High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World's Greatest Skyline Page 21

  (The Rockefeller Center Archive Center)

  EIGHT

  Fish

  Joe 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 E
urope 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.

  You don’t have to go into Frank’s to recognize this fact. You could, alternatively, walk up to the cemetery at the top of Colliers Hill, behind the church. Much of the cemetery is overgrown with wildflowers, but if you push them aside you can see the names on the gravestones: Burke, Cole, Conway, Costello, Doyle, Kennedy, Kenny, Lewis, Moore, St. John, Wade. Stop by any steel job in Manhattan and you will hear these same names today. They belong now to the grandsons and great-grandsons of the earlier Newfoundlander ironworkers. Most of these younger men have never seen Conception Bay, having been born and raised in Park Slope or Bay Ridge or in the suburbs around New York. Once their fathers and grandfathers left Newfoundland, they never really came back. This was just another of Newfoundland’s catches. The island was a kind of paradise. But the only way to live here was to go away.

  Conception Harbour, Newfoundland.

  (Photo by the author)

  JIGGING AND SWILING

  John Cabot, the Spanish-born English explorer, was among the first Europeans to see the rocky fogbound island when he sailed across the Atlantic in 1497. He was hoping to find a western route to Asia. What he discovered instead, and promptly claimed for England, was this “newe founde lande.” Though the island looked austere and desolate from his ship, he immediately noted the attraction that would draw people here for the next several centuries. “The sea is swarming with fish,” Cabot reportedly claimed on his return, “which can be taken not only with the net, but in baskets let down with a stone.” The fish were cod, and by the middle of sixteenth century fleets from France, Portugal, and Britain were making frequent summer trips to the Grand Banks near Newfoundland to scoop them up. While the shoals off Newfoundland became the world’s premiere fishery, the island itself served mainly as a convenient place to dry the fish. Nobody seemed to seriously entertain the idea of living there.

  The first true immigrants
to Newfoundland came from the British Isles near the end of the eighteenth century. Some of them came from rural England, but the great majority came from the southeastern counties of Ireland. They were a seafaring people who probably arrived as crewmen on English fishing vessels, then remained out of some brave and foolish notion they could scrape a living out of these rocky harbors and exquisitely cold waters. They settled the outlying coves around St. John’s, the “outports,” as they are still called, on the Avalon Peninsula. Among these early outports was Cat’s Cove, probably named after a cougar who lived in the area. In 1870, the people of Cat’s Cove changed the name of their small outport to Conception Harbour.

  It’s an indication of the hardship these people must have come from that this—this rock—seemed to offer something more promising. Farming wasn’t really an option in Newfoundland. The land was too rocky, the soil too shallow, and the growing season too brief to cultivate anything more elaborate than a vegetable garden. The only way to earn a living here was by fishing.

  The cod fishery was summer and autumn work, from June to October. The men would sail out to the Grand Banks in schooners, then lower themselves to the water in small dories, two men per boat, and “jig” for fish with a small lead ball and hook. They would jig until the dory was filled with as much fish as it could hold. Then it was a matter of gingerly making the trip back through the swells to the schooner without sinking—assuming the fishermen could find the schooner. Getting lost in a squall was easy. Fog, too, was a constant danger. Every time a man went out to the Grand Banks, he stood a good chance of never coming home.