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

  “The calling is one that hardly attracts the home-loving married man,” is how a report by the U.S. Commission on Labor Relations described the bridgemen’s trade some years later. And once a man had succumbed to the calling, he was “not likely to develop in a high degree the social habits that tend to ideal citizenship.” On the contrary, he tended to be “shiftless,” “irresponsible,” and “reckless.”

  Most floaters would probably have agreed with the description. But the founder and editor of The Bridgemen’s Magazine, James L. Kelly, endeavored to cultivate the image of a somewhat more civilized bridgeman: a roughneck who appreciated the finer things in life. To this end, among the union news and editorial tracts, Kelly never failed to include a sample of poetry and high thoughts:

  What was the song we sang together,

  You and I in long-lost June?

  Something to-day in the dreamy weather,

  Brings back a strain of the tune….

  began a poem in one issue, while in another, Mr. Kelly considered

  How often have bridgemen, when working out in the “jungles” thought of Washington Irvin’s [sic] tribute to the lark, which revels in the brightest time of day, in the happiest season of the year, among fresh meadows and opening flowers; and when he has sated himself with the sweetness of the earth, he wings his flight up to heaven as if he would drink in the melody of the morning stars.

  When the bridgeman was done thinking of lost tunes and larks, he could further broaden himself with curious facts and helpful bromides:

  Avoid alcoholic drinks if you want to insure yourself in these torrid days against heat prostration. Alcohol in any form is first a stimulant and then a depressant. It overworks the heart for a time, and then there is languor due to lack of material on which to labor.

  The best way to get out of debt is to pay out.

  The dome of the United States Capitol is 287½ feet high. The weight of the iron alone in the dome of the Capitol is 8,909,200 pounds.

  The Lord made woman—but she made herself into a lady.

  On the subject of women, George O’Kane, who called himself Doctor O’Kane and frequently wrote to the magazine from New York, believed that bridgemen would be better off if they were more willing to “try the saving grace of matrimony.” Nor would it hurt to dress a little better while they were at it. “There is a large class of bridgemen who work steadily, dress respectably and are a credit to the organization and the community in which they reside,” wrote Dr. O’Kane. Another class, however, dressed and behaved like bums. “We heard some of the latter uncharitably criticizing the former the other day, calling them dudes and other things. We look at the matter differently and think that diamonds never flashed from a fitter repository than a UNION bridgeman’s bosom.”

  The promise that bridgemen, even floaters, were capable of cultivation was confirmed in the winter of 1903 when Munch Chunk (whose real name turned out to be William Woodring) wedded a charming young widow at the Little Church Around the Corner, at Fifth Avenue and 29th Street. The service was followed by a lavish champagne reception at the bride and groom’s home at Park Avenue and 112th Street. “All the roughnecks were invited to attend,” reported The Bridgemen’s Magazine, “and Mr. and Mrs. Chunk were sorry they had laid in such a large stock of the flowing beverage, as the invited guests did not leave until everything was cleaned up.” That was two days later. Evidently, these roughnecks truly did appreciate the finer things in life.

  The start of the twentieth century was a good moment in the history of New York’s ironworkers. The ruinous strikes that would begin in the spring of 1903 were still in the future. Peace reigned. The wage, $4 for an eight-hour day, was a good one at a time when factory workers averaged less than $8.50 per week. True, ironwork tended to be irregular, but for the moment there was more work than there were men to do it. The George A. Fuller Company alone was running about 15 steel jobs in Manhattan in 1901, with several others soon to break ground. All around the city, derricks were swinging, rivet guns were clattering, and steel frames were rising. On the East River, where the Williamsburg Bridge was about to overtake the Brooklyn Bridge as the longest suspension bridge in the world, bridgemen stood on black-ribbed girders and catcalled down to the hoist operator hundreds of feet below. “Yeow-yeow-yeow!” they called, then the operator shouted back “Hey-y-y!” and then everybody cried, “Ho-hoo-ho-hoo,” and the load started to rise. Meanwhile, work was getting under way on the Manhattan Bridge, another long suspension bridge over the East River, and would soon commence on a great cantilever bridge between Manhattan and Queens. There was so much demand for structural steel work in Manhattan that the steel companies could not keep up with it, and some jobs—the Flatiron among them—temporarily suspended construction while waiting for more steel to arrive.

  The basic customs of the work were in place by 1901. The steel was hoisted from the street by wooden derricks that were secured to the top of the building by guy wires. The derricks rose as the buildings rose, but their steam-powered cable drums, and the men who operated these, remained below on the ground. The ironworkers topside communicated with the operator by bell lines that ran to the basement: two yanks meant the operator should pay out the cable and let the load down; four yanks meant he should reel it in, and up. As a load began to rise from the street, a man or several might jump onto it and hitch a ride to the top, one hand fecklessly grasping the cable as the ground receded. A “bullstick” man would pivot the derrick by throwing his weight into a long lever, and the derrick’s boom would swing in over the scantily planked floor.

  When it came time to hang steel, the “setters,” as connectors were then called, slipped in the first bolts, then the rivet gang moved in. The “heater” stood over a small coke forge propped on a few pine planks laid across beams. He barbecued a rivet to a white glow, then plucked it from the coals with tongs and flung it, fast and hissing, 20, 30, as far as 50 feet, to wherever the gang happened to be working. His “catcher” snatched the rivet from the air with a funnel-shaped cup, its mouth no wider than a salad plate. The catcher withdrew the still red-hot rivet with his tongs and plugged it into the rivet hole. Now the “bucker-up” held the blunt head of the rivet flush against the column or beam with a steel bar, while the “riveter” stood on the other side of the connection and pressed the barrel of a pneumatic hammer against the shank of the rivet. He pulled the trigger and the piston fibrillated—br-r-r-r-r-r-r-ip!—smashing the semi-molten metal into a button flush against the steel. All of this happened with great speed and deafening clamor—heat, toss, insert, smash, then move on across the steel to the next rivet hole. A good gang could do a few hundred rivets a day. A thousand a day was not unheard of.

  All of this assumed, of course, that nothing went wrong. But things did go wrong. Sometimes the heater threw a wild one. Sometimes the catcher missed and the rivet seared his skin (you knew a catcher by the scars on his forearms) or plummeted through the frame of the building like a meteorite. The gang would shout a warning to those working below and, inevitably, everyone would do the one thing a person should never do when a hot rivet is plummeting toward his head: they looked up.

  It did not take a full rivet to injure a man. As the pneumatic guns pounded the rivets into their holes, cinders frequently flaked off and dropped. “I had the strangest experience once,” a young ironworker told Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly. “I happened to have my mouth open and the red-hot burr flew right in my throat. It burned the roof of my mouth badly, and then dug into my right cheek somehow. But the doctor at the hospital could never find the bit. They thought it must have worked out in some way and that I must have swallowed it.”

  Of greater concern than rivets or cinders was the ever-present danger of falling. There were no safety harnesses, no fall nets, no safety wires around the perimeter of the working floor in 1901. A law passed 12 years earlier required contractors to spread wooden planking below the men as they worked. This would have done little to keep men from goin
g over the side of the building but it might have protected men from going into the hole on the inside—if, that is, contractors had obeyed it. They did not. As construction photographs of the Flatiron and other steel-frame buildings clearly illustrate, planking was spotty, allowing plenty of man-size gaps between timbers. If a man slipped, he could go many stories before hitting something solid.

