High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World's Greatest Skyline (26 page)

No event was more extraordinary than the building of the World Trade Center. Joe went there in 1968 and stayed two full years, working in a gang on Tower One. Few jobs were as swarming with Fish as that one. The Moores were all there, and Willie Quinlan and Jack Doyle, and Jack’s brothers, and Joe’s brothers, Ron and Jerry, and dozens of others. There were times, standing a thousand feet above the city, with a watery view of the harbor and a fog sweeping in from the east, when you could look around the derrick floor and everyone you saw came from a small patch of rock at the head of Conception Bay.

But New York was not home, and in 1975 Joe and Beverly, realizing that it never would be, moved the family back to Conception Bay. They wanted to raise their three sons—and later, a daughter—in Newfoundland. “Growing up in the place, I just loved it that much. I figured, why let them miss what I had growing up at eight, nine, ten years old? The fishing and the woods and the water. There’s no place like it on earth. And it’s what I wanted for them.” The old Newfoundland catch, of course, was that Joe had to leave his family at once and go back out into the world to make a living. Like his father and many other fathers before him, he would be gone months at a
time, returning home at Christmas and summers, his children grown a few inches taller every time he saw them.

The separation was probably harder on Beverly than on Joe. She raised the four children mostly on her own. Then Joe came home on holidays, barging into the order she had arranged, and they were like strangers who hardly knew each other. In retrospect, this wasn’t all bad. “There’s a special thing to it, even it being hard,” says Joe. “You get that special time when you come home. It’s like you met her for the first time in your life. When you’re living with a person day after day after day, maybe it’s good. But I don’t think it’s the same.”

Joe missed home terribly when he was away. “You go out to the bars on the weekends, meet up with the guys, have a few beers. You go home half-drunk, then get on the phone for an hour talking to your wife—you’d want to be home—and the next day you gotta break your back to work again. The only time you wouldn’t think about home was when you’re working, ’cause your mind was on the job, to watch so you didn’t get hurt.” Mose Lewis’ death had put an end to any aspirations Joe once harbored of being a full-time professional musician, but music remained central in his life. He played with his brothers in bands all over New York, and when he boomed out to California and Tennessee, he always brought along his guitar or fiddle. Music was a consolation for a man far from home.

The part that made it all worthwhile—the flip side of the catch—was the return. The pre-Christmas drive through Maine and Nova Scotia, the endless quiet highway. The hours of anticipation on the ferry, standing on the deck, the bow breaking through the North Atlantic, and somewhere in the foggy distance your family waiting for you. No place on earth was better than the head of Conception Bay, and a man could put up with a lot of hardship for the pleasure of going home. “It was,” says Joe, “like going back to heaven.”

Joe did not see much of his sons while they were young, but when they grew up they followed him into ironwork, and now he spent
most of his free time with them. They were more like brothers than sons, solid and capable young men to whom he could speak of anything. Like Joe, they traveled between Brooklyn and Conception Bay. All three of them had bought houses in Conception Harbour, and it was there they planned to raise their own families. “I say, son, you’re going to do the same thing I did, all over again. Maybe that’s the way it’s got to be. I say if you’re happy with it, then go for it. They’re like me. They work in the city, but all they want is to be back home.”

By the summer of 2001, Joe Lewis and his three sons were among the last of the true migrating Fish. Most of the old timers had made their lives around New York. Their children and grandchildren were born and raised in the suburbs, spread out over Westchester County or Connecticut or Long Island. Many of the younger generation earned their livings as ironworkers, but they were not Fish anymore, not really. They were Americans.

A great many men from Conception Harbour still practiced the trade of ironwork, but most did it in Canada now, going out to build oil rigs in the North Atlantic or traveling a few thousand miles west to Alberta. Newfoundland had come a long way since Joe was born. The cod were gone and Greenpeace had put an end to swiling, but oil and mining were strong. Tourism was on the rise, too. Many of the tourists who visited Newfoundland in the summer were American-born sons and daughters and grandchildren of ironworkers come back to see the Rock. They’d show up at Frank’s, which everybody still called Doyle’s, and drink and talk with the Newfoundlanders who shared their last names and some of their blood. The Yanks and the Fish sometimes had difficulty understanding each other after a few beers or a shot of screech (a rum-based drink so called because it makes you
screech
when you drink it), when the most frequently uttered word in a conversation between a Yank and a Newfoundlander was likely to be “What?” Or, as the Newfoundlander would put it, “Wha’?”

