High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World's Greatest Skyline Page 24

  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 ingredients: 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 everything 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.”

  “Well, it isn’t. It’s twenty-nine feet, ten and a half inches.”

  “You measured it?”

  “Yeah, we measured it. It’s an inch and a half in compliance. You want to measure yourself, be my guest.”

  Mike squinted up at the beam skeptically. He was a heavyset man and no ironworker. He scratched his beard like he was thinking about it.

  “Twenty-nine feet, ten and a half inches. All right, then.”

  “Every day the safety thing is a headache,” said Joe after Mike had departed. “Everything is changing. The men don’t like it, but that’s the way it is, and they gotta get with it or go.”

  The “safety thing” was a new set of revised OSHA regulations known officially as the Subpart R Steel Erection Standard. Subpart R dictated how ironworkers were to rig steel, how they were to land it on the derrick floor, how they were to connect it in the air. Most significantly, as far as the ironworkers were concerned, Subpart R mandated that ironworkers use fall protection whenever they worked a considerable distance above the ground or the floor below. That is, they had to “tie off” by wearing a harness attached by cable to a nearby beam. Most ironworkers would have to tie off when working more than 15 feet above the derrick floor or the ground. Connectors would have to tie off at 30 feet.

  Tying off was not a new practice, but contractors had always been pretty lax about enforcing it. That was about to change. Insurance companies would not carry contractors with high accident rates. Even contractors with good safety records would suffer premium boosts if a single employee got injured on one of their jobs. “I tell the guys, don’t think for one second they’re worried about your health,” said Joe Kennedy. “It’s all about dollars and cents.”

  The majority of the ironworkers loathed the practice of tying off. This was one of those mysteries that the good people of OSHA simply did not understand. OSHA had probably saved hundreds of ironworkers’ lives and prevented many more injuries since President Nixon signed the agency into law in 1970. Now, with Subpart R, they had crafted and honed a package that would, by their analysis, reduce fatalities from an average of 35 or 40 a year to about 5 a year, while cutting the number of injuries in half. The regulations had been conceived to save ironworkers. But rather than applaud them, what did the ironworkers do? They got angry. “It is odd,” Richard Mendelson, area director for OSHA, conceded. “The ironworkers are one of the few trades that argue against compliance.”

  Obviously, nobody wanted to get hurt or killed, and the majority of the OSHA regulations made good sense to the ironworkers. The phase-in of slip-resistant steel surfaces and the removal of lugs and other tripping hazards from steel beams were examples of measures the ironworkers backed. They likewise supported laws that forced contractors to hang safety nets under bridges and along the sides of buildings. But tying off was different. Many ironworkers considered the practice an imposition, at best, and very likely counterproductive. Connectors, most audibly, tended to believe it made their work more dangerous by restricting movement. Nearly every connector had been in a situation where a quick duck or leap had saved him from a wild piece of steel. Yes, the safety harness might protect them if they were knocked off, but they preferred to avoid getting hit in the first place. “I’ll wear the harness if they make me,” said Jerry Soberanes. “But there’s no way I’m tying it to anything.”

  In the end, whether the new rules saved lives or cost lives wasn’t the whole issue to the ironworkers. Every work site would be staffed—it was already happening—with several full-time safety inspectors like Mike, whose entire job was to watch them, spy on them, and reprimand them for infractions. For men who were used to doing things their way, autonomously, this was galling. “Fuck the insurance companies,” said a middle-aged veteran plumber-up one afternoon as he sat in his usual lunch spot on the sidewalk. “We’ll get up a few floors, and then we’ll do whatever we want.”

  KEITH AND MARVIN

  “Yo, get in the truck and back it up, ya bonehead!”

  The truck driver, a small bald French Canadian who had driven four hundred miles to deliver a load of steel and get abused by Keith Brown, grinned sheepishly and stepped up into the cab of his truck. On 60th Street, Keith took a last drag of his French Canadian cigarette—a cigarette from a pack, as it happened, provided to him several minutes earlier by the truck driver in the futile hope of placating Keith—and threw it to the ground, as if the cigarette suddenly disgusted him, as if the ground itself rubbed him the wrong way.

