High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World's Greatest Skyline (31 page)

Four days after Kent State, on Friday, May 8, anti-war demonstrators, mostly students from New York University and Hunter College, staged a rally on the corner of Wall Street and Broad Street, near the base of the World Trade Center. City schools were closed for the day and American flags flew at half mast in honor of the four dead students in Ohio. The rally was progressing peacefully when, just before noon, 200 or so construction workers, including ironworkers from the World Trade Center and the U.S. Steel Building (rising on the former site of the Singer Building) suddenly descended on the demonstrators, pushing through police lines and beating the students with fists, boots, and pipes. The mob then stormed City Hall and ordered officials to restore the flag to full staff. This done, the mob launched into a rousing chorus of “God Bless America.”

Seventy people were injured before the riot ended. The police, who tended to share the tradesmen’s attitude toward the student demonstrators, did little to intervene. “They came at us like animals,” said one 20-year-old student. “You could hear them screaming, ‘Kill the commies.’ They charged and we ran for our lives.”

One of the “animals” was a 29-year-old ironworker, an ex-Marine who worked on the U.S. Steel Building and had recently broken three of his toes when a steel beam fell on his foot. “It was probably the only day my foot didn’t hurt me a bit,” he told the
New York Post
. “I had other things on my mind.”

To a city and country already reeling, Bloody Friday and several successive demonstrations, collectively known as the “hard-hat riots,” were one more extraordinary fact to absorb. Liberals, especially, were confounded. Wasn’t the proletariat supposed to be on the same team they were on, snuggled up under the inclusive embrace of the Democratic Party? Apparently not. Apparently, the proletariat wished them bodily harm.

Conservatives, for their part, welcomed the hard hats as a much-needed antidote to hippie peaceniks. Nixon could hardly contain his glee, declaring Bloody Friday “a very exciting thing.” At a special White House ceremony later that month, the president personally thanked a gathering of trade union representatives for their support. In return, Peter Brennan, president of the Building and Construction Trades Council of New York, presented Nixon with a hard hat of his very own.

But the romance was short-lived. In February of 1971, just 10 months after praising the hard hats at the White House, Nixon bowed to pressure from pro-business lobbying groups and suspended the Davis-Bacon prevailing wage act, a singularly harsh blow to trade unions. Nixon’s betrayal came as a shock to the ironworkers and other tradesmen, but nobody felt too sorry for them. They had done far too good a job of tarring themselves as racist warmongers
to stir up much support from their old allies, the liberals. As for conservatives, they only had a use for them, it seemed, when they were beating up liberals.

COLOSSUS

Autumn arrived, heralded by the carcasses of dead birds on the top deck. “They were small birds, little black birds,” remembered Jack Doyle. “Probably flying at night and hit the boom.” Evidently, the birds were migrating on last year’s flight plan and had no idea a building had risen into the winds that carried them south.

Then winter. “One day early that winter,” said Jack, “we had one of those silver thaws, where it got mild and wet snow was falling, then turned cold fast, especially at that height. The next morning I went up with the super and the shop steward to have a look at the cranes, to see that everything was fine up there.” Jack and the two other men rode the elevator, then climbed the last few floors on ladders, and when they stepped out through the core onto the deck, they found themselves in a place they hardly recognized. “It was like something out of
Doctor Zhivago
,” said Jack. “There was an inch of ice all over the crane booms, all over the lacing and the cables, and they were standing there, everything decorated in ice. The heat of the day was starting and you could hear the ice cracking. Up on the boom, every now and again, a small piece would crack and fall, but nothing else, just everything silent and beautiful. It was like the world stood still.”

Down below, the carping had already started. Broadcasters worried the towers would block the transmission of television signals from the top of the Empire State Building, leaving black rectangles in the middle of television sets all over the Tristate area. Real estate moguls predicted the towers would glut the market and depress prices throughout the city. Aesthetes objected to the towers because
they were ugly—“annoyingly familiar,” as Glenn Collins put it in the
New York Times Magazine
, resembling “two shiny new sticks of Arrow staples, standing on end.”

