High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World's Greatest Skyline Read online

  High in the annals of the lethal space-out is the perplexing case of Charles Bedell, a gifted young Yale-educated engineer who oversaw the erection of steel on the Williamsburg Bridge. He had been with the bridge from its start four years earlier and he knew every piece of steel in it. He was a measured and conscientious man by nature, the last person on earth you’d expect to lose himself in a passing thought. One lovely sunny morning near the end of September of 1900 Bedell made his usual rounds of the bridge. He paused for a moment near the Brooklyn anchorage. He could see his office a hundred feet below. A month earlier, Bedell had been standing down there, on the street, when an ironworker fell and died at his feet. The event had shaken the engineer profoundly. Now, as Bedell stood on the bridge, whittling a stick and thinking about—what?—a 150-ton “traveler” crane crept up behind him, groaning and creaking on its tracks. A man did not have to be particularly light-footed or on the ball to avoid getting hit by the traveler. The crane operator saw Bedell standing there but assumed the engineer knew the crane was approaching and was just taking his sweet time getting out of the way. Only when it was too late did the operator realize Bedell wasn’t planning to move. He shouted a warning. Bedell swung around and saw the crane bearing down. He lifted his right arm as if to grab the boom of the crane, then reeled back. He tumbled over the side of the bridge to his death on the street below.

  Connectors were less likely to forget the danger than other ironworkers, because the danger was all too obvious. They had only to glance down to remember it. Most had fallen, and those who had not knew there was always a fair chance they would. Jerry had not fallen, but Bunny had. Chad Snow, the connector in the other gang, had fallen three times. No one stood around and thought about falling—you’d be finished if you did—but you took precautions. On windy days, you put extra bolts in your bolt bag to lower your center of gravity. When you were walking the outside of the building, you leaned in slightly, away from the street, and readied yourself to drop to the lower flange if need be. “You always look for a way out in case something goes wrong,” said Bunny. “It becomes second nature. If a person doesn’t do it, and something happens, they panic. Or they just stand there and they get hurt.” A little bit of fear wasn’t only natural, it was necessary. “You gotta be completely nuts if you don’t have fear,” said Bunny. “If you lose your fear, you put yourself in danger, and everyone around you.”

  Unlike most young men who became connectors, Bunny had been a timid child. “I was kind of a scared kid. I didn’t like to leave my parents. I hated to go away on trips.” He first experienced heights as a teenager when, like nearly every other adolescent boy on the reservation, he ventured onto the Black Bridge, an old railroad bridge that crossed the St. Lawrence River onto Kahnawake, and climbed up into its superstructure. Ever since 1886, when the construction of this bridge introduced the Mohawks to ironwork, Indian boys had been going out on it to cheat death; climbing the bridge was an unofficial rite of passage. As teenagers, Bunny and his friends would run along the beams and scale the top chords, often at night, hollering and tossing empty beer cans down into the fast black water of the St. Lawrence hundreds of feet below. Every now and then, inevitably, a boy would fall. While this sent a chill through the others, it didn’t stop them from going back. It was all right to be afraid. Being afraid was the point. You were afraid but you dealt with the fear and you did it anyway. It’s a lesson many of these boys would take with them when they followed their fathers into ironwork.

  “To tell you the truth, I still get nervous sometimes,” said Bunny. “It does strange things to your mind. Every day I go to work, I look around and pick a person and think, what would he look like if he fell? Stupid things like that. But then you gotta push it out and get to work. You can feel afraid, but you still gotta do the job.”

  He was quiet for a moment. It was a Monday evening and Bunny was getting ready to turn in early. At work that afternoon, he’d seemed flip and carefree and a little cocky. Not tonight. “I just hope that if I fall, I go on the outside,” he said. “It’s longer that way, but it hurts less when you land.”

  “Will somebody kill the damn bird already?”

  Sweat dripping from his face, his T-shirt drenched, Matt squinted up at an eighth-floor balcony across 58th Street, where a mechanical macaw perched on the railing. The bird was a fake, plumed with synthetic feathers and wired with a continuous loop soundtrack: caw-cawcawcaw-caw! The owners of the balcony only wanted to keep the pigeons away. Inadvertently, they were driving the ironworkers to madness. The cranes’ engines whirred, the jackhammers split the sidewalk, the impact guns of the bolter-ups filled the air with their savage rattle, but the sound that pierced through all of this—the sound that drove the men crazy—was the fake macaw squawking on the railing across the street.

  It was June, and summer was upon the city with all its heat and filth and irritants. The corrugated metal of the derrick floor reflected the sun’s rays onto the men, retaining enough heat to cook through the soles of their shoes. When a breeze came, it carried the sweet sticky odor of port-a-pottys through the building. At lunch, the ironworkers sought the shade of Central Park, or a front stoop, or the air-conditioned chill of the Coliseum Bar and Grill.

  The summer was off to a poor start. A few weeks earlier—on a Monday, as it happened—a young ironworker named Ron DiPietro had gone into the hole at a job on 56th Street, where ironworkers were erecting a skyscraper for the Random House publishing company. He’d fallen two stories, hit something, then fallen three more. He’d survived the fall, but barely. Now, a month later, he remained bedridden, still unable to walk.

  Ron’s fall hit close to home at Columbus Circle, not simply because it had occurred a few blocks away, but also because many of the men now working at Time Warner had recently arrived from the Random House job and knew Ron well. Ron himself had been due to transfer over to Time Warner within weeks. His gang would still come, but now it would come without him.

  The worst thing an ironworker can do after a colleague falls is to dwell on it; better to get back to work, out onto the steel, and put the accident, however awful, behind. Unfortunately, that was not an option right now at Columbus Circle, because the work had slowed to an excruciating pace. The reason was lack of steel. The recent building boom had created so much demand for steel that fabrication mills were having a difficult time keeping up. ADF Group Inc., the fast-growing Canadian fabricator that supplied steel to the Time Warner Center, was overextended: a convention center in Pittsburgh, an airport in Toronto, a stadium in Detroit, not to mention several lesser steel jobs in New York. The company simply could not produce enough fabricated steel to satisfy the demand of all these jobs at once. So instead of the usual nine or ten trucks arriving at Columbus Circle every day, the ironworkers were getting three or four. This was not enough steel to keep four tower cranes busy. It was hardly enough for two.

  “Every day, it’s the same story,” said Joe Kennedy, the ironworkers’ superintendent, as he sat in his trailer, surrounded by shop drawings, sounding weary and besieged. “They tell me they got more steel coming just around the corner. But then it never comes. It kills the men. They walk around with their heads down. You’re an ironworker, you want to put up some iron and look back over your shoulder at the end of the day and see what you did—this is what they take away from us when we don’t have enough steel to set. It’s extremely frustrating.”

  It was particularly frustrating to the raising gangs, who thrived on action and competition. Some days, Bunny and Jerry found themselves moving port-a-pottys and Dumpsters around on the crane, tedious and unsatisfying work. Weeks passed without noticeable upward progress. The idleness gnawed at Bunny and made him irritable. “To tell you the truth, it sucks,” he said one evening after work. “Everybody’s pissed off, nobody’s got anything to do, everybody’s bitching and moaning. It’s no fun coming to work when it’s like this.”

  One afternoon, Chett Barker, the 55-year-old signalman in Bunn
y and Jerry’s gang, announced that he’d decided to take some time off. The pain in his ankles was nearly constant. Simply walking across the derrick floor was difficult. A few days earlier, one of his ankles had given way. Chett had stumbled and fallen, and now his back bothered him, too. When he left for home that afternoon, he told the men to give him a few weeks for the pain to go away, then he’d be back, good as new. In fact, the pain would not go away and he was gone for good, effectively retired after 37 years in the trade, but he didn’t know that yet.

  The gang shifted to accommodate his absence. George asked Bunny to take over as signalman temporarily. This gave Matt Kugler the opportunity to move into position as the gang’s second connector. Nothing could have thrilled him more. “They can send the rest of them boys away,” he announced one afternoon at the Coliseum. “I’ll set the whole thing myself. What ya say, Jerry? You and me.”