  Tying off.

  (Photo by Michael Doolittle)

  “Hey, moron,” he called to a young apprentice loitering near the back of the truck. “Quit scratching yourself like a retard and stop traffic so this shit-for-brains can back his rig out.” The apprentice ran out into the street, nearly getting clipped by a taxi.

  “Now look at this idiot,” muttered Keith. “He’s gonna get himself killed down here on the fuckin’ street?” He pulled another cigarette out of his pack. He stuck it in his mouth and struck a match.

  If there was anyone to light a fire under a slow job it was Keith Brown, the walking boss, recently arrived at Columbus Circle in the August heat, bringing with him his impatience, his shouting and cursing, his disgust for the lazy and the incompetent, for no-good apprentices and French Canadian truck drivers. He split his time between overseeing the raising gangs up top and coordinating the delivery of steel down on the street, stalking back and forth with a cigarette in his mouth and a scowl on his face. Folded lengthwise in his back pocket was a schedule of truck arrivals. Now and then Keith would pull the schedule out, glance at it, and shove it back into his pocket. The secret of the schedule was that it was meaningless. Trucks routinely showed up a day early or a day late. A truck due tomorrow would arrive today and two trucks due today would not arrive at all. It was enough to make a relaxed man crazy, and Keith Brown was far from a relaxed man. He was, as he himself admitted, wired for movement, for combustion. When he removed his hard hat to air his scalp, as he often did, he revealed a small fuzzy bald spot on the crown of his head. It did not look so much like the hair had fallen out. It looked as if it had been singed.

  If Keith Brown was a first class ball-buster, he was also, as apprentices and even some truck drivers came to realize, a decent guy—a “real ironworker,” as the journeymen said of him, which is about the highest compliment one ironworker can pay another. None of these tributes made Keith exactly cuddly. And as soon as you dismissed his ranting as humorous—it was humorous—he reminded you that, like most humor, his rose out of deep convictions. He really did hate these kids sometimes. “Don’t you fuckin’ ruin my business, you and the rest of you lousy apprentice shits,” he liked to shout at them. “You’re not gonna ruin this business if I can stop it.” In his quieter moments, Keith conceded that it was probably already too late. “Oh, God, I used to love this business. Now, it’s just a job. I’m just glad I’m on my way out.”

  Keith Brown was a Mohawk by blood, a New Yorker by birth and attitude. He spent his early childhood in an apartment on State Street in the old Mohawk neighborhood in Brooklyn, while his father worked on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. The family moved from Brooklyn to the suburbs of New Jersey as soon as the bridge was finished.

  As a boy, Keith had only the vaguest sense of what ironworkers did. Sometimes his father came home with broken bones and sometimes he came home drunk—this was the sum total of Keith’s knowledge of his father’s occupation, and neither part held much appeal. “Don’t worry about me drinking,” he assured his mother after taking a sip of beer. “This tastes like shit.” To please his mother, Keith tried college. He lasted three days. “I told you he was a moron,” his fathe
r said. “Let’s hope he’s tough.” Keith followed his father into ironwork.

  Keith’s father was a hard man. When Keith fell into the hole on one of his first jobs, a drop of about 30 feet that ended, fortunately, in a pile of sand, he wiped the sand from his eyes and looked up to see his father glaring down at him from above. “You no good bastard, get up here!” his father shouted. “You’re embarrassing me.” Then there was that time his father swung a maul at a lintel and missed, landing the blow on Keith’s kneecap. It made a pop so loud men could hear it on the other side of the building. “Ah, get up, you sissy,” scolded his father when Keith fell back in pain. “That didn’t hurt.”

  Keith’s father may have shouted louder than some of the ironworkers of his generation, and he may have been tougher on his son, but not by much. A lot of the old timers handled their novice sons much as they handled steel, with force and diligence. They woke them up at four in the morning and got them to the job site an hour early, because that was the ironworkers’ way. Some made their sons wear connecting belts all day long so they’d get used to the weight of the clanging tools, so they’d turn into good connectors and make their fathers proud. When their sons screwed up, the fathers shouted, and when their sons got hurt, they told them to shake off the pain and get back to work.