“Tall buildings are an outmoded concept—this is Victorian thinking,” wrote the renowned critic Lewis Mumford of the towers. “They are not economically sound or efficient—in fact they are ridiculously unprofitable….” The Trade Center’s fate, predicted Mumford, “is to be ripped down as nonsensical.” This was a fate many seemed to wish upon the World Trade Center in those days. It was, as
BusinessWeek
described it, “the colossus nobody seems to love.”

Well, the ironworkers loved it. It was
their
colossus. Many of them had spent two or three years of their lives building it. Not only had the towers provided them with steady employment and ample pride, but they’d kept them safe, too. Those same perimeter columns that carried the load of the building and buffeted the wind had enclosed them and protected them as effectively as palings on a crib. Five men died constructing the Twin Towers, but none of them were ironworkers.

There were injuries, of course, several of these quite serious. Two ironworkers fell and became paralyzed. And at the top of Tower One, George Doyle—Jack’s older brother—stepped on a plank that gave way under him, and fell 20 feet. The plank hit his head and cut a gash in it. He recovered but was out for several weeks.

It was George Doyle, not Jack, who was supposed to top out Tower One. Topping out is an ironworkers’ tradition marking the setting of the highest piece of steel in a building or bridge. The beam is decorated with an American flag and frequently with a small fir tree as well. Despite the fact that the ceremony had long ago been seized by publicists and financiers as a photo-op, topping out was something ironworkers took seriously. To be the foreman whose gang raised the topping-out flag was an honor.

The day before the topping-out ceremony, George’s crane broke down. The honor went instead to Jack.

At 11:30
A.M.
on December 23, 1970, a cold gray day, Jack Doyle gave the order to his signalman, who relayed it to the crane operator. As the crowd watched from the deck of the 110th floor, a 4-ton, 36-foot-high column rose into view, paused on the deck for the photographers, then rose again and settled into the core. Months of detail work remained before the ironworkers would leave the building and hand it over to the trades that followed, but the tallest steel frame in the world was now complete. Jack Doyle had made it to the top.

The towers’ position as the tallest buildings in the world was challenged almost as soon as they were finished. In October of 1972, the owners of the Empire State Building explored the possibility of
adding 11 stories to the building and resurrecting it as the world’s tallest. That never panned out. But in 1974, Sears, Roebuck and Company completed the Sears Tower in Chicago, 1,450 feet of steel arranged in tubes by Fazlur Khan. The tallest in the world—for the moment.

On a foggy December day, Jack Doyle
(right)
tops out the north tower of the World Trade Center.
(Courtesy of Jack Doyle)

On the night of August 7, 1974, a young French highwire walker named Philippe Petit rigged a ?-inch steel cable between the tops of the two towers by shooting an arrow across the 200-foot gap. The following morning, as thousands watched from below, he stepped out onto the cable and started across, as catty as a man can be. For one hour that morning, as Petit walked back and forth on the cable, the identical twins of the World Trade Center were combined into a single astonishing structure. They were the towers of the highest suspension bridge in the world.

L
ater, of course, everybody would remember exactly what they were doing at 10 minutes to 9 that Tuesday morning. Chad Snow was on 60th Street with Ky Horn, unloading heavy columns from the back of an eighteen-wheeler. Joe Emerson and Kevin Scally were setting steel on top, on the northeastern corner of the Time Warner Center. Mickey Tracy was inside the building directing his gang to cut and weld deck angles onto beams. The news came at them from the street, from some teamsters who’d heard it on the radios of their trucks and shouted it out—
The Trade Center! A plane!
—and simultaneously from the highest point on the building, the cabins of the kangaroo cranes, where some of the operating engineers kept themselves company with small transistor radios.

They’re saying a plane hit the Trade Center,
one of the operators called into his two-way.

Sixty feet below, the signalman looked past the boom of the crane into the clear blue sky.
A plane?

A little single-engine job they think. Some idiot.

The operator reached for a pair of high-powered binoculars he
kept on hand inside the cab. The binoculars were a tool of his trade. He was perched so high above the derrick floor that he sometimes needed the lenses to see what the ironworkers were doing below. But in idle moments, when the ironworkers were mucking around with a choker or a turnbuckle and the operator had a few minutes to kill, he amused himself by scanning the faraway windows of neighboring skyscrapers. Extraordinary visions appeared within his grasp. Beautiful women strolled naked through sunlit rooms at the top of the city. Had they never heard of blinds? Had they never heard of high-powered binoculars and idle crane operators?

This morning, the crane operator wasn’t looking for beautiful women. He was looking for a flickering television set. He found one almost immediately.

Jesus Christ
, he said to his signalman.
It’s burning. I’m looking at it.

You can see it?

I’m watching it on the TV. Christ!

As the facts piled on—second tower hit! Pentagon hit! Tower Two down! Tower One down!—the ironworkers gathered in the dirt courtyard at the front of the building. Joe Kennedy descended the metal staircase from the sidewalk bridge. He spoke gravely. “The Trade Center has collapsed. You’re all welcome to stay here if you can’t get home. The trains are all stopped. Call your wives, call your families. Tell them you’re all right.”

The men dispersed slowly. They made their calls. Then, in clusters, they started their long journeys home. The bridges had closed to traffic, the subways and trains were frozen. They walked, like hundreds of thousands of other people that day, over the steel bridges that ringed the city.

Mickey Tracy decided to stay put. He figured there was no sense trying to go home, since he lived an hour and a half north of the city and the roads were already at a standstill. He dialed his wife from the
trailer but couldn’t get through to his home in Connecticut; the lines were jammed. He tried a few other numbers, eventually reaching his sister-in-law in Massachusetts, who then tracked down Mickey’s wife, Karen, at a lawyer’s office and gave her Mickey’s message: he was alive and well and would be home as soon as possible. Karen had gone to the lawyer that morning to discuss the will Mickey and she were drawing up.

After hanging up the phone, Mickey sat in the trailer with the other men who had stayed behind. They listened to the radio, nobody saying much. Then the phone rang. It was Eddie Walsh, one of Local 40’s business agents, calling from the shape hall on 15th Street. The fire department had put out a call for ironworkers. Anybody who wanted to volunteer should get over to the Armory on 68th Street and Park Avenue, Walsh said. The National Guard would take it from there.

Mickey stood up, said good-bye to the men in the trailer, and walked out into the stunning day. The message he had left for his wife—that he was fine and would be coming home as soon as possible—was only half true. He had a hunch, even as he spoke the words, that he wasn’t going home anytime soon. A few blocks down Broadway he turned into the lobby of a hotel, a place he’d stayed a few times in the past. After checking in, he returned to the street and found a small store around the corner, where he purchased three pairs of socks, three pairs of underpants, and three T-shirts. With his bag of undergarments, he walked back to 59th Street. He stood by the eastbound lane and stuck out his thumb. A moment later, a van halted. “I’m going to Park and 68th,” he told the driver. “Gimme a ride?” The driver nodded, and Mickey climbed in.

Stepping into a stranger’s car in the middle of Manhattan on a day the world seemed to be coming apart was not for everyone, but Mickey thought nothing of it. He was blessed with a quick, puckish wit and could always talk his way out of trouble; and where his mouth failed him, he trusted his fists. He was only 5'4" but thickly
built and strong. “It doesn’t take much,” he once explained, “for us ironworkers to crack a guy.” Mickey was given to such pronouncements about ironworkers. “We’re physical guys, but we take care of people,” he would say. “The ironworker is a generous person.” Or: “Bad ironworkers have bad ironworker kids.” Or: “Ironwork is a series of moves; every day you learn a new move; miss a day, you miss a move.”

