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

  Fifteen months had passed since Jerry and Matt and Bunny and John and Chett showed up and looked into the enormous hole. Across the street, the south tower rose 24 stories over Columbus Circle. The lower floors were clad in glass façade, the upper floors still bare. The ironworkers had set 28,000 tons of steel. Jerry, as one of eight connectors, had personally set about 3,500 tons of it, give or take a few. Another year from now, Jerry and Matt would return to top out the building with a steel crown at 700 feet. For now, though, their work was nearly done.

  No one died. No one got badly hurt. There was that to be thankful for. On the other hand, the job hadn’t been much fun, either. Nothing like the great sport the raising gangs had anticipated coming in. The steel had sputtered in for so many months, and even when there was finally steel, getting it up in the air had been a painstaking process. The competition was a dud. “We blew everybody out of the water,” Kevin Scally bragged once, but he didn’t say it with any conviction. The truth, as Kevin admitted, was that the gangs could not compare themselves. For one thing, they worked too far apart from each other to keep track of each other’s progress. And there were other complicating factors. Matt and Jerry’s gang, for instance, had done a lot of heavy lifting for Johnny and Punchy’s since their tower crane happened to have a greater lifting capacity. Time spent lifting another gang’s steel was time spent not setting your own.

  The job put a sour taste in the men’s mouths for reasons that had nothing to do with sport or competition. For most of them, the Time Warner Center marked their first experience of the new world of ironwork: the rules, the oversight, the abridgements of autonomy. The lesson the ironworkers learned at Time Warner was that their work would be (presumably) safer, but that it would also be more regimented and considerably duller. Even Matt, who had been so zealous about connecting a year ago, had lost some of his enthusiasm for this job. “It’s become drudgery,” he admitted one day in early May. At least, now, the end of the drudgery was in sight. By the end of May, it was done.

  Jack Doyle returned once more to the site of the World Trade Center at the end of May. He arrived on the evening of May 28 to witness the removal of the last piece of the steel from the hole. The mayor was there, alongside a bugler and a brigade of bagpipers. The event was the opposite of a topping-out ceremony: they were here to pull out a piece of steel, not set one. They came to mourn, not celebrate.

  Jack came in his official capacity, as president of Local 40. But he also came as the young man from Conception Bay who’d showed up here long ago determined to make it to the top. As he walked down the ramp into the deep hole, he was flooded with déjà vu. He knew this hole. He’d been here before. “That was an eerie feeling for me,” he said. “I never thought that I would look at those walls again. We filled it up with steel, they filled it up with concrete—they covered it over. We put buildings all around. And now here I am walking back into square one after thirty-odd years. Just the same as if nothing was ever there.”

  Much had changed since 1968, of course—in the world at large and in the world, more specifically, of ironworkers. Most of the young ironworkers gathered in the hole with Jack that evening had never caught a rivet or pushed the bullstick of a derrick; never taken a ride on the ball of the crane or even, some of them, experienced the keen thrill of walking a beam high above the ground with nothing to keep you there but your own guts and balance. And as the work had changed, so had the ironworkers. Jack could see the change reflected in the faces of the men, 13 percent now African-American, another 5 percent Hispanic. Even a couple women had joined Local 40; neither had been seen around the hall for a while, but others, surely, would come. Jack was not a sentimental man. You could welcome some changes and you could object to others, but there was not a damn thing—short of standing in a hole in the ground under the spell of déjà vu—that you could do to halt the future.

  The last column stood under what had once been the south tower. It weighed 58 tons, one of the enormous pieces that Jack had grappled with 34 years earlier. As a crowd watched, an ironworker lit a torch and began to cut through the steel. Shortly before 8:30, under the glow of floodlights, a crane hooked the column and lifted it, laying it on the back of a flatbed waiting nearby. The workers shouted “U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” and “Union! Union! Union!” but nobody complained about jingoism or featherbedding, or any of the sins often laid on union tradesmen. The job had come in three months ahead of schedule and well under budget, an achievement that owed a lot to the hard work of hard hats. “The construction workers who have dedicated themselves to this effort are on the verge of completing an enormous job, and in many ways this is their night to reflect and remember,” said Mayor Bloomberg. Afterward, as the ironworkers and other construction personnel filed up the ramp, saluted by firemen and police, the mayor shook their hands, one by one.

