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

  Steel had been around almost as long as iron. The Oxford English Dictionary cites a reference to steel—“style”—in Beowulf, from the year 725. Chaucer used the word, which he wrote as “steell,” in 1380, though it’s not clear that his steell was the same thing as our steel. The word generally connoted a superior form of wrought iron into which some carbon had seeped during the smelting process to give the iron more hardness. Steel’s carbon content, about 1.5 percent, is higher than wrought iron’s but lower than cast iron’s.

  Most early structural steel was crucible steel, a laboriously manufactured high-carbon version. James Buchanan Eads insisted on crucible steel in parts of his great bridge over the Mississippi River at St. Louis, completed in 1874. Eads’s steel supplier was the Keystone Bridge Company, a subsidiary of Andrew Carnegie’s burgeoning empire. Carnegie still had doubts about the future of the product that would transform him from a rich Pittsburgh businessman into one of the wealthiest men in the world. But in 1868, he took a trip to Britain and witnessed a demonstration of a new invention called a Bessemer Converter. The trick to economically turning molten “pig” iron into steel, an Englishman named Henry Bessemer had discovered, was to blow air through it as it heated. The air burned off excess carbon 10 times faster than any previous method and used less fuel to do it. For the first time in history, steel could be manufactured quickly, cheaply, and in vast quantities. Carnegie needed no more convincing.

  Steel was slow to win acceptance as a sound or practical structural material; early on it was used mainly for rails on railroad tracks. But gradually engineers came to recognize its superiority to both wrought and cast iron. Steel combined the best of both metals—the flexibility of wrought iron and the brute bearing strength of cast iron—and was at least 20 percent stronger than either. New methods of production would soon make it a good deal stronger.

  Like iron, steel first proved itself on bridges. The first all-steel bridge went up in 1879 in Glasgow, Missouri. That same year, Washington Roebling changed the specifications for the floor beams and trusses of the Brooklyn Bridge from wrought iron to steel. (Ten years earlier, his father, John Roebling, had decided to use steel in the bridge’s suspension cables.) Steel’s migration from bridges to buildings was a simple step, pushed by the hand of Andrew Carnegie. The market for steel rails was drying up in the late nineteenth century. Carnegie, with his extraordinary nose for progress, anticipated skyscrapers as a new market for his Bessemer Converters before most people had any idea what a skyscraper was.

  William LeBaron Jenney once again played the role of pioneer. His plan for the Home Insurance Building originally called for a structure of cast-iron columns and wrought-iron beams. But after ground broke on May 1, 1884, Jenney received a letter from Carnegie, Phipps & Co. inviting him to try its new steel beams. Jenney agreed to place steel in the top three floors, marking the first use of structural steel in architecture. When the Home Insurance Building topped out in the winter of 1885, the steel skeleton-frame skyscraper—all nine stories of it—was born.

  CIRCUS ACTS

  As iron and steel came of age on nineteenth-century bridges, so too did the trade of ironwork. Long before the men who practiced it called themselves ironworkers, they were “bridgemen,” and bridgemen they remained long after they turned their skills from skeleton-girder bridges to steel-frame buildings. The two types of structure were so similar that the skills and constitution a man required to build one applied equally well to building the other.

  Early bridgemen lived hard itinerant lives. The bridges they built were often in the middle of nowhere, or near some no-luck town looking to the railroad for salvation. They camped at the site or, if they were fortunate, found a room in a nearby boarding house. The work itself was difficult and perilous, but also sometimes thrilling. From these remote towns the bridgemen frequently picked up starry-eyed farm boys as new recruits. “Here is how we get ’em,” an engineer explained some years later. “A big railroad bridge is being built over a river. The boy from the farm comes to watch it. He sees the men climbing out over the water, using ropes for staircases, taking all kinds of daredevil risks. And pretty soon his jaws fall open, and he says to himself that this here game beats the circus all to hollow…. He watches his chance; he gets out there himself, learns how to tie ropes and sit on air. In a few months, he is one of the gang. And then good-bye to the farm. It’s the roving life after that, from Maine to the Rockies.”