Mickey was a fourth-generation ironworker and had been at it himself for 22 years. He was Bronx-born but a Newfoundlander by heritage. He had no idea where on the Rock his family originated but he did know a story about three brothers who got drunk one night and stole a boat from Newfoundland and sailed it down to Boston. They sold the boat, drank the proceeds, and took up ironwork to support themselves. One of the three brothers was Mickey’s great-grandfather, who later fell and died in Boston. Mickey’s grandfather, Jack Tracy, then moved to New York and worked out of Local 40, until he fell, too. As part of the operation to save Jack Tracy, surgeons inserted a metal plate inside his head. “We think maybe it was a lead plate,” said Mickey, “’cause he started acting a little strange after that.”

By the time the van deposited Mickey at the Armory, the place was crawling with ironworkers. They stood or sat about in clusters, smoking cigarettes and waiting for clearance to go downtown. “There were guys there I hadn’t seen in years. There were guys there I used to connect with, men who broke me in when I was a kid. I tell you, there was so much ironworking talent in that room it humbled me.”

National Guardsmen swarmed around them nervously. “The G.I. Joes were talking about chemical things, nerve gas, anthrax, smallpox,” remembered Mickey. “They couldn’t clear us to go because they didn’t know what was down there. So we just waited around. A few of us helped load some tents and supplies onto army trucks. We wanted to be busy and do something.” The ironworkers had to fill
out paperwork while they waited.
NEXT OF KIN
, read one entry. Mickey wrote down his wife’s name and his home address.

Several hours had passed at the armory when it dawned on Mickey and a number of the ironworkers that they were going to spend all afternoon here unless they made a move. Without a word to the G.I. Joes, and lacking proper clearance, they slipped out to Park Avenue, boarded a fleet of pickups and four-by-fours, and took off. The convoy headed west, then sped south along the river. Mickey sat in the back of one of the pickups, trying to anticipate what he was heading into. Fatality statistics of fifty or sixty thousand had been discussed at the Armory. Airborne chemical and biological weaponry had not yet been ruled out. Mickey thought about his wife and son and said a prayer. He was, he later admitted, apprehensive. But he never doubted that he was doing the right thing. “I decided that I was going to try to do something. They needed ironworkers. Cutting steel, moving steel. This is what we do every day. There was nobody more equipped to do it.”

The sun dipped over the high-rises across the river. It was a beautiful afternoon, crystal-clear and warm. Then Mickey saw what appeared to be snow swirling up in the breeze, a blizzard of concrete powder and paper. The gray snow covered the ground with a thin dusting at first, but as they drove on it became a blanket, as much as two inches deep. Further on, huge hunks of steel lay scattered over the highway as if they’d fallen from the sky. Which, of course, they had.

Those who went to the site in the first few days kept returning to the same two images to describe it. “It’s like a war zone.” Or: “It’s like a movie.” Or they said nothing, they were silent. What television could not convey, they all agreed, was the total overwhelming vastness of the obliteration. “You gotta be able to turn your head around and look,” said John White. “I can’t even explain it, that’s how fucked up it is down there.” Mickey, who generally had a word for every occa
sion, found little to say about his first vision of hell. He just shook his head and grimaced. “It was bad,” he said. “I’ll tell you that. It was bad.”

Black, gritty smoke billowed off the wreckage. Mickey saw a few cops wearing respirators, but the ironworkers had only flimsy paper masks, which proved so useless against the fine particles of smoke and dust that many of the men pulled them off and tossed them aside. A few sections of the external walls of the towers stuck up from the rubble, appearing as fragile as eggshells. The rest was a tangled heap no higher than two or three stories. The most obvious features of the heap—“the pile” as rescue workers would soon name it—were the prefabricated triads of columns jutting out from it at obscene angles. Firemen clambered over the mess, spraying hoses or shoveling or clawing at it.