Joe Lewis would finally get the O.K. from the doctors and the lawyers to go home. It would be late fall by then, many weeks after the terrorist attacks of September 11, and the world would be a very different place than on the August day Joe sat at the kitchen of the row house in Brooklyn and spoke of the bad luck that had afflicted his old raising gang. Newfoundland had never seemed as utterly peaceful and distant from Manhattan as it would in the autumn of that
annus horribilis
. Joe would celebrate Christmas in the old house near the bay, where he grew up and where his mother still lived, just across the street from his own well-tended white clapboard house.

The numbness in Joe’s hand would improve, but only slightly. Joe would never pick the strings of a guitar or handle a fiddle with his old finesse. On New Year’s Eve, Joe and his brothers would take the stage of the Oasis, the tavern he and Beverly owned in Colliers, just over the Pinch from Conception Harbour. Joe would look out into the crowd and know every one of the two hundred or so faces looking back at him, and the Lewis brothers would begin to play. During the instrumental sections, Joe would mostly pretend to strum the guitar while his brothers covered for him. But when it came time to sing, Joe would not have to fake anything. He’d still have his voice. He’d sing a country song, then a few rock ballads, and then, for the old-timers, some of the jigs and reels he used to play in the kitchen when he was a boy. He’d sing “The Star of Logy Bay.” He’d sing “Kelegre’s Swarree.” And then, of course, he’d sing the song that every true Newfoundlander knows by heart, “I’s the B’y”:

 

I’s the b’y that builds the boat

I’s the b’y that sails her

I’s the b’y that catches the fish

And brings them home to Lizer.

Cods and rinds to cover your flake

Cake and tea for supper

Cod fish in the spring of the year

Fried in maggoty butter.

 

Everybody in the Oasis would be stomping their feet and singing along, and a few of the old-timers would stand and begin to dance, the large tavern vibrating and warming with moving bodies. Then the front door would open and someone would enter, and as a blast of cold air rushed into the Oasis, a scrap of music would slip out into the night and go skipping up over the spruce trees to the cemetery on top of Colliers Hill, where Mose Lewis and the other dead lay buried. A clear cold sky would be glittering overhead, and the black bay heaving in the distance, and if you were lying on top of the hill on this frosty night, you might hear the faint strand of music from below and you might remember, for a moment, what it was to be alive.

B
unny Eyes quit one hot afternoon at the start of August. Or was fired. Or was fired and then quit—the details depended on who was offering them and nobody was offering much. This part was certain: Bunny and George, the gang’s foreman, got into some kind of dispute about the heat, which had soared into the high nineties several days earlier and been parked there every day since. Heat waves brutalize ironworkers. All other trades on a skyscraper job work under the derrick floor, in shade, but there is no shade for the ironworkers on top. The sun beats down on them mercilessly, and it radiates back up at them from the stainless steel decking and the beams and columns.

On the fourth day of the heat wave, Bunny announced that he favored cutting out early. George wanted to keep working. The argument quickly escalated, and before it was over, George told Bunny he no longer wanted him in the gang and he could now consider himself a bolter-up. No one expected Bunny to accept this—“Bunny’s a raising gang man,” said Matt, “no way was he gonna bolt up”—and Bunny promptly quit. It had been a long time coming. As Matt said later, “Bunny was never happy in this job.”

The real reason Bunny quit, or got himself fired, or whatever happened exactly, wasn’t that he held anything against George or the gang, and it wasn’t that he couldn’t take the heat—Bunny
liked
it hot. It was, simply, that he hated the job. He had come to loathe it. “That job was just a horror,” he would say later. What made it such a horror? “Just the job itself,” he would vaguely elaborate. “Christ, just everything.”

The job had turned out to be nothing like what he, or any of the men, expected. The great competition he’d looked forward to, those four kangaroos bobbing and swinging, the four raising gangs clambering over the frame, pushing themselves to excel—none of this had come to pass. Instead, the Time Warner Center had crept upwards at an excruciating pace. Six months had elapsed since that morning in February when Bunny and the rest of the raising gang arrived, five months since the ironworkers began setting steel. And the building was only on the fifth floor. A floor a month. Given the acreage and the size of some of the steel members, this represented a good tonnage of steel, but still—five floors in five months? No ironworker at Columbus Circle could remember a job that had advanced at such a slow grind.

The problem was the same one that had plagued the job since May: lack of steel. The ADF plants in Quebec were pumping out fabricated shapes at full throttle, but this was not fast enough to feed the hunger of the Time Warner Center. To make matters worse, when the steel finally did arrive, the ironworkers complained that it was poorly fabricated. It didn’t fit as it was meant to. The bolt holes did not align properly. Or the piece came a few centimeters too long and had to be trimmed to size with an acetylene torch. Often, the only way to get the steel to match was by hitting it again and again with beaters, or by slamming the ball of the crane into it, or by straddling it and bucking up and down on it or, all else failing, kicking the shit out of it. The goal of all this activity was to get the holes of the facing pieces close enough together that you could stick the
tapered end of your drift pin through both—getting a “bite,” this was called—then pound the pin in with a beater, pulling those two holes, and all the others on the facing pieces, into alignment. Only then could you fit your bolts and move on.

It was arduous and joyless work. Connections that should have been made in three or four minutes routinely took an hour. Instead of setting 40 or 50 pieces a day, as they should have been doing, the gangs were lucky to set 10 or 15. Joe Kennedy, the superintendent, had recently brought in Tommy Emerson’s raising gang from the Random House job to take over the northeast crane but he hardly had enough steel to keep two cranes busy, much less three.

The last anyone saw of Bunny around Columbus Circle, he was sitting at the bar of the Coliseum on a Thursday afternoon. The place was sparsely populated and deliciously cold. A few men slumped listlessly over the bar, and a few other men slumped over tables against the wall. Nobody was saying much, certainly not with any animation, except for Chad Snow, the connector in Chappie’s gang. Chad sat on a bar stool near Bunny telling stories about close encounters he’d had with death, each story slightly more harrowing than the last. “When I landed,” Chad was saying, “I hit right on my sternum. They wanted to take me down in a scale box but the last guy I’d seen go down in a scale box died, so I said no way, and I walked down the stairs. All I knew,” said Chad, “is there was no way I was going in that box.”

Chad had suffered many accidents in his 36 years. Even before he’d learned to walk he’d almost killed himself by crawling into his older sister’s walker, pulling himself up to his feet, then shuffling over to the stairs and tumbling down them. Since becoming an ironworker, he’d fallen badly three times and had many close calls. Chad was short but quick and solidly built, with wide bow legs and large thighs, and he had proven himself to be fairly indestructible. He was in the middle of telling a new story about the time a piece of steel
flew out of control and nearly knocked him off the edge of a building when Bunny, who had been quiet and remote, looked up from his beer and turned his liquid blue eyes on Chad. “Christ, Chad, didn’t anything good ever happen to you?” Chad paused for a moment, then went on telling his story. Bunny took a last sip of beer, stood up, and walked out without a word.

Quitting was a right ironworkers took as God-given. An ironworker owed his loyalties to his union and his trade, not to any specific job. Indeed, an ironworker was expected to quit if he was unhappy in a job. “You can shove this job up your ass,” a New York ironworker told his foreman one day, according to a well-traveled bar story. Off the man went to find a new job, booming down south, all the way west, up north, but no luck, there were no jobs to be found. Finally, he returns east, just where he began. “If that job’s not too far up your ass,” he says to his old foreman, “I’d like it back now.” The real punchline is that he got it back, no hard feelings.

In a boom, a new job was pretty much guaranteed to a good raising gang man like Bunny. The local would send him right back out for a fresh start. A construction slowdown might change the equation—a man was more likely to stick it out when there were few other jobs to go to—but the standing rule was that an ironworker worked at his own discretion. He earned that right by the risks he took. Every decision, even one ill advised or lightly made, could turn out to be the decision that saved his life. In 1907, Dominic McComber walked off the Quebec Bridge three and a half hours before it fell because he’d gotten into an argument with his foreman. No matter why he made it, that decision, that single autonomous act, turned out to be the most important of his life.

In the spring of 2001, the American Psychological Association published the results of a study on human happiness. According to the study, happiness is nourished not by popularity or affluence or the pursuit of pleasure. Rather, it derives from a recipe of four ingre
dients: autonomy, competence, self-esteem, and relatedness. Autonomy tops the list.

Ironwork provided all four. It was difficult work that gave men a chance to apply their physical strength and skill to the problem of handling and connecting steel. It was work most other people found inconceivably dangerous and which set apart its practitioners as men of courage. As a result, most ironworkers were fairly bursting with pride. The work also provided “relatedness.” Once an apprentice survived the ribbing and hazing that was part of his initiation into ironwork, he belonged to a tight fraternity, a “family,” as many ironworkers described it. For many of the members, of course, the relatedness was literal. They were cousins and brothers and fathers and sons.

But it was autonomy, in the end, that set ironwork apart from most blue-collar jobs. Autonomy is what blue-collar jobs are generally supposed to lack. Lack of autonomy, in fact, is one of the defining characteristics of working-class occupations. “Class is about the power some people have over the lives of others, and the powerlessness most people experience as a result,” writes the labor historian Michael Zweig. “For all their differences, working class people share a common place in production where they have relatively little control over the pace or content of their work, and aren’t anybody’s boss.”