  The bridges were usually prefabricated in shops, then shipped in sections to the site for assembly. The bridgemen fastened the sections by pounding long iron “pins” through matched eyeholes, then bolting them tight. It was called the “pin-connection method” or simply “the American method,” and with it American bridgemen could raise a bridge faster than anyone on earth, often within a matter of days. Speed mattered. It mattered because the railway was spreading over the country like wildfire, making the demand for bridges relentless. It mattered, too, because truss bridges were generally erected over rivers. A temporary wooden scaffold, or “falsework,” would be driven into the river’s bed to take the weight of the iron until the bridge’s superstructure was assembled and self-supporting. Compared to the lazy old rivers of England, America’s waterways tended toward the violent and the unpredictable. Bridgemen lived in constant fear of ice flows or “freshets” suddenly gushing down from mountain melts and whisking away the falsework and the bridge and, potentially, the bridgemen themselves.

  A few of the iron spans these early bridgemen built remain aloft, crossing over Laughery Creek near Aurora, Indiana, and over the McKenzie River near Springfield, Oregon, and over the Susquehanna River in Ouaquaga, New York, and elsewhere. The great majority are gone, though, made obsolete by steel and concrete and the decline of the railroad. Records of early iron bridges seldom mention the bridgemen; they give an impression, almost, of bridges erecting themselves. But at least one engineer’s account of an iron bridge, built in the spring of 1873 over the Missouri River (at St. Joseph), suggests the urgency and danger nineteenth-century bridgemen encountered.

  It was now April 20. Bad weather almost constantly, the river gradually rising to its June flood—the dangers daily increasing rather than diminishing, and the hardest span of all yet to raise….

  Two sets of falsework had already been swept away by flooding. As soon as the third falsework was complete, the bridgemen hurried to raise the iron:

  It was all transported from shore, a distance of about eight hundred feet, and hoisted into place and coupled in about thirty-six working hours. The sight of the turbulent water surging and boiling around the piles below, like a fierce monster hungry for its prey, was eminently suggestive, and every man worked with a will, and the result was that the span was put in place quicker than any similar piece of work was ever done before. Everyone drew a long breath of relief when it was finally pronounced safe.

  Not all early bridgemen toiled in anonymity. The Brooklyn Bridge, because it was the longest and highest bridge ever built, and because it linked the two largest cities in the country, was a frequent subject of newspaper and magazine coverage during its construction. Most of the reports focused on the work of the chief engineer or the politicians and financiers behind the bridge, but the bridgemen, too, made occasional appearances in the press. As a rule, they earned these appearances by dying in a manner the papers deemed newsworthy.

  Exactly how many men died while building the Brooklyn Bridge is uncertain (David McCullough, author of the definitive history of the bridge, estimates between 30 and 40) but there is no question the job was very dangerous. Much of the danger belonged to the caisson diggers, the laborers who descended into dank, dark pressurized chambers beneath the riverbed to excavate the foundations for the bridge’s towers. Many of these men became gravely ill from the poorly understood effects of sudden depressurization, “the bends,” when they climbed out of the caissons at the end of a shift. Once the stone towers were complete, though, the bridge presented a different,
more obvious kind of danger: falling. Now came the time for the bridgemen to take over; for what David McCullough refers to as the “circus acts.”

  Working almost 300 feet over the river, crowded together atop the towers, these men stood higher than the vast majority of Americans had ever ventured. This was a strange and alien world where a man could feel, in the words of Master Mechanic E. F. Farrington, foreman of the bridgemen, “as completely isolated as if in a dungeon.” Years after the bridge was complete, Farrington wrote of standing atop the Brooklyn tower one foggy morning and seeing the city nearly vanish. “The spires of Trinity in New York, and in Brooklyn, and the tops of masts of a ship in one of the dry docks, with the roof of the bridge towers, were all that were visible of the world below…. Rising through this misty veil was the confused crash and roar of busy life below.”

