High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World's Greatest Skyline Page 3

  The rest of the day was a blurry nightmare of pain and upset. From a gurney in the hospital Brett called his parents. His mother answered. The moment she heard his voice, she began to cry. “It was horrible…horrible,” Brett would recall a year later. He then repeated the news to his father.

  That evening, with his parents at his side, Brett digested the preliminary test results. He had a collapsed lung, three crushed vertebrae, and a fractured spine. The worst damage was to his left foot, still too numb to feel. Apparently, the foot had taken the brunt of the fall. The bones were splintered, one of them spearing his ankle joint, and bone fragments were scattered throughout his foot. Over the next two years, Brett would undergo several operations to repair the foot. He would undergo hundreds of hours of physical therapy for his leg and back, then psychological therapy to deal with the trauma of having his young life permanently altered.

  Ironworkers’ injuries don’t usually make the newspapers. The Sunday after Brett Conklin fell, though, a small item about his accident appeared in the New York Times. The reporter had visited Smith’s, an ironworkers’ watering hole on Eighth Avenue, on the very evening of the accident. There he’d found several ironworkers drinking and talking about it. “I looked up and saw him climbing the column,” one of the ironworkers told the reporter. “I looked up again and saw him coming down.”

  “It was his own fault,” said another. “It was too wet and he shouldn’t have been messing around. The kid learned the hard way.”

  According to the article, Brett had tried an “old ironworker’s trick” of sliding down a column headfirst. He’d been goofing around—“skylarking,” in ironworker parlance—when he lost control. “He slipped, did a flip in the air and landed two floors below,” wrote the reporter. “He missed falling through a hole in the steel, and death, by two feet.”

  By the end of the following Monday, virtually every ironworker in New York had either read the item or heard about it. Most found it infuriating and implausible. A certain amount of skylarking was probably inevitable, but anything that put a man in harm’s way was looked upon severely by ironworkers. The implication that Brett had attempted a death-defying stunt on a damp day when he was almost guaranteed to fall seemed ludicrous.

  No one knew exactly why or how Brett fell. Not even Brett knew. He wished, he once admitted, that the whole event had been videotaped, so he could watch it over and over and over again. He wanted to figure out what happened—how one moment he had been reaching up, the next falling upside-down toward the deck. As for the ironworkers in the bar, it was perhaps comforting to place blame on the injured man, to assume that he did something to cause his own injury. It meant you had control over your own destiny. Poor bastard…but it would never happen to me.

  The truth was that bad things happened all the time, and not for any good reason, and they happened not just to the reckless and the stupid, but to the smartest, the quickest, the most experienced. Within six months of Brett’s fall, Frank Lane, the superintendent, a man who looked like he could handle pretty much anything, had his legs pinned under a load of steel in Atlantic City, crippling him. Joe Lewis fell through a plank on a building on 59th Street and Sixth Avenue, destroying the nerves in his right arm and ending his ironworking career. Big Ben, the connector with cancer, got cured and came back to work. A few weeks later, a beam rolled over onto his leg and broke it.

  FALLING

  Between 35 and 50 ironworkers die on the job in America every year. This is perhaps not a resounding number, given a workforce of approximately 50,000, but it’s high enough to make it one of the most lethal jobs, per capita, in the country. (Only timber cutting and fishing rate as more lethal in a 1998 table compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.) As for serious nonfatal accidents—that is, serious enough to put a man out of work for a period of time but not serious enough to kill him—the Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA) estimates that American ironworkers sustain about 2,300 per year. This estimate is probably low. As OSHA itself has conceded, nonfatal injuries are difficult to track, since contractors are not legally obligated to report them. One good indication of the relative danger of the job is the fact that, nationally, employers pay an average of $41.24 in workers compensation per $100 of payroll for ironworkers, one of the highest premiums of any occupation in the country.

