call the landscape of Newfoundland “rugged.” Newfoundlanders themselves call their island the Rock, because that’s essentially what it is, a raw convulsion of ocean crust punched up by the same tectonic forces that gave rise to the Appalachian Mountains
to the southwest. Newfoundland is a hard, unforgiving land, the poorest province in Canada, but it is also a profoundly beautiful place. Sheer cliffs drop off into the icy green North Atlantic. Rivers tumble out of the highlands into the bays. Saltbox houses cling to rocky shores. All of this makes for dramatic and stunning vistas. Unfortunately, visitors to the Rock seldom get to enjoy these vistas. Newfoundland comes with a few catches, and one of them is fog. The fog comes in wisps, in scrims, in shrouds and blankets. Newfoundlanders have many words and phrases to describe its varieties. “Mauzy” means warm and foggy. “Capelin weather” means foggy and drizzly and cold. “RDF” means rainy-drizzly-foggy.

Newfoundland English is filled with colorful locutions, all pronounced in a brogue that is a frequent source of puzzlement and amusement to off-islanders. The vowels are thick, and whole sentences are often mashed into a single extended diphthong climaxing in a contraction. So, for instance, instead of a straightforward query like “How is he doing?,” you might get something like “Owsee gettin’ on, b’ys?” (“B’y” being the Newfoundland equivalent of “man” or “dude” in American slang.)

Newfoundlanders may be frequently unintelligible to off-islanders, but they have an admirable way of saying exactly what they mean. This practice is conveyed in the names their ancestors chose for the bays and coves around which they live, a geographic index of regret and resignation: Bay of Despair, Chance Cove, Cuckold’s Cove, Deadman’s Bay, Gin Cove, Mistaken Point, Mosquito, Stinking Cove, Useless Bay, Witless Bay.

Joe Lewis comes from the more auspiciously named Conception Bay near the northeastern tip of Newfoundland, on the Avalon Peninsula. Conception Bay is surrounded by hills of black spruce and butte-like humps of rock that Newfoundlanders call tolts (pronounced “towts”). Compared to much of Newfoundland, the topography of Conception Bay is gentle, even soothing. The bay is almost 20 miles
across at its mouth, but narrows at the head to small coves that appear as enclosed and protected as mountain lakes. Six small towns cluster around the coves. The names of these towns, east to west, are Chapel Cove, Harbour Main, Holyrood, Avondale, Conception Harbour, and Colliers. Most of these six towns are furnished with a white Catholic church, a red brick post office, a tavern, and not much else. Any one of them you could careen through on the curvy two-lane coastal road, Route 60, and experience only the dimmest sense you’d passed a town at all. Avondale is the second largest of the towns. It’s got a white Catholic church, a red brick post office, and a tavern, but it also boasts the only restaurant for miles around. The restaurant is a small diner in a railway car next to the old train depot. The specialty of the house is fried cod tongue.

The largest of the towns, and the most picturesque, is Conception Harbour, Joe Lewis’s town. Conception Harbour is set on the western shore of a cove. The church, Our Lady of Saint Ann, marks its center. Everything north of the church is known as Up-the-Bay. This includes the old fishing hamlets of Bacon’s Cove and Kitchuses and the high fields of bush and grass beyond. Standing on these hills on a rare clear summer day, you can often see schools of pilot whales—Newfoundlanders call them potheads—knitting in and out of the water below, chasing capelin fish.

South of the church—Down-the-Bay, that is—Church Street crosses Route 60, forming an intersection that locals call the Cross. This is the practical, if not the spiritual, focus of the town. Just beyond the Cross, Route 60 rises sharply up Lewis’s Hill. Larrasey’s general store and the small red brick post office are on the right. Higher up the hill is a funeral home, and a little beyond it, the Conception Harbour Tourist Inn, a bed-and-breakfast run by the town’s mayor, Marg O’Driscoll, and her husband, Paul. Locals refer to the crest of the hill as the Pinch, probably because it rises like a fold of pinched skin. On the other side of the Pinch, at the bottom of a long steep grade, is the town of Colliers.

Across the street from Larrasey’s store—heading back down toward the Cross now—is the tavern. It used to be Doyle’s but is now Frank’s, though pretty much everybody still calls it Doyle’s. It is a cavernous, windowless hall, room enough for hundreds if there’s a band playing or a dance. On most nights, though, half a dozen patrons mill around the small bar at the front. The bartender is a pretty, soft-spoken woman named Lorraine Conway, who happens to be Joe Lewis’s sister. Lorraine is somewhat famous around the head of the bay for having gone to Nashville a few years back and cut a country-western album. Some evenings she gets up on the little stage near the back of Frank’s and sings about found love and broken hearts in a sweet soprano. Her husband is often away in Alberta, 2,500 miles to the west. Like so many absent men from around here, he’s an ironworker.

Until you step into Frank’s and listen to the conversation and notice the Local 40 decals on the wall behind the bar, there are few signs around the head of the bay to tell you of the remarkable link between this place and New York City. There is little outward evidence to suggest that this tiny speck on the map, these six towns, a few square miles with a total population of several thousand, have produced a huge percentage of the men who erected the steel infrastructure of Manhattan, not to mention other American cities. Indians from Kahnawake may have gotten most of the attention from the press, but Newfoundlanders and their offspring—other ironworkers call them “Fish”—have made up the backbone of the New York local for many years.