  The Brooklyn Bridge, like most long spans, was a suspension bridge. Its roadbed would hang from giant cables anchored into massive stone blocks on either shore and draped, in a sort of inverse arch, between the towers in the river. First, the bridge’s four cables, each containing 3,515 miles of thin steel wire, had to be spun out. This was done by sending wheels of wire back and forth between Brooklyn and Manhattan thousands of times, threading the wires through sheaves, then corseting them together until, at last, they made a cable about 15 inches in diameter.

  It was fast, precise work, and to do it a man had to be nimble-fingered and surefooted. Above all, of course, he had to be fearless. “No man can be a bridge-builder who must educate his nerves,” Farrington wrote in his memoir of the bridge. “It must be a constitutional gift. He cannot, when 200 feet in the air, use his brain to keep his hand steady.” Many of the men were, like Farrington himself, former sailors. Sailors had experience clambering about at height, having scaled the hundred-foot masts of square-riggers and schooners. They understood rigging, the arts of rope knotting and hoisting. They adapted well, in part, because the machinery of bridge building derived from sailing vessels. The derricks that bridgemen used to lift steel had evolved from the boom and mast of ships; indeed, the terminology was the same. The horizontal arm of a derrick was its “boom,” the vertical pole its “mast.” The rigging required to lift iron and steel—the blocks and tackle—were nearly identical to the rigging on a ship. And, of course, the kind of man who willingly cast his lot to the high seas was a good candidate for the perils of bridge building. Both careers demanded a certain willingness to die.

  One of the former seamen under Farrington’s supervision was a swashbuckling young rigging foreman named Harry Supple. The former seaman got his name in the papers not once but three times. The first time was after a derrick fell and he was among the injured. The second time was for a daring whooshing ride he took in a boatswain’s chair along the wire from the top of the New York tower down to the anchorage. “Stupendous Tight-Rope Performance,” ran the headline in one newspaper.

  The third time came two years later, in 1878, when he was working atop the Brooklyn anchorage, helping to feed steel wire into the sheave of a spinning wheel. The wire suddenly snapped, whipping out with a crack and a hiss. It knocked Harry Supple off the tower to the Brooklyn pavement 80 feet below. He lived a few hours, then passed away.

  NEW YORK

  The building of the Brooklyn Bridge was a distant memory by the turn of the century. So was Jenney’s Home Insurance Building in Chicago, 16 years old in 1900. Skyscrapers had moved out of their infancy and into their rowdy adolescence, and New York was where they came to spend it.

  New York was by far the largest city in the United States in 1900, and the richest. It was also the fastest growing, experiencing the same kinds of real estate pressure that drove Chicagoans skywards in the 1880s; in fact, by 1903, office rents in New York would be four times as high as in Chicago. The combination of limited land and ready money made New York’s destiny as skyscraper capital of the world practically inevitable.

  Chicago’s politicians had already forfeited the chalice in any case. In 1893, they passed an ordinance banning buildings over 10 stories, having come to believe that tall buildings were destroying their city. A year earlier, New York’s leaders had arrived at the opposite conclusion. They jettisoned the city’s more conservative zoning laws and embraced the principle of metal-frame construction for the first time.

  Builders knew where the action was at the end of the nineteenth century. They arrived in New York in droves, many of them the same men who had recently helped create the skyline of Chicago. The George A. Fuller Company, for example, came from Chicago. So did Daniel Burnham, the most celebrated architect of his time. The bridgemen came, too, flocking east from all over the country to apply their skills and daring to the skyscrapers.