  The danger was reflected in the carnage. At the start of 1902, The Bridgemen’s Magazine noted that Local 2 had buried two men a week for the previous six weeks. Meanwhile, of 1,000 members in Chicago’s Local 1 a year later, 103 were injured, 15 more were permanently disabled, and 18 died: nearly fifteen percent of the union’s members injured or killed in a single year. A few years later, Chicago would record 83 injured, 17 permanently disabled, and 23 dead. Altogether, about two percent of ironworkers died and another two percent were permanently disabled each year in the early twentieth century. In other words, of every 100 men in a local, 40 were likely to be dead or disabled within a decade, 80 within two decades. Not even the luckiest man could hope for a long career on steel. “We do not die,” went an ironworkers’ slogan of the time. “We are killed.”

  “We are only too well justified by the facts in making the statement that a man, on the day he starts in the structural iron industry, signs his death warrant,” wrote the president of Local 2, Robert Neidig, in 1903. “It is a sad, gruesome, and only too truthful fact that no ironworker is considered to die a natural death unless he gets killed. One of our members that lives to be old and dies in his bed is looked upon as a curiosity by the vast majority whose crushed and mangled remains are laid beneath the sod before the hand of Time has had a chance to touch one hair with silver.” In February of 1903, Local 2 raised its initiation fee to $100, exactly the amount the union paid out for funeral expenses when a member died. “All we are asking of these candidates,” wrote Neidig, “is to give us enough money for decent interment.”

  No workers’ compensation existed in 1901, so if a man died, his widow, if there was one, made do with the $100 from the union and perhaps a small settlement from the builder. As a rule, builders were not generous with settlements, on the grounds that the sort of man who went into ironwork knew what he was getting into so hadn’t much right to complain when he died. “The men are fully aware of the risks they run when they undertake the work,” one builder told the New York Times. “If the man has not a cool head and is subject to giddiness in working at dizzy height, he takes an unjustifiable risk in accepting such a job…. It would be a benevolent and philanthropic, no doubt, for employers to provide for families of their workmen who are killed as a result of their own carelessness, but on the other hand I don’t see that it would be just to compel them to make such provisions.”

  A great many of the city’s early skyscrapers were built by life insurance companies. Metropolitan Life, New York Life, Manhattan Life, Washington Life—their buildings were among the tallest in the city. Here is one telling irony of the ironworker’s plight: none of these companies would have provided him with life insurance. He was not, actuarially speaking, worth the risk.

  As soon as the scaffolding came off the Flatiron, crowds would gather at the intersection of Broadway and Fifth Avenue, some to admire the new building, others to ridicule its bizarre mile-high pie-slice shape. From certain angles, it would appear as sharp as a blade or as unsupported as a stage flat—a sheer wall with nothing behind but air. Sightseers would gather to watch it topple in the wind, but they would be disappointed, for the building would turn out to be every bit as strong as its promotional literature had promised. The wind would not bother the building nearly so much as the building would bother the wind, causing powerful and perilous downdrafts. A boy would be blown off the curb into Broadway and killed by a cab. Women who walked near the building would risk immodesty as drafts lifted their petticoats, revealing a glimpse of Victorian knee.

  Among those drawn to the base of the new building would be a young and soon to be celebrated photographer named Alfred Stieglitz, whose moody, snow-swept photographs would help establish the Flatiron as the most recognizable building in the country. In 1904, he would write about the Flatiron in a letter to his father: “It appeared to be moving toward me like the bow of a monster ocean steamer—a picture of a new America still in the making.”

  And what of the man in that earlier photograph—the nameless man on the 15th floor with his back to the camera? Impossible to say. But if this building was an ocean liner, then he’d ride it into the future. If this was the new America in the making, he’d be among those making it. Because the new America was going to be made of steel.

  The Flatiron, still in the making, 1902.

  (Brown Brothers)

  THREE

  The New World

  (2001)

  Two weeks after they arrived at Columbus Circle to build the Time Warner Center—two weeks after Brett Conklin’s fall 17 blocks to the south—the raising gang was high over the hole, enjoying a mid-morning coffee break on the machine deck of crane number 2. Last night a dusting of snow had fallen over the city, but the sun had come out strong and the sky was brilliantly blue and the snow was mostly gone. The men sat on the deck, smoking and gazing out at the multi-million-dollar view of Central Park. When their cigarettes burnt down, they flicked them over the edge and the butts fluttered 110 feet to the mud at the bottom of the hole.