  It was a moment of high praise for the ironworkers and other laborers who worked at Ground Zero, but it would not last. Gradually, maybe inevitably, the prediction that Kevin Scally had made a few days after 9/11—We’ll be popular for a while, and then we’re gonna disappear—came to pass. The new status of the ironworkers and other tradesmen subsided; the attention faded. The fact that the press and public seemed to forget their contribution so easily upset some of the men, but most took it in stride. “God knows what we did down there,” said Mickey Tracy. “That’s good enough for me.”

  Mike Emerson returned to his family. He and Danny Doyle, the foreman with whom he’d come down from Columbus Circle on September 12, went on to another job together, along with several other men they’d worked closely with at Ground Zero. They had spent as much time down there as anyone; unlike the firemen and policemen, who generally worked leapfrog shifts, three days on, three days off, the ironworkers worked straight shifts, seven days on, no days off. It said something about the mentality of ironworkers that a year after 9/11, while 500 firemen were claiming disability due to smoke inhalation and psychological trauma, not a single ironworker had made such a claim. “We could try,” said Mike. “It’s just, I don’t think anyone would listen to us.”

  Joe Lewis shuttled back and forth between the row house in Brooklyn and his home in Conception Harbour that summer. He talked often about getting back to work, but the doctors’ prognosis of the nerve damage in his arm was not encouraging, so he made the best of it, spending as much time in Newfoundland as he could between the obligatory appointments with doctors and lawyers. He continued to play music whenever the opportunity arose, and what he could not play, he sang.

  Newfoundland turned out to be not quite as distant from the event of September 11 as one might have supposed. Hundreds of overseas flights had been grounded there when American airspace closed in the wake of the terrorist attack. Newfoundlanders took in the stranded passengers and fed them for several days, showering the wayfarers with hospitality. On his last trip to Newfoundland, Joe noticed that the ferry to Argentia was packed with foreigners. People who had been stranded in Newfoundland were returning as tourists to revisit the place they’d fallen in love with. What cod could not provide—a decent economy—perhaps tourists could.

  Keith McComber—Bunny Eyes—dropped out of ironwork for a time after leaving the Time Warner job. He passed a few months at a rustic Mohawk hunting lodge in the woods a hundred miles north of Kahnawake, then returned to New York that winter. He became a foreman of his own raising gang, a natural step for a connector. He put on a little weight, also a natural step for a man who quits the action of connecting for the more sedentary life of pushing. He seemed entirely content with where he’d landed.

  Many of the men who had worked at Columbus Circle moved due east that summer to begin building an enormous skyscraper on 59th Street and Lexington Avenue. It was another Bovis job, and Joe Kennedy was superintendent. He brought over three of the raising gangs from Columbus Circle to work under the three cranes. This new building—it would become home to Bloomberg Media, the company founded by the city’s billionaire mayor—
shared a number of important features with Time Warner Center. It began as another huge hole, one of the biggest in the city, and combined a steel podium with reinforced concrete towers.

  The safety measures that had been applied so vigorously at Columbus Circle turned out to be even stricter here, and the ironworkers balked. One afternoon, a connector stepped off a column onto the hook of the crane and swung out like Tarzan over the hole, then rode the hook down into it. It was an exhilarating sight, not because it looked like fun—though it did—but because it was about the most outrageously illicit thing an ironworker could do in 2002, and he did it in broad daylight in front of dozens of people. The task of reprimanding the connector fell to Keith Brown, who had recently come over to Lexington Avenue to serve (with Marvin Davis, of course) as walking boss. It gave Keith no pleasure to tell the connector that if he ever rode a hook again he’d be fired on the spot.