  Once here, the bridgemen quickly melded into another group of tradesmen, housesmiths, who were already working the territory. The term “Housesmith,” soon to vanish from the American lexicon, referred to skilled mechanics who set iron fixtures, like railings and stairs and lintels, in masonry buildings. Housesmiths also worked as joiners on cast-iron buildings and other proto–metal frame structures. By the end of the nineteenth century, housesmiths had moved into the burgeoning market of structural iron and steel erection. They had become, in effect, the more urban and domesticated version of bridgemen. Perhaps they lacked a bridgeman’s experience with dizzying height, but they were trained in riveting and fabricating iron. They were also, significantly, experienced in the internecine labor politics of New York City, having chartered a union called the Housesmiths Mutual Protection Association way back in 1864.

  Now, 30 years later, ceding to the influx of bridgemen, the housesmiths’ union reorganized under a new name: The United Housesmiths’ and Bridgemen’s Union of New York and Vicinity. This organization then combined with five other local unions to charter the ambitiously named International Association of Bridge and Structural Ironworkers. In deference to its pioneering status as a union town and birthplace of the skyscraper, Chicago was designated Local 1. New York became Local 2.

  ROUGHNECKS

  They called themselves roughnecks. Other trades called them “the roughnecks up above yuh.” The Irish were “harpies,” the Swedes and Norwegians were “squareheads.” A veteran who knew his way around the steel was a “fixer,” while a man new to the trade was a “snake,” not because he was necessarily venal but because he was somebody you wouldn’t willingly trust with your life.

  Unlike more established trades, in which members entered as teenaged apprentices then worked their way up to journeyman status, ironwork tended to attract fully grown men who had already tried their hands in other lines of work. Some had farmed, others had been on the railroad or in factories. Many, like their predecessors who built the Brooklyn Bridge, were former seamen, particularly the Norwegians and Swedes. Mixed among them by 1901 were “a few Canadian Indian half-breeds, who are highly esteemed for their endurance and skill,” according to Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly. These men almost certainly hailed from Kahnawake, the Mohawk Indian reservation near Montreal that would still be supplying ironworkers to New York a century later.

  Although the distinction between housesmiths and bridgemen was officially defunct by 1901, two separate strains continued to run deep through New York’s roughnecks. The “Homeguard” were staunch members of the local union, true New Yorkers who would travel for work if required but preferred to stay put and reap from the harvest of steel. The “Floaters” were a different breed. Floaters were afflicted with a bridgeman’s wanderlust. They rambled between bridges and buildings, between states, often traveling great distances from job to job. A floater would work on a skyscraper in New York, then jump a boxcar and ride the rails out to San Francisco for another job, then stop off on his return to join a gang on a backwoods bridge in the “jungles”—his word for just about anywhere that wasn’t New York or Pittsburgh or Chicago or San Francisco. One young man, Billy Beatty, bragged that he’d already been to 27 states and territories in his five-year career. A
few men had recently returned from Egypt, where they’d helped build a bridge across the Nile. Other gangs had traveled to India and Cuba, while another was about to depart for the jungle, the real jungle, to raise steel viaducts in Uganda.

  The Bridgemen’s Magazine, founded in July of 1901, served as a job bulletin and gossip rag for the floaters. Locals around the country wrote in to let floaters know if they were needed, and floaters wrote back to say where they were and where they were headed. Thus, members of New York’s Local 2 learned that “Cork” Manning “came into the burg with some other human flotsam and jetsam about two weeks ago, but may be drifting Southward….” In the same issue, a man called “Munch Chunk” wrote in to let his fellow bridgemen know he’d just arrived at Niagara Falls from New York City, having helped himself to his own “private railway car, N.Y.C. & H.R.R.R., No. 62,064.” He’d gone north to build a bridge with Billy Beatty and a man called “Goose.” How, Munch wondered, could he and his fellow floaters like “Bughouse” Murray and “Kid” Finnegan and “Boxcar Slim” and “Jimmy the Bum” and “Skipper” Hicks—how could they get their hands on The Bridgemen’s Magazine since they were never in one place long enough to receive any mail?