  There are many ways for an ironworker to become injured. He can get hit by a piece of swinging steel or a dropped tool. He can inadvertently lop off his finger between two pieces of steel. He can lose his leg under a load. But the easiest way is by falling. Falling is the leitmotif of an ironworker’s life. This is not to say he’s doomed to fall—chances are he won’t—but falling is a possibility that confronts him every time he steps out onto a beam or shinnies up a column. Falling is the thing he is always striving not to do, and the moment he stops striving not to do it, he puts himself in danger. Gravity lies in wait. All it needs is a false step, an ankle that turns in, a slight stumble, an instant of an imbalance or idiocy or just plain spaciness. Falls account for 75 percent of ironworker fatalities.

  Other than skydivers, no group of humans has had more experience of falling from elevation than ironworkers. In New York City alone, hundred of ironworkers have fallen to their deaths and thousands more have fallen and lived. Thanks to reforms instituted by insurance companies and OSHA, ironworkers are much less likely to fall now than they were even twenty years ago. And those falls that occur are likely to be shorter and more survivable than the falls of previous eras. Still, ironworkers fall, and short falls are plenty dangerous. A study conducted in 2000 by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) examined 91 fatal falls by workers, including, but not limited to, ironworkers. Half the fatalities occurred in falls under 30 feet. Nineteen fatalities—over a fifth—occurred in falls under 15 feet.

  When a man falls from an earthly structure, even when he falls a considerable distance, the entire event lasts no more than a few seconds. A 50-foot fall will be over in about one and a half seconds. One Mississippi Two Missi—and it’s done. Exactly how fast a man falls depends on a number of factors, including the position of his body, the clothing he wears, and how the wind is blowing that day. No matter how fast he falls, the rate of his acceleration will be 32 feet per second for every second of descent. He starts slowly, then speeds up very rapidly. Eventually, the gravitational force pulling him down will be matched by the friction of the air he is falling through, and then he will stop accelerating and maintain a fixed speed the rest of the way down. This speed is his terminal velocity—somewhere between 120 and 140 miles an hour. Unless it’s a very long fall, the man will hit ground well before he reaches terminal velocity.

  The important part of any fall, the part that can decide whether a man lives or dies, is that slender fraction of a second when there is still opportunity for a falling man to act, when his reflexes may work faster than his speed of descent and he may try to save himself by grabbing hold of something on the way down. They all try and many, amazingly, succeed. Good ironworkers are agile as cats; some are just as lucky.

  In the late 1920s, an ironworker named Slim Cooper was driving a rivet on the 36th floor of the Grand Central Building on Park Avenue when the plank he was standing on gave way. Nowadays, floors are filled in as the building rises, so that if a man falls through the derrick floor he’ll usually land on the floor below. But in the 1920s, buildings were open shafts for many stories below the working floors, making a fall inside every bit as lethal as a fall outside. Fortunately for Slim Cooper, a pair of parallel planks happened to lie across the beams directly below, on the 35th floor. As Slim plunged through the narrow breach between them, he flung his arms out. The boards caught him under each arm and held him there, his feet swaying over the open shaft until his gang could come and rescue him. “I meant to quit after that,” Slim Cooper said later, “but I never did.”

  One man gets lucky, another gets unlucky. Seven men fell to their deaths during th
e construction of the Williamsburg Bridge at the start of the twentieth century. The last two of these, Harmon Hansen and Adolph Weber, fell in July of 1903. They were a hundred feet over land on the Manhattan side of the bridge when a wooden derrick they were using broke and plunged to the cobblestone street. In this case, their instinct to grab hold of something did them no good. They clutched the guy wire of the plunging derrick and it pulled them down with it. On the same bridge, two months later, a 25-year-old riveter named William Sizer was overcome by a dizzy spell and started to fall. He reached out and grabbed the nearest thing at hand, a keg of rivets. The keg came with him. Even as he began spinning head over heel, Sizer held onto the keg for dear life, letting go of it only an instant before slamming into the East River “headforemost,” as the New York Times put it in the next morning’s edition. A few moments later—headforemost—he popped back out of the water, bruised, bewildered, but very much alive. “I can hardly believe I fell from the bridge,” he told reporters as he lay in Bellevue Hospital recovering from his 130-foot dive.

  Why did William Sizer live while the seven before him died? One man falls 50 feet and walks away, another falls 10 and breaks his neck. In the late 1920s, Paul Rockhold fell from the 12th floor of an apartment building under construction on Riverside Drive. Around the fourth floor, he hit a plank of green wood and bounced, then went down another four floors and landed in a pile of debris. He spent eight months in a hospital but he lived. His explanation: “The devil wasn’t out that day.”

  “You never can tell,” an ironworker named Billy Beatty told a magazine writer in 1901. “I remember a man who was standing on a traveler [a kind of crane] up eighty-nine feet. The light of a line that was picking up a stick of timber swung over and took him off his feet, knocking them right from under him. But he came down square on those feet of his, let me tell you, after falling the whole eighty-nine, and the only harm it did him was to drive his hip up four inches. That was all.”

  Then there is the more recent story of an ironworker named Ray who fell back in the 1970s. Ray fractured his spine and was paralyzed for life. It was a hard fate, but at least he got a huge settlement from the insurance company. As his girlfriend was driving him to pick up the settlement check, another car cut them off. “His girlfriend slammed on the brakes, he went through the windshield and got killed,” recounted Joe Lewis, the Newfoundlander signalman who worked in Brett Conklin’s gang. “I mean, now that is bad luck.”

  The real question isn’t why Brett fell but, rather, by what grace of good fortune he flipped and landed on his feet, instead of his head. He lived. He was not a quadriplegic. He had a family who loved him and a girlfriend who would stick by him through the grim times to come. For all that had happened, he was, he knew, lucky.

  Among ironworkers the term for falling is “going into the hole.” The hole is the foundation of the building, the mud pit from which it sprang. By the time a building starts to rise, the hole has been covered in cement and filled with ductwork and wires. It has become, in other words, a basement. But for ironworkers it is always more than a basement. It is the hard spot down there, the place in the earth from which gravity asserts its pull. Going into the hole doesn’t require falling clear through to the foundation. It’s a term used to describe any substantial fall. Sometimes the hole is just another word for the grave.

  The largest hole in New York City in that winter of 2001 was about a mile north of Times Square, at the western rim of Columbus Circle. Since the mid-1950s, the site had been home to one of the most despised buildings in New York, an enormous white slab called the Coliseum. Now the Coliseum was gone, demolished, and in its place was a vast basin of dirt, 3.4 acres, 33 feet deep, 630 feet corner to corner. From this hole would rise a building as enormous, complex, and expensive as any the city had seen for decades. The twin-towered Time Warner Center would rise 750 feet and cost 1.7 billion dollars to build, the highest price tag for any building in the history of the city. Its 20 acres of tinted glass would enclose 21 million square feet of office, retail, and residential space, including the headquarters of the largest media conglomerate in the world, several television studios, a 251-room hotel, a 1,200-seat jazz hall, several suburban malls’ worth of shops and restaurants, and 198 “super-luxury” condos priced between 1.8 million and 27 million dollars. The building had all the earmarks of an instant New York icon. Such a building required a title, a legend, and a clever copywriter had provided one: “The Center of Everything.”

  On the morning of February 20, 2001, several hours before Brett Conklin fell, a raising gang of ironworkers arrived for their first look at the hole from which The Center of Everything was to rise. The six men gathered at the western edge of Columbus Circle and looked down into it, and all of them thought the same thing: That is one big hole. With the exception of the 55-year-old veteran signalman, Chett Barker, none of them had seen a hole like this. Most of them hadn’t been born when Chett got his first look, 31 years earlier, at the foundation for the World Trade Center. Nothing could compare to that, but this came close.

  One of the men in the gang that morning was a 32-year-old blue-eyed Mohawk Indian connector named Keith McComber. Keith McComber’s eyes weren’t just blue; they were startlingly blue, pale and liquid and fringed with long lashes that gave his otherwise rugged features a sensitive, soulful cast. They were the eyes of a leading man or a poet. One afternoon about 10 years earlier, somebody on the reservation had called him Bunny Eyes and the name stuck. Over the years, Bunny Eyes had been shortened to Bunny. Now if you mentioned Keith McComber, no ironworker had any idea whom you were talking about. But everybody knew Bunny.

  At lunch that first day, around the same time that Brett Conklin was arriving by ambulance at St. Vincent’s Hospital, Bunny and the rest of the raising gang—who had not yet heard news of the fall—lined up on stools at the Coliseum Bar and Grill, a narrow bar on 58th Street. A few cardboard shamrocks were taped to the wall behind the bar in anticipation of St. Patrick’s Day. Each had a name written on it and, beneath this, an inscription dedicating the shamrock to the Muscular Dystrophy Society. Bunny sipped his beer and eyed the shamrocks.

  “How much for one of those?” he asked the bartender.

  “One dollar.”

  “I’ll take one.”

  He paid his dollar and wrote his name, his real name, on the green cardboard: “From the heart of KEITH comes this shamrock.” The bartender taped it up over the bar with all the others. It never hurt to buy yourself some luck.

  TWO

  The Man On Top (1901)

  At the start of the twentieth century, the most remarkable hole in New York City was a 35-foot deep gash on 23rd Street, where old, meandering Broadway cut across the modern grid street of Fifth Avenue and formed the hypotenuse of a narrow right triangle. The wedge-shaped plot had been the home of a ticket booth for the Erie Railway and, before that, a bare sliver of grass known as Eno’s Triangle. Awkwardly shaped and minuscule—“a stingy piece of pie,” somebody once described it—it was about the last place on earth most people would have thought to build a 21-story skyscraper. But that is exactly what the construction firm of George A. Fuller, in collaboration with the architect Daniel H. Burnham, proposed to do in the summer of 1901.

  The steel-frame building that began to rise from the hole the following autumn was officially named the Fuller Building, but no one ever called it that. It was, and always would be, the Flatiron, so called for its resemblance to a nineteenth-century clothing iron. “For many reasons this building is unique,” a sales brochure informed prospective tenants. “It is the cumulative result of all that is known in the art of building, and is equipped with every conceivable convenience that human ingenuity could devise. From a structural standpoint, it is the strongest building ever erected.” It was also, much like the Time Warner Center 100 years later, the Center of Everything: “Situated in the very heart of New York City, its accessibility is exceptional: It is in close proximity to all the leading hotel
s, theaters, railroad stations, and ferries.”

  In fact, the Flatiron was located well north of the main business district of New York in 1901, but no matter: this would turn out to be one of its assets. No other tall buildings stood nearby to compete for height or attention. And attention is exactly what this building demanded. Curious and skeptical pedestrians paused and craned their necks to marvel at the strange steel sliver, and at the sight of its exterior walls going on nonsequentially, a few floors here, a few floors there, rather than from the bottom up, as walls had always gone. A decade after the first steel-frame skyscraper arrived in New York, the concept of walls as an afterthought was still difficult to grasp.

  A photograph taken of the building as it went up (dated 1901 but probably shot in the early spring of 1902) illustrates the new “curtain wall” technology perfectly. The building’s frame has reached the 15th floor in the photograph, giving it another six to go before topping out. Derricks poke out from the sides. Beams and struts lie in careful stacks on the sidewalk below, waiting to be hoisted. Stalk-like columns rise from the top. Most of the building is an open skeleton of dark oxidized steel, but along the bottom two floors and several middle floors white limestone panels clad the exterior, as thin and fragile-looking as bleached seashells.

  At first glance, the building in the photograph appears empty and quiet, frozen in Sunday morning stillness. Closer inspection, though, reveals a dozen or so white-suited masons scattered along a scaffold on the eighth floor. Still closer inspection reveals a lone dark figure hunched over a column at the top of the building, standing along its southern edge. His back is to the camera, so it’s difficult to infer much about this man on top, except that he is, in all likelihood, an ironworker: there’s not much chance he’d be standing so casually on the edge of the 15th floor if he weren’t. His name is probably Irish, or if not Irish then Scandinavian or German. “I never knew but one Italian iron man,” a veteran ironworker told a magazine writer in 1901, “but he was a good one.” He comes to this occupation from another line of work—few men, in 1901, set out to be ironworkers—but is still relatively young; old age is rarely achieved in a field where the average worker has a four percent chance of getting killed or permanently disabled every year that he works. His reward for his risk is about $4 a day and the awed expressions of men and women who pause on the street to look up and marvel at him.