  As it happened, cattycorner to the Bloomberg Media building, on the ground floor of an old red brick walk-up at Third Avenue and 59th Street, was a bright and expensive sandwich shop. The floors were slate, the walls lime green, the patrons well dressed in white-collar garb. The ironworkers never went there for lunch, preferring the plainer, more affordable deli on the other side of the building, but a hundred years earlier the place had crawled with ironworkers. It was Lynch’s saloon, Sam Parks’ old haunt—the very spot where Parks and his underlings drank and plotted and “entertained” their rivals. No sign of that sawdust saloon remained in the overpriced sandwich shop. Too much had changed. Sam Parks was dead, vanished, removed one spring morning early in the last century to parts unknown. But he was not gone entirely. A wisp of his reckless, scrappy spirit had been released into the atmosphere by the smoke of the burning towers. It was visible down there in the hole with Jack Doyle in the smoke of the torch cutting the final column, and now, through the windows of this sandwich shop on 59th Street, in the smoke of Matt’s cigarette as he walked a beam 80 feet over Third Avenue, and in the clouds rushing across the blue sky as a chunk of steel floated under them, into the outstretched hands of Kevin Scally and Joe Emerson.

  Whatever rose downtown could not be what was there before. The Great American Steel Skyscraper had been forever demoted from an icon of strength to a symbol of vulnerability. But it could stand for an idea every bit as compelling as what the old towers stood for: Defiance. It would take a certain amount of defiance to plan and inhabit a skyscraper on the site where two had been turned to rubble, and it would take defiance to build it. How much structural steel it would take—well, that remained to be seen. With any justice, the answer would be many thousands of tons, all of it hoisted and bolted in the sky by ironworkers. They would shove it, prod it, whack it, ream it, kick it, shove it some more, swear at it, straddle it, pound it mercilessly, and then rivet it or weld it or bolt it up and go home. On a good day.

  SOURCES

  CHAPTER 1: SOME LUCK

  Brett’s fall:

  New York Times: February 25, 2001; “Iron in the Blood, Misfortune on the Mind.”

  Ironworker injuries:

  “Insurance: Workers’ Comp Rates Ready to Take Off.” ENR. August 30, 2002.

  U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Worker Deaths By Falls: A Summary of Surveillance Findings and Investigative Case Reports. September 2000.

  U.S. Department of Labor. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Compensation and Working Conditions. Spring 2000.

  U.S. Department of Labor. Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Federal Register/Vol. 63, No. 156. August 13, 1998.

  U.S. Department of Labor. Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Federal Register/Vol. 66, No. 12. January 18, 2001.

  Men who fell:

  Norris, Margaret. Heroes and Hazards. 1932.

  Thomas, Lowell. Men of Danger. 1936.

  New York Times:

  July 16, 1903; “Workmen Fall…”

  September 10, 1903; “Fell From Bridge; Lives.”

  Childe, Cromwell. “The Structural Iron Workers.” Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly. July 1901.

  CHAPTER 2: THE MAN ON TOP (1901)

  Early history of skyscrapers:

  “The Attractiveness of M. Eiffel’s Proposed Tower.” Scientific American. August 21, 1886.

  Birkmire, William H. The Planning and Construction of High Office Buildings. 1898.

  Bossom, Alfred C. Building to the Skies: The Romance of the Skyscraper. 1934.

  Brochure Advertising Retail Space (re: Flatiron). 1902.

  Burrows, Edwin G. and Mike Wallace. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. 1999.

  Douglas, George H. Skyscrapers: A Social History of the Very Tall Building in America. 1996.

  Freitag, Joseph Kendall. Architectural Engineering: With Especial Reference to High Building Construction, Including Many Examples of Prominent Office Buildings. 1906.

  Horowitz, Louis J. and Boyden Sparks. Towers of New York. 1937.

  James, Henry. The American Scene. 1907.

  Landau, Sarah Bradford and Carl W. Condit. Rise of the New York Skyscraper, 1865–1913. 1996.

  New York Times:

  July 14, 1895; “Limit of High Buildings.”

  September 27, 1896; “Fatalities to Workmen.”

  Saliga, Pauline A. The Sky’s the Limit: A Century of Chicago Skyscrapers. 1990.

  Shultz, Earle and Walter Simmons. Offices in the Sky. 1959.

  Starrett, Paul. Changing the Skyline: An Autobiography. 1938.

  Starrett, W. A. Skyscrapers and the Men Who Build Them. 1928.