  Jerry grinned. “The whole building? I don’t know. It’s a pretty big building.”

  By 5:47 on the morning of June 28th, the temperature on the digital screen on the south side of Columbus Circle had reached 78 degrees. “Mostly Sunny,” read the forecast on the screen. “Hot and Humid.” Already the air felt soupy as the sun rose over the corner of Central Park. You could see how hot the day was going to be in the faces of the early-bird joggers returning from the park, flushed and gasping. Just after six, the first ironworkers began to arrive, rising out of the subways at the end of their long journeys from home. The men got coffee and papers then clustered around the front of the building. The gate opened around 6:30. Some went in, though most lingered out front. At 6:55, Ky Horn, a quiet young connector who worked with Chad Snow, walked out to the paved island in the middle of Broadway and sat on a bench, glancing at the big digital clock. When it turned to 6:59, he stood up and walked back to the gate.

  A few hours later, around 11 A.M., as the mercury shot up past 90, the phone rang in Joe Kennedy’s air-conditioned trailer. On the other end was a woman’s voice. She needed Bunny to call her, she told Joe; it was urgent. Joe radioed George, the foreman, who relayed the message to Bunny on the derrick floor. Bunny dropped his headset and strode quickly across the floor, his heart pounding—had something happened to one of his daughters? his wife?—then ran up the metal stairs to the trailer.

  “What’s up, Joe?”

  “I don’t know. Your wife wants you to call home right away. It’s important.”

  Bunny dialed his number. His wife picked up. “Keith, it’s Weedy.”

  Weedy was the nickname of Bunny’s cousin, Kenny McComber, a young ironworker, just 22 years old. He’d been working night shifts near home, retrofitting a bridge over the St. Lawrence River.

  “What about him? What happened?”

  “There was an accident. One of the outriggers on the crane broke. The rig fell over and pulled him into the water. They can’t find him.”

  “All right, listen,” said Bunny. “I’m coming home.”

  By early afternoon, he was on the New York State Thruway, racing north to Kahnawake.

  PART II

  The Bridge

  SIX

  Kahnawake

  Interstate 87 changes a few miles north of Albany. The four-lane road has been flat and straight but now it starts to bend and pitch in the foothills of the Adirondacks. The air cools, the traffic thins, and oaks and maples give way to dark pine lit by flashes of white birch. For the Mohawk ironworker returning home, the change is more than superficial. He is just half way to Kahnawake but he has crossed into ancestral land now, the land that Mohawks claimed for hundreds of years and which many Mohawks still believe is theirs, if not in law then at least in spirit. Kanienkeh—the Land of Flint, as the Mohawks called their dominion—covered more than 15,000 square miles. It extended west from the Hudson River Valley and Lake Champlain over the mountains toward the Great Lakes. The southern border of the territory was the valley of the Mohawk River, where Interstate 90 now runs between Boston and Buffalo. The northern border was the St. Lawrence River in southern Quebec. For the next several hours, everything to the left, through the driver’s-side window, once belonged to the Mohawks.

  The drive from Manhattan to Kahnawake takes over six hours, though it can be done—God and the New York State Troopers willing—in five and a half. Before the Northway opened in the 1960s, the journey home took 11 or 12 hours on Route 9, the beautiful and treacherous two-lane road that once served as the main artery between New York and Montreal. The men drank more in those days, often starting with a few beers at a tavern, then sipping all the way home, and the 400-mile drive could be as lethal as the work. These days many of the men make the drive home in one fell swoop. A handful, though, still pull off at Exit 36, about an hour past Albany, for refreshment at the Black Bear.

  The Black Bear is a ramshackle but cheery tavern nestled into a hollow where old Route 9 curves into the town of Pottersville. Mohawk ironworkers have been stopping off here since the early 1950s, when an Indian’s car broke down one night near the tavern. The owners brought him in, fed him, and gave him a place to sleep. The Indian returned the favor by showing up a week later with fifty homebound ironworkers, and Mohawks have been coming ever since. Fewer men stop at the Black Bear nowadays, but on any given Friday evening a couple dozen ironworkers still pull into the parking lot under the high wall of pines, step out into the mountain air, and walk into the haze of smoke and ethanol fumes and good fellowship. A painting of a Mohawk brave hangs behind the bar. A stuffed bear lunges from a corner of the room. On cold nights, a wood fire crackles in the cast-iron stove at the far end of the bar. A couple of drinks, a few stories, a bite to eat from the restaurant, then the ironworker is back in his car, racing home with renewed urgency over the path that Mohawk ironworkers have been taking for generations—and that Mohawks walked four hundred years earlier on their way to Kahnawake.

  Long, long ago, the earth was covered with water and the ancestors lived in the sky. They were the Sky Dwellers. One day, according to the creation myth of the Iroquois, the Great Leader pushed his pregnant daughter through a hole in the sky. As Sky Woman fell, the water animals below prepared to cushion her landing. Water Fowl flew up and took hold of her and lowered her gently onto the back of the Great Sea Turtle. Sky Woman was the first human to live on earth.

  The terrestrial Mohawks lived mainly in the area around what is now Albany. Like all Iroquois, they dwelt in longhouses, rectangular bark-covered cabins shared by several families. The women farmed the fertile banks of the Mohawk River for corn and beans and squash, while the men disappeared into the mountain forests for long stretches to hunt for deer and bear and to fish for trout and perch. Occasionally, the Mohawks joined the other nations of Iroquois Confederacy to wage war. They were notoriously fierce warriors. Before going into battle, they took oaths to the sun, praying for victory and promising to eat their victims in sacrifice. They tended to keep that promise. The name “Mohawk” is not itself a Mohawk word. It was given to them by their anxious enemies, the Algonquin. It means “man-eaters.”

  Of the five (later six) nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, the Mohawks lived farthest to the east, which brought them into early contact with Europeans. First, the Europeans spread their diseases to the Indians, in the form of smallpox, which killed about 5,000—well over half the Mohawks’ total population—in a matter of months. Then they imposed their religion, as Jesuit missionaries arrived near Albany in the mid-seventeenth century and began to convert the “sauvages” to Catholicism. In 1676, a large group of converted Mohawks and other Iroquois were persuaded by the missionaries—and perhaps more convincingly by antagonistic non-Christian Mohawks—to travel north and settle on the banks of the St. Lawrence River. The first settlement was at the Lachine Rapids, just east of Montreal. The Indians named it Kahnawake—“By-the-Rapids.” The settlement moved upriver several times over the next half century, but held onto its original name. Kahnawake moved one last time, in 1716, to its final, and current, location on the so
uthern banks of the St. Lawrence, eight miles upriver from Montreal.

  Life was different on the great river. Along with traditional longhouses, the Mohawks now built sturdy stone houses and a stone church and rectory for the pursuit of their new religion. But it was commerce, not Christianity, that made the biggest impact on Mohawk culture. The St. Lawrence, reaching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes, was fast becoming a superhighway into the interior for European speculators, and the men of Kahnawake worked as river guides, or “voyagers,” transporting fur pelts east from the Rockies or south from Hudson Bay. When the fur trade began to dry up in the 1820s, the Mohawks turned to timber rafting, negotiating the goods of white men through the turbulent Lachine Rapids that ran just downriver from the reservation.

  Living on the banks of the St. Lawrence placed the Mohawks in proximity to another of the white man’s enterprises: the construction of the iron and steel bridges that began to span the river in the middle of the nineteenth century. The first of these was the Victoria Bridge, an iron tubular bridge erected seven miles downstream from Kahnawake in the 1860s. The Canadian Trunk Railroad purchased stone for the bridge piers from a quarry on the reservation, then hired Mohawk boatmen to transport the stone to the bridge site. It’s not clear whether the Mohawks climbed up into the superstructure of this bridge, but certainly the Victoria gave them a taste of iron construction. Apparently they liked it. When the Canadian Pacific Railroad undertook a new bridge over the river 20 years later, the Mohawks were determined to participate more directly.