Ironworkers were indisputably members of the working class, but throughout most of their history they’d exerted a good deal of control over the pace and content of their work. Gangs of ironworkers operated as self-determined units. As long as they completed the work in a timely fashion, they were free to carry it out more or less as they pleased. Within the gang, the foreman was the leader, but in most gangs, especially in raising gangs, his rank was only marginally higher than that of the others. They were all members of the same union, and the foreman earned just a dollar more per hour. Nor was his rank permanent; it lasted as long as the job. On the next job, he
might find himself back in the gang; he might very well find himself working for one of the men he was now pushing. He did well not to lord his power over the others.

A journeyman ironworker went where the union sent him and carried out the tasks that his foreman or super assigned him. Beyond this, he was given a wide berth. If he didn’t want to come to work one day, well, all right. If he felt like coming to work drunk, nobody would say anything against him, just so long as he could hold his liquor and didn’t slow down the gang. If he was inspired to slide down a column upside-down or do cartwheels on a six-inch beam, he was probably a fool, but foolishness was his prerogative. Within the quasi-socialistic brotherhood of unionism, ironwork was a libertarian’s paradise.

Or rather, always had been. In the summer of 2001, it was a paradise quickly vanishing, much to the dismay of the men who lived in it.

SAFE NEW WORLD

Joe Kennedy, the white-bearded superintendent of the ironworkers, just a few jobs shy of retirement and peace, stood near the front gate on Columbus Circle, in the three-sided court that would eventually become the magnificent portal of the Time Warner Center. The budding towers rose on either side, casting afternoon shadows over the court. Above Joe, to the south, George’s gang, minus Bunny, was “jumping” its kangaroo crane, an astonishing process whereby the crane lifted itself on hydraulic pistons while the raising gang slipped a new 13-foot tower section into the gap. Matt Kugler and Jerry Soberanes stood on the tower section, hanging by the crane’s hook. John White and Danny Donohue were whacking away at the tower, pulling out pins to make room. To a man looking for signs of progress, and Joe was such a man, this was a good one.

On the other side of the court, a crane lifted a stack of stainless-
steel decking. As the decking rose and yawed slightly, several hundred gallons of brown water poured out of its corrugated hollows and cascaded down onto the concrete floor. Joe lifted his two-way radio from his belt.

“Jesus Christ, Tommy, you guys break a water main up there?”

“No, Joe,” came the response. “That’s me taking a piss.”

“That’s lovely, Tommy, thank you for that information.”

“Any time, Joe.”

Joe Kennedy passed most of his days inside a small trailer propped on the scaffold bridge over the sidewalk of Columbus Circle. The trailer was furnished with a few phones and drafting tables and reams and reams of shop drawings. From this vantage, Joe attended to the hundreds of logistical problems that beset the assembly of a steel building in the middle of Manhattan, from arranging deliveries of materials to coordinating with other trades to dealing with catastrophes. These days he spent a lot of time placating the general contractor, Bovis Lend-Lease, about the all too evident lack of steel. “There’s absolutely nothing I can do,” said Joe. “I can make phone calls and holler and scream and stamp my feet as loud as they do, but I get the same result.” The project manager from ADF kept assuring Joe that more steel was around the corner, that the bottleneck was about to bust open. “Every week he tells me it’s great, it’s gonna be fine, and I say, ‘Listen, you tell me that every week for the last month. You better change your system or do something different, cause it ain’t changing any.” From our end, all we want is to be able to order the steel, have it delivered, erect it, bolt it up, plumb it up, whatever we have to do. But it isn’t happening.”

Superintendent is a powerful but thankless position, the intermediary between impatient contractors above and unruly ironworkers below. Nobody loves a superintendent except his own family, and Joe couldn’t even count on
them
since several of his brothers and sons worked for him. “When you’re super, you’re the boss, which makes you the enemy,” said Joe. “The pay is better, but there’s every
thing else that goes along with it. To be honest, it’s not much fun.”

There were moments of pleasure, however, and this was one of them. In the afternoons, when things quieted down, Joe stepped out of the trailer and took a tour of the building. He walked slowly, with the measured authority of a bishop admiring his cathedral. Even now, after all these years, Joe got a charge out of the sight of iron rising and cranes jumping. These were accomplishments you could measure and appreciate with your eyes.

“Joe, why aren’t they tied off?”

Joe’s reverie was abruptly terminated by the approach of a large bearded man named Mike. The site safety manager for Bovis, Mike looked ponderous and grim, as he often looked when approaching Joe. He pointed up to a wide girder running along the edge of the courtyard. Several plumber-uppers stood on the girder, drawing a tape measure between two columns, unaware they were under observation.

“They aren’t tied off.”

“They aren’t tied off,” responded Joe, “because they aren’t thirty feet over the floor.”

“Looks like thirty feet to me.”