For all the activity, the place was strangely quiet. The hum of the generators and the engines of cranes and backhoes drowned out voices under a dome of white noise. Nobody was saying much anyway. The men went into a state of numbness and worked quietly for the most part, speaking only when they had to.

Mickey did not get very close to the pile that first night. The immediate critical task was to clear the roads so the cranes and other heavy equipment could gain access to the site. Cranes had been lumbering toward lower Manhattan almost from the moment the first tower collapsed, but until rescue workers cleared a path to the pile, all of the cranes in the world were useless. Mickey fell in with a gang of ironworkers under one of the cranes. They were lifting and removing the crushed fire trucks and ambulances that littered the road, walking the crane in toward the pile one lift at a time. The ironworkers lacked the most basic rigging to do the work until they discovered some cables and other rigging stowed away inside the fire trucks. They used the trucks’ own rigging to lift them and set them aside. They slowly worked their way toward the smoking jagged heap where an untold number of people—hundreds?
thousands?—were buried alive, they assumed, and waiting for them.

Mickey tried to keep himself focused on the work and prevent his eyes from wandering. “I did not want to gawk at anything,” he said. “I was there to do ironwork, and that’s what I did.” There were occasional interruptions, as when 7 World Trade Center collapsed around 5:30
P.M.
and everybody turned and ran. But as soon as the dust cleared, they got back to work.

Mickey left after midnight, utterly exhausted and depleted. He invited a blond kid named Justin, an apprentice he’d gotten to know at Time Warner Center, to come back to the hotel and crash on the floor. The two men hitched a ride on a garbage truck, Mickey in front with the driver, the kid perched on the fender in back, and jumped off on Broadway near the hotel. They must have been a sight as they came through the revolving door into the hotel lobby. Their arms and faces and shirts were caked in dust. More dust clotted their eyebrows and hair. Their jeans were soaked with water from the firehoses. Their boots were heavy with mud, their socks drenched. Their throats were raw from the smoke and dust they’d been inhaling for hours.

In the room Mickey pulled out a couple of self-heating army rations he’d managed to grab before leaving Ground Zero. They sat on the bed and shoveled the food, a mysterious but edible stew, into their mouths. Their throats hurt when they swallowed, but they were famished. When they were done, Mickey reached into the plastic bag he’d managed to hold onto since early that afternoon. He handed the apprentice a package of clean underpants and socks and a T-shirt, then took one of each for himself. These were the last clean clothes he’d see for a while.

Wednesday was the day tens of thousands of Americans woke up, having never really fallen asleep, possessed of the same powerful urge: to get down to the site of the fallen towers and help. New Yorkers
were not alone in fixating on this idea; sheriffs from Maine and home health-care workers from Nebraska, paramedics from Wisconsin, ballerinas from Georgia—people from all over the country shared the obsession. It was as if that grave prediction made by the French savant about the Eiffel Tower over a hundred years ago—that its iron would spontaneously polarize and suck Paris into it—had come to pass at the World Trade Center. Devastation and grief had transformed the towers’ steel into a giant magnet.

What distinguished the ironworkers from the masses who responded to the disaster in those early days was the skill they possessed. It was as Mickey said:
There was nobody more equipped to do it.
The most important project of those early days—and indeed for months to come—was the careful but speedy removal of structural steel. Cutting steel. Rigging steel. Hoisting steel.
This is what we do every day.

If their chosen trade placed a moral obligation on them, it also gave them an intimate connection to the fallen buildings. The dead were not their dead, but the buildings had been
their
buildings. ironworkers put them up, raised their 192,000 tons of steel, and loved them even when most of the city found them unlovable. “These were buildings you were proud to look at,” said Matt, the broad-shouldered ex-Marine fellow ironworkers called Rambo. “They were beautiful buildings. Now it’s lying all over the place. You wanna cry ten times a day. And that’s not even the human toll. Just looking at the structural damage you wanna start crying.”