  Since that gray February day they first came—it was early March now—the men had been setting up kangaroo cranes. This was the first step in any major steel job in New York; until there were cranes, there could be no steel, and there would be no cranes until the raising gang assembled them, piece by piece, like giant Christmas toys. The gang had already completed crane number 1, to the east. Crane number 2 was well on its way, soon to be joined by number 3 and number 4, which would serve the southern tower of the building. For the next month, a temporary crawler crane in the hole would feed the raising gang prefabricated components of the cranes and the men would bolt these into place: box-shaped sections of the tower, one stacked upon the other like milk crates; then the rubella, a turntable-like collar on which the crane would pivot, or “slew”; then the machine deck, the drums and engine, the operator’s cabin, the mast, and finally, the lacy 180-foot-long boom.

  The cranes were called kangaroos not because they resembled the eponymous marsupial, but because they were first manufactured in Australia. If they resembled any living thing, it was the ornithological species that shared their name: cranes. They rose on a single spindly leg, absurdly top-heavy, graceful and agile but also slightly ludicrous. What kept them from keeling over were the four 12-ton counterweights that hung from a rack under their rumps. As the crane’s boom reached out and dipped to take a load, the counterweights, in a small miracle of weight distribution, slid in the opposite direction. As the boom lifted and strained under the load, they slid further out; as it rose, pulling the center of gravity toward the crane, the counterweights moved back home.

  Before that miracle could occur, though, the raising gang would have to install the counterweights. At a nod from their foreman, the men slowly stood, their break ended. The connectors, Jerry Soberanes and Keith McComber—the blue-eyed Indian the others called Bunny—slithered through the hollow center of the rubella, then ducked under the machine deck and wriggled between the diagonals of the latticed tower. They hung onto the outside of the tower, a hundred feet over the hole, and waited. A moment later, the first of the counterweights swept in on the boom of the crawler crane. Along the bottom of the counterweight, welded to it, ran a slender horizontal terrace of grilled wire, just wide enough to accommodate a man’s boot. The counterweight was still a yard off the stern when Jerry stepped across the open air and onto its terrace. The counterweight, with Jerry aboard and clinging to it, swung gently away from the tower, then gently back. Now it was Bunny’s turn: he reached a foot out over the gap and stepped on beside Jerry. They stood there on the narrow ledge a hundred feet over the ho
le, swaying in the breeze.

  A few minutes before noon, the raising gang started down a narrow metal ladder through the interior of the crane’s tower. When they reached the bottom, they stepped out onto the mud, a treacherous topography of half-frozen divots and crags concealed under a few inches of boot-sucking paste. Bunny and Jerry led the way to the dirt ramp at the southwest corner of the hole. Like most connectors, they were fit and agile and didn’t have much trouble high-stepping through the mud. Their wrenches and connecting bars clanged in the scabbards of their connecting belts, and with a little imagination—a pointed helmet instead of a hard hat, a long yellow beard instead of a clean-shaven face, a rocky beach instead of mud—they might have been Viking warriors arriving home after a season of berserking. They had the weary look of men returning from difficult work.

  They walked shoulder to shoulder, side by side, matching strides. Bunny and Jerry had never connected together before this job but already they’d acquired the complementary rhythm of old partners. This would stand them in good stead. Over the next several months, nearly every move one of them made would depend on the timing and skill of the other. So, sometimes, would his life. Connectors routinely step out onto beams held aloft by a bolt on one end and the tapered end of their partner’s spud wrench on the other. They make the step based on nothing but a slight nod from the partner’s head, the nod that says: It’s in the hole, trust me. Trust is everything.