  Union History Company. History of Architecture and the Building Trades of Greater New York. 1899.

  Early bridges:

  Cooper, Theodore. American Railroad Bridges. 1898.

  Curtis-Clarke, Thomas. An Account of the Iron Railway Bridge Across the Mississippi River at Quincy, Illinois. 1869.

  Curtis-Clarke, Thomas. “European and American Bridge Building Practice.” The Engineering Magazine. 1901.

  Detroit Bridge & Iron Works. Memoir of the Iron Bridge Over the Missouri River, at St. Joseph, MO, Built in 1871-2-3.

  Kemp, Emory L. “The Fabric of Historic Bridges.” The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archeology. 1989.

  MacQueen, P. “Bridges and Bridge Builders.” Cosmopolitan, A Monthly Illustrated Magazine. Vol. 13, 1892.

  McCullough, David. The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge. 1972.

  Passfield, Robert W. “The Turcot Riveted Arch-Truss Bridge.” The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archeology. 1997.

  Vose, George L. “Safety in Railroad Travel.” The North American Review. October 1882.

  Early ironworkers:

  The Bridgemen’s Magazine. 1901–1903 (all issues).

  Childe, Cromwell. “The Structural Workers.” Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly. July 1901.

  Grant, Luke (for the United States Commission on Industrial Relations). The National Erectors’ Association and The International Association of Bridge and Structural Ironworkers. 1915.

  Moffett, Cleveland. Careers of Danger and Daring. 1913.

  Poole, Ernest. “Cowboys of the Skies.” Everybody’s Magazine. November 1908.

  CHAPTER 3: THE NEW WORLD

  Drinking:

  Sonnenstuhl, William J. Working Sober: The Transformation of an Occupational Drinking Culture. 1996.

  Workforce statistics:

  Shifflett, Crandall. Almanac of American Life: Victorian America 1876–1913. 1996.

  Caplow, Hicks, and Wattenberg. The First Measured Century: An Illustrated Guide to Trends in America, 1900–2000. 2000.

  Definition of skyscraper:

  Tallmadge, Thomas E. (ed.). The Origin of the Skyscraper: Report of the Committee Appointed by the Trustees of the Estate of Marshal Field for the Examination of the Structure of the Home Insurance Building. 1939.

  CHAPTER 4: THE WALKING DELEGATE (1903)

  Sam Parks [The narrative of Parks’ rise and fall is mainly drawn
from approximately 100 newspaper articles published between April 1903 and May 1904]:

  Commercial Advertiser

  New York Daily News

  New-York Daily Tribune

  New York Herald

  New York Post

  New York Press

  New York Times

  The Sun

  More Sam Parks:

  Baker, Ray Stannard. “The Trust’s New Tool—The Labor Boss.” McClure’s Magazine. November 1903.

  The Bridgemen’s Magazine. 1901–1904 (all issues).

  Clarkin, Franklin. “The Daily Walk of the Walking Delegate.” The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine. December 1903.

  International Association of Bridge, Structural and Ornamental Iron Workers. A History of the Iron Workers Union. 1996.

  Lardner, James and Thomas Reppetto. NYPD: A City and Its Police. 2000.

  Lewis, Henry Harrison. “Sam Parks: Grafter and Blackmailer.” Harper’s Weekly. October 17, 1903.

  Scott, Leroy. The Walking Delegate. 1905.

  Starrett, W.A. Skyscrapers and the Men who Build Them. 1928.

  CHAPTER 5: MONDAYS (2001)

  Ironwork:

  Cherry, Mike. On High Steel: The Education of an Ironworker. 1974.

  Spacing out:

  Moffett, Cleveland. Careers of Danger and Daring. 1913.

  New York Times: September 29, 1900; “Fell 85 Feet…”

  Thomas, Lowell. Men of Danger. 1936.

  CHAPTER 6: KAHNAWAKE

  Early history of Kahnawake Mohawks:

  Blanchard, David S. Kahnawake: A Historical Sketch. 1980.

  The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume III. 1908.

  Snow, Dean R. The Iroquois. 1994.

  Quebec Bridge: