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

  “Jesus, you look like shit, Johnny.”

  “I feel like shit. Last night was a tough one.”

  “But you always look like shit, Johnny. What happened to your eye, anyway? Your wife do that?”

  “Naw, it was your wife. She likes it rough.”

  The accordion door screeched open and 20 men crushed in. The cage shot up the outside of the building, rattling like a can of nails. Fogged Plexiglas covered the metal grilling, a favor not to the ironworkers, who weren’t likely to care, but to the other tradesmen and the dozens of other possibly acrophobic surveyors and inspectors and financiers who might visit the site of a building under construction. Accelerating upwards at the edge of a building in an open cage held to a building by a thin monorail was not an experience for the faint of heart.

  The hoist stopped with an abrupt clunk on the 27th floor. This was as high as it went. The operator yanked open the gate, and Brett and the others filed out and walked across the metal deck to the ladders. They started up the steep rungs, a coil of men stretching out, then bunching together, then stretching out again. The higher they climbed, the shorter the coil, as men dropped out along the way. At the 28th floor, the welders peeled off, then the detail men turned away at the 29th. Brett kept climbing.

  From the moment he steps up onto the corrugated metal deck, a visitor unaccustomed to the summit of a modern skyscraper-in-progress is likely to find the surroundings unsettling. This is especially true if he happens to be among the 23 percent of Americans who described themselves in a 1999 Harris Poll as “very afraid” of heights. The clinical term is acrophobia. In the hierarchy of American fears, according to the poll, only ophidiophobia—fear of snakes—ranks higher.

  The novice visitor’s first shock, beyond the inescapable fact of height, will be the slap of wind on his cheeks; no matter how tranquil the morning below, the air, lacking obstacles to drag down its velocity, blows hard at the top of a skyscraper. More disconcerting is the absence of walls and ceiling. Without these bearings, the novice’s brain balks, shooting an urgent message to nerve receptors in his extremities. The gist of the message is: DON’T MOVE! But even as his legs refuse to move, he notices that they are in fact moving—or rather, the building itself is moving. Tall buildings sway slightly, and the stronger the wind, the more they sway. It’s called deflection. The Empire State Building, extremely rigid by today’s standards, deflects a couple of inches off its vertical axis in wind. Newer, lighter buildings deflect a good deal more than that, up to two feet off their vertical axes on upper floors. The height of the building, in feet, divided by 500 provides a good estimate of how far a modern building deflects at its top in peak winds. (A 750-foot building, then, deflects up to a foot and a half.) A certain amount of deflection is perfectly natural, even beneficial, for a tall building; better for a structure to bend like green wood than to snap like dry timber. Some buildings, though, over-deflect, a condition which can cause structural problems. In rare cases, it stresses joints and, over time, sheers bolts and welds. More likely, over-deflection will simply cause leaks in windows and disrupt elevator service by pushing elevator shafts out of plumb.

  Over-deflection isn’t primarily a structural concern; it’s a human concern. If a building moves too much in the wind, people on upper floors start to feel dizzy and nauseated. The issue isn’t how far the building sways in any direction or even how fast it sways—it’s how quickly it accelerates. Just as in a car or on a train, humans feel movement inside a building when the building is speeding up or slowing down; it’s acceleration that makes people’s stomachs turn. By the time most buildings are ready for occupancy, they’ve accumulated so much bulk from their frames and walls and floors that they are fairly rigid. What deflection remains in buildings is then hidden by the walls and ceiling that surround the inhabitant and remove any visual and aural clues of movement. They fool the brain into a pleasant perception of stillness.

  No such luck at the top of a skyscraper under construction. Rigid-making walls and floors are still many months away. So are ceilings. The building moves all too obviously and the sky gapes all too endlessly, and it all takes some getting used to.

  When the novice finally works up his courage and manages a few tentative steps across the derrick floor, he will find it hard going. The term derrick floor, by which ironworkers refer to the ever-rising top floor of a skyscraper under construction, is a misnomer. For one thing, in this age of tower cranes, derricks are all but extinct. For another, the derrick floor isn’t really a floor at all, but wide-wale corrugated steel decking. The troughs are ankle deep, perfect for receiving and molding the concrete that will eventually be poured into them but treacherous to walk on. To make matters worse, the decking is usually littered with debris—discarded bolts, scraps of wire, soda cans, chains. A first timer’s instinct is to shuffle along slowly with eyes cast down, until suddenly he feels a shadow pass over and looks up to see a 15-ton girder swooping not 10 feet above him on the hook of a tower crane. Dark brown columns stick up from the deck like trees scorched by fire. Grids of beams link some of the columns, and men walk on the beams, while other men straddle them, working at the joints with torque wrenches and four-pound mauls called “beaters.” The jarring sound of beaters whacking bolt heads—chung! chung! chung!—rings out over the steady blanketing hum of the crane engines. A pigeon alights, flaps its wings once or twice, then takes off again. Even pigeons seem to find the environment inhospitable.

  And yet, it is breathtaking. The air is literally fresher, as gravity tends to keep heavy particles of pollution close to the ground. Some days the sky is a wide swath of blue and the top of the building could be hundreds of miles from the city, an alpine ridge populated by a strange breed of mountain men. Across the chasms, distant figures stand or sit in offices, but they look more like plastic dolls in a playhouse than real people. They do not seem to move much. Every now and then one of them turns and looks out vacantly at the ironworkers for a few moments, then turns away.

  By 7:20 Brett was on the steel, climbing above the 32nd floor. The sun was making a lackluster effort to rise. The cranes hummed and the sound of steel meeting steel rang through the damp air. From where he stood, Brett could see most of the men up top. They were a fair sample of New York’s ironworkers in the winter of 2001. On the derrick floor stood Joe Lewis, a stocky man with a heavy brogue. Joe was born and raised along the coast of Conception Bay in Newfoundland, a small speck on the map that had produced an extraordinary number of New York City ironworkers over the years. Joe’s three sons were ironworkers and his brothers were ironworkers. His father had been one, too, until the work killed him.

  On the other side of the building stood John Collins, a brash 40-year-old from a legendary family of New York ironworkers. His grandfather had worked on the Empire State Building; his father and seven uncles had worked on most of the big buildings of the last 40 years. John’s father had recently passed away, but an 82-year-old uncle still worked iron in the summers.

  J. R. Phillips and his cousin Jeff Phillips straddled the steel a few yards from John Collins. Both were fourth-generation Mohawk ironworkers on both sides of their families. Like their fathers and grandfathers, they made a weekly commute down to the city from a small reservation just north of the Canadian border, spent their days on the steel, their nights in Bay Ridge, then drove home to Canada every Friday afternoon.

  Hanging off the side of building on a small wooden platform called a “float” was Joe Gaffney, a sandy-haired man of Irish and Norwegian extraction whose brothers and uncle were ironworkers. In the winter of 2001, Joe Gaffney’s mother happened to be employed in an office on Sixth Avenue that gave her a perfect view of the Ernst & Young building. She kept a pair of binoculars in her desk and would occasionally check up on Joe, then immediately regret having done so. The sight of her son perched on a thin plank of plywood lashed to side of the building 300 feet above the ground—it was really more than a mother could bear.

  Brett Conklin
on the Ernst & Young building, January 2001.

  (Photo by Michael J. Doolittle)

  Now and then, the superintendent of the job, Frank Lane, would climb up to the top and have a look around. Frank—one of the two men who drove in to Times Square from Wilmington, Delaware, every morning—was young for a superintendent, still in his early 40s. With long sideburns, a wad of tobacco tucked inside his cheek, and bulging biceps, Frank looked tough even for an ironworker. In fact, as superintendents go, he was a decent sort. Most of the ironworkers actually admitted to liking him.

  Nearly everybody up here had some deep familial connection to ironwork, which made Brett an exception. There were no ironworkers in Brett’s family. Once you were an ironworker, though, you were family. “We might get into it sometimes at a bar or something, but the next morning it’s all forgotten,” said Brett. “We look out for each other. You have to. Especially the guys in your gang.”

  THE RAISING GANG

  The gang is the essential unit of ironwork. The men are deployed in half a dozen different types of gangs, the task of each described fairly precisely by its name. Bolting-up gangs drive and tighten the bolts that hold pieces of steel together. The plumbing-up gang—there is usually one per job—traverse the beams, measuring and adjusting columns to ensure that they are perfectly vertical, or plumb. Decking gangs spread corrugated sheet-metal deck over completed rectangles, or bays, of steel made by the floor beams. Once a floor is set, other gangs follow to further secure it. This includes the welders, a few detail gangs, and the safety gang. The job of this last gang is to enclose hazards with steel cable, set nets on the outside of the building, and generally reduce the chances that a man will get killed.

  A journeyman ironworker prides himself on his ability to work in any gang. No journeyman is above any job and no journeyman is below it. The wage is the same no matter what you do. All ironworkers are created equal.

  In theory, anyway. In practice, one gang stands above the others. This is the raising gang. The five members of the raising gang—six if you count the foreman—are the men who actually erect the steel. They work under the cranes to set it, piece by piece, in the frame of the building. What they assemble is by no means complete. It still requires a great deal of labor to make it plumb and strong. But like an elite military unit, it’s the raising gang that goes in first and captures territory. By the time the others arrive, the raising gang is off to claim the next level of altitude.

  The two key men in a raising gang are the connectors. Working in pairs, connectors make the initial couplings of steel beams and columns as the pieces swoop in under the booms of cranes. They snatch the steel from the sky, “set” it in position, “hang” it with a high-strength bolt or two, then move on to the next piece as the other gangs—the bolter-ups, the welders, the detail men—come in behind to make the couplings permanent. The connectors are the alpha dogs of high steel. They are the most agile, the strongest, the most fit. Connectors routinely climb 30-foot columns, scooting up vertical trunks of steel using nothing but their arms and legs, much as a racoon pulls himself up a tree. Connectors also walk the narrow beams that run along the perimeter of the building, 30, 40 stories over the ground, or higher. By law, ironworkers are supposed to wear safety harnesses that are attached to the frame of the building whenever they work at a significant height above the deck or the ground, but connectors are an exception to this law. They move so quickly that tying-off would be impractical. This means they are always in danger of falling or getting knocked off. A piece of wild steel, a gust of wind, a missed bolt—it doesn’t take much to send a man over. The connector’s job is demanding, dangerous, and highly competitive. It is the job that every young ironworker wants. Brett Conklin had it.

  Brett was born to connect. Height did not bother him. He didn’t mind standing on a beam with the deck 30 feet below on one side and Broadway hundreds of feet below on the other: he liked it. Brett was also a natural and avid athlete. Football was the game he loved most. On weekends, he played linebacker on a flag football team in the Rockland County league. He was strong, aggressive, and agile, all necessary attributes of a connector.

  The only thing working against Brett on the steel was his size. Connectors, like gymnasts, tend toward compactness. This gives a man the advantage of quickness and a low center of gravity, the better to stick to the steel. Brett compensated for his 6'4'' frame with a fine sense of balance and good reflexes. As for his weight—205 pounds of himself, plus 40 or 50 pounds he carried in tools and bolts on his connecting belt—this was a lot to haul up and down columns all day long, but from the moment Brett became an ironworker and set his sights on connecting, he trained himself to overcome his size with strength and technique. He climbed every chance he got in those early days, learning how to distribute his weight, how to let his legs do most of the work, how to angle his size 11½ boots between the flanges. “I just practiced, practiced, practiced,” he said. “I became good at it, really good. Climbing columns was definitely one of my better points as a connector.”

  By the time Brett got to the Ernst & Young building, he was at the top of his game—“the total package,” in the words of his connecting partner, Tommy Mitchell. He had experience, having connected for the better part of five years, but still held onto the enthusiasm of a young man doing something he loves. “The thrill of it,” recalled Brett. “It was thrilling. All day long you’re moving, working hard, learning something new. You work hard, and the day flies by. I loved that feeling. I loved to work hard.”

  He knew very well the work was dangerous. The chance of something going wrong seldom left your mind, and whenever it did, something would happen to bring it back to you. You’d be walking a beam and a sudden gust of wind would knock you off balance for a second, and when you got to the other side your heart would be racing and you’d think, Well, that was close. A few weeks earlier, a rookie crane operator, sitting in for the regular operator, had gotten a piece of steel caught on a safety cable that ran around the perimeter of the derrick floor. The operator, unaware of his mistake, kept booming up as the piece started to bend. A few seconds more and it would snap or slip out of the choker and possibly fall to the street. Without thinking, Brett ducked under the safety cable and leaned out over the edge of the building. The steel was whipping around, swinging at him like a club, but he balanced on a wide beam several hundred feet above 42nd Street and somehow managed to pry it free. The piece popped loose and sailed away. Only after he stepped back onto the deck did it occur to Brett how close he’d just come to falling.

  Altogether, the Ernst & Young job had been safe. One man had broken his foot, another had crushed a finger. A Mohawk Indian named Jeff, who had been working in Brett’s gang, had gotten injured when a piece of steel hit him in the chest. But within the spectrum of possible injuries that could befall an ironworker, these were all fairly run-of-the-mill; none were killers or career-enders. The only ironworker on this job who had spent any length of time in the hospital was a young connector known to his fellow ironworkers as Big Ben. Sometime after Christmas, Big Ben, who never smoked and took great care of himself physically and who was, as his nickname implied, famously strong, came down with cancer. It was just one of those things: you never knew.

  Later, Brett would recall fragments of the event. They’d rattled around in his mind like pieces of a missing jigsaw puzzle. The gang spent the morning setting steel on the 32nd floor. They had just landed a column when a light drizzle began to fall. The rain was a welcome surprise, since it meant the day would probably be called and the men would get to go home early. It’s one of the few axioms of ironwork: rain cancels work. Wet steel is too slick to climb or walk. Before quitting, though, Brett had one thing left to do. He had to scale the column to its top, 30 feet straight up, and unhook the line of the crane. It was an entirely routine procedure for a connector, one that Brett had performed hundreds of times. Brett grabbed hold of the flanges with his hands, dug in with his feet, and started to climb.r />
  Joe Lewis was a few floors below when he heard the sound, a sickening THUD. It lacked the peculiar twang of falling steel and Joe knew instantly what it meant. “Ah, jeez,” he said. “That’s somebody just went down.” By the time Joe got upstairs, ironworkers were gathered around Brett. He lay supine on the derrick floor. He’d blacked out for a few seconds, then come to. Somebody was calling into a radio for help. Brett lay there, stunned, looking up at the 30-foot column from which he’d just fallen.

  Don’t move, somebody said.

  You flipped over, somebody else said. You were coming down head first.

  Brett gasped. His back and chest felt scorched. He was sure he’d broken his back. The pain in his back was almost unbearable. He did not even feel his ankle.

  When an ironworker falls up top, the fastest way to get him down is by crane. The crane’s boom is rigged up to a seven-by-five metal bin with low sides, called a scale box. Usually, scale boxes are used to transport supplies from the street to the decks, but in emergencies they double as airborne stretchers.

  Brett descended from the top of the Ernst & Young building in one of these. A few paramedics and fellow ironworkers rode down with him. Brett lay on his back, facing up. Later, he’d remember how the rain fell on his face, the way the cold drops pricked his skin. He’d remember the crowd gathered on the sidewalk and the faces of the ironworkers sticking out from the edge of the building 30 stories up, gazing down at him. The paramedics gingerly lifted him on a board, then slid him into the back of an ambulance. Then the doors slammed and the ambulance sped south down Seventh Avenue to the trauma center at St. Vincent’s Hospital.