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

  It was a nice irony, except that it wasn’t completely true. The ironworkers, as it turned out, wouldn’t actually build all of the Time Warner Center. They would not even build half of it. Most of the building was not going to be steel. It was going to be that other material, despised and reviled by all self-respecting structural ironworkers: concrete. The ironworkers would only go as high as the 23rd floor on the north tower and the 24th floor on the south tower, and then—concrete. Here was the largest steel job New York had seen in years and it wasn’t even a steel job. If there was any dark lining in the silver cloud in the great boom of 2001, this was it: concrete!

  The New York offices of the Cantor Seinuk Group, structural engineers for the Time Warner Center, were located on the third floor of a 17-story building on the east side of midtown Manhattan. The building was typical of the steel-frame, wedding cake–shaped towers of the 1920s. It rose eight stories, then “stepped back,” ascending in ever-smaller boxes. It was a functional building if not an especially imaginative one, a straightforward steel-frame high-rise conforming to New York City zoning laws and building codes of its time. The skeleton design was so simple a first year engineering student could probably pull it off.

  The firm’s offices were plainly tailored, lacking the architectural flourishes one might expect to find in, say, an architect’s office. As a rule, engineers don’t like to spend more money than is strictly necessary; miserliness is practically part of the job description. Over the receptionist’s desk hung the one decorative extravagance in the lobby, a four-by-six-foot collage displaying Cantor Seinuk’s many projects, including a stadium in Phoenix, a high-rise in Israel, a riverfront complex in London, and dozens of skyscrapers in New York.

  On a stormy March morning two days after the raising gang convened in the Coliseum Bar and Grill, Ysrael Seinuk, the leading partner of Cantor Seinuk (Cantor having departed some years earlier) stood by a round table in his office, looking crisp, trim, and a good 10 years younger than his 69 years. Outside, the rain stopped and started again, washing dirt over the windows. Pedestrians hurried along on the street. The wind turned umbrellas inside out. It was on days like this that the works of engineers were tested.

  “If we had used steel instead of concrete, that building would have been another forty feet higher,” said Seinuk, speaking in a clipped Cuban accent and gesturing through the window to the top of the Trump World Tower, the firm’s latest achievement. “Those forty feet would have been nothing but a big sail on a day like this.”

  He was pointing to the top of a new building looming to the east, a brown glass sliver. As architecture, the building was perhaps of dubious distinction, but as engineering it was noteworthy. Seventy-two stories tall and just 25 yards wide at the northern and southern walls, the building’s height-to-width ratio placed it among the slenderest high-rises in the world. And it was made of reinforced concrete.

  By conventional definition, a skyscraper is a tall building supported by a steel frame. “By skyscraper is meant a building that exceeds in height the practical limit of solid masonry construction,” is how a 1939 report on the origins of the skyscraper put it. “The absolute and first essential in the structural creation of a skyscraper is the metal (ferrous) skeleton.” But looking up through Seinuk’s window at the glass façade soaring into the fog, there was no denying that the building was a skyscraper, even if it was made primarily of concrete.

  Ysrael Seinuk understood the potential of concrete as well as any engineer in New York. He attributed this to his Cuban education. In the early 1960s, when Seinuk, a Jew, immigrated here to escape the grip of Fidel Castro, America was still a country built largely of steel, and steel is what American engineers knew best. At the same time, Seinuk and his fellow Cubans, having no steel industry to speak of, were making a virtue of necessity and learning to stretch concrete to its limits. “In Cuba we were using eight-thousand PSI concrete; here they weren’t using anything over four thousand,” said Seinuk, referring to the pounds-per-square-inch standard of measuring concrete’s strength. “We had completed in Cuba three hundred thirty-three–foot post-tension single span bridges. And the largest in the United States was a hundred feet.”

  All this had changed over the last 40 years. American concrete was now as strong as any in the world. The concrete in the new Trump building was 12,000 PSI, and 16,000 PSI concrete was at hand.

  Concrete has many advantages over steel as a structural material. For one thing, it significantly lowers the distance between floors, so that a 70-story concrete building will be shorter, much shorter, than a 70-story steel building. Floors in concrete buildings are six-inch thick slabs laid flat on concrete pillars. Even after wiring and ceiling fixtures are added to the bottom of the slab, and after floorboards or carpet are added to the top, the total space between ceiling and floor will be eight or nine inches. Steel beams, flange to flange, are generally eight or nine inches deep by themselves. On top of these come corrugated sheets filled with cement, and below go ceilings. Altogether, the space between a ceiling and the floor above is about 15 inches on a steel-frame building, or seven inches more than it would be for concrete. A small difference in itself, perhaps, but multiplied by 70 stories this comes to about 40 feet. That’s 40 fewer feet of façade to cover the perimeter of the building; 40 fewer feet of wires and pipes running inside the building; 40 fewer feet to brace against wind pressure; several million fewer dollars spent on construction.

  There are other advantages to concrete. It goes up faster than steel, typically three floors a week compared with steel’s pace of one or two floors. And during construction, it’s easier to manipulate—to mold, to modify—than steel. A single imperfectly fabricated piece of steel can turn into a contractor’s nightmare, holding up the building’s erection as ironworkers burn or pummel it into place. No such problems arise with concrete. It is cast on site in plywood forms. Mistakes can be fixed with a hammer, a sheet of wood, a few nails.

  No wonder concrete has taken such a large bite out of the construction market in recent decades. Until the middle of the twentieth century, tall buildings in America, office and residential both, were inevitably steel. Concrete structures seldom exceeded 20 stories until 1960. By the mid-1970s, though, the architect John Portman, among others, was designing huge opulent reinforced concrete hotels in places like Las Vegas and Miami. And by the 1980s, any large residential building or hotel built in America was likely to be concrete.

  Given all of concrete’s splendors, wasn’t steel doomed? Seinuk frowned. “Of course not. That is silly—silly talk. There are buildings that want to be concrete and you have to do them in concrete, and there are buildings that want to be steel. If you try to do a building that wants to be steel in concrete, it’s going to be very foolish.”

  Steel buildings are more difficult to build than concrete buildings, but, once completed, they are far more pliable. They are easier to renovate, an important advantage in buildings that will see many tenants with different space requirements over the course of their lives—office buildings, for instance. Bashing a hole through a floor or trying to move a column is an expensive and elaborate procedure in a concrete building but is easily achieved in a steel building. Also, steel is better suited to longer spans, the kind of long spans you are likely to encounter in office building lobbies and television studios. And because steel, at 50,000 PSI, is still much stronger than concrete, steel columns and beams take up less space than concrete structural members.

  “The building always tells you what it wants to be,” said Seinuk. “Whoever designs the building trying to tell the building what it wants to be is going to have a very expensive design.” The Time Warner building, then, would be concrete where it wanted to be concrete and steel where it wanted to be steel. And where it wanted to be steel was on the bottom.

  Determining precisely how the steel would be arranged was a task that fell to Mr. Seinuk’s partner and second-in-command, Silvian Marcus. Like Seinuk, Marcus was a Jewish émigr
é from a communist regime, in Marcus’s case Soviet-dominated Romania. Also, like Seinuk, he had been at the firm for a long time, almost 30 years. Otherwise the two men could not have been more different. Whereas Seinuk was trim, elegant, and reserved, Marcus was rumpled and sleepy-eyed. He gave the impression of a large but kindly bear awakened from a nap: a grumpy mensch. When the phone rang, he picked it up, closed his eyes and held the receiver an inch or two from his ear, as if he knew it could only transmit a headache. Suddenly, his eyes would widen and twinkle, and he’d break out in delighted laughter, tickled by something. In the spring of 2001, nothing tickled Silvian Marcus more—or caused him more headaches—than his design for the Time Warner Center.

  This was the most complicated building Marcus had ever engineered. As Marcus was fond of pointing out, it really wasn’t one building but half a dozen different buildings pressed together, each having a different function and different structural requirements. The most obvious distinction, of course, fell between the parts of the building that were steel and those that were concrete. The towers, which contained the hotel and the condominiums, would be made of concrete. (They would be topped by a steel crown, so ironworkers would, in the end, have the last word on the building.) Beneath the towers, steel would rise only as high as the 23rd floor. But those 23 floors would consume almost twice the amount of steel required by a typical steel-frame skyscraper, and its arrangement would be at least twice as complex.

  The difficulties began with the columns. The function of columns is to transfer the load, or weight of the building, to the ground. In most buildings, this is accomplished by vertical columns running in a straight line from the top of the building to the bottom. The path of transference is clear and well marked. Not so in the Time Warner Center.

  “Because of the way the building functions, a column cannot go straight,” said Marcus. “He has to move and change places every few floors. After he finishes his function on a particular floor, then he’s going to a different usage, where the column layout doesn’t fit him anymore. So we have inclined columns, hanging columns, columns that terminate all of a sudden. This makes the building totally different than a conventional building.” The shopping arcade needed one column layout, the offices another. The television studios for CNN required very long spans, 40 to 65 feet, uninterrupted—and unsupported—by columns. Amidst all of the canted columns and strangely transferred loads, just a dozen columns would run straight up from the bottom of the building. Marcus called these columns “boomers.” They were enormous, between 30 and 45 tons apiece, and very important. It was their job to support the enormous trusses that would top the steel section of each tower.

  The trusses were the most audacious part of Marcus’s design. They would support not only the concrete columns rising up from them, but also a number of steel columns, called “hangers,” hanging down from them. The trusses would serve, too, as the central system of wind-bracing for the concrete towers, acting like huge outriggers to prevent them from swaying. No one, as far as Marcus knew, had ever asked quite so much of a truss before.

  No one had ever asked quite so much of a steel fabricator either. In a conventional wedding-cake or glass-box skyscraper, where floors replicate each other as they go up, many pieces of steel are the same, so that a beam on the fifth floor is interchangeable with a beam on the ninth floor. That would not be the case in this building. Nearly every piece of steel, all 18,000 of them, would be unique. The steel design alone would generate about 26,000 shop drawings to specify the shape of each piece of steel, about four times the usual number of shop drawings for a skyscraper. The drawings took up so much space that Cantor Seinuk had rented a room in Long Island City to store them all.

  Why so much complexity? The short answer is economics and computers. Building owners wanted flexible, multi-use, tenant-pleasing spaces, and they wanted to build them as cheaply as possible. This is how they made their profits. Architects and engineers naturally wanted to satisfy their clients. Computers helped them do this by allowing them to measure loads and strains before any material was raised. They gave engineers freedom to experiment and innovate in ways that would have been inconceivable back in the 1920s. But if computers were facilitators to innovative engineers, they were also enablers to capricious and needy clients. The more complicated a building could be, the more complicated, inevitably, it would be.

  Trying to keep track of all 18,000 pieces of steel, to make sure that each piece did what it was supposed to do, was enough to keep Marcus awake at night. Everything had been thoroughly considered and calculated, run through the computers and simulators, double-and triple-checked by hand. But only one test really counts for a design that has not been tried before, and that test must wait until the building begins to rise: Will it work? Will it function? Will it stand? These questions were not academic. Three weeks earlier, a steel truss had collapsed during the construction of a convention center in Washington, D.C. The accident occurred at 11:30 at night. Twelve hours earlier, or twelve hours later, it would have killed dozens of ironworkers.

  A structural engineer is an odd creature who must temper the hubris of a Master Builder (how would he or she dare build without it?) with the self-doubt of a neurotic. Lying in bed at night and brooding over grim hypotheticals—what if we got it wrong? what have we failed to consider?—is what drives engineers to design sound buildings. The moment an engineer stops doubting the design, he or she puts the structure, and human lives, at risk.

  Marcus was confident his building would function exactly as he meant it to, but he also knew he carried an enormous burden of responsibility to the men who would erect it and the tenants who would someday inhabit it. “It’s a pressure that you go to sleep with and you wake up with,” he explained. “It’s not the life of one person, but of so many people. Take a doctor, a surgeon, a very responsible position. But if he makes a mistake, he kills one person. If I make a mistake, or one of my assistants or colleagues makes a mistake that it’s my responsibility to be sure he will not make, then my life ends with a question mark.

  “I pray, although I am not a religious man, for everything to be O.K.,” said Marcus. “Because there are so many things, so many complicated things. We check and re-check. But we also need to be lucky.”

  FOUR

  The Walking Delegate

  (1903)

  I’m a peaceful, law-abiding, simple citizen—that’s Sam Parks. I’ve been played for a rowdy, but the tag don’t fit and I don’t pose for that picture. Of course, if there’s a fight, I don’t run away. No man has got any business in the labor movement that gets cold feet as soon as there’s a scrap.

  —SAM PARKS

  …the shameful truth must be confessed that relief can come only from the capture and impounding of Sam Parks as one would a mad dog.

  —HENRY HARRISON LEWIS

  Harper’s Weekly, October 17, 1903

  Lutheran All-Faiths Cemetery lies on a bluff in Middle Village, Queens, about four miles east of Manhattan. The cemetery grounds cover 225 acres and contain the remains of roughly half a million dead. A hundred years ago, the cemetery was surrounded by open farmland. Today, shopping outlets and gas stations encroach at every end and jets from the nearby airports roar overhead. Still, it is a pleasant, almost pastoral place, wooded with elms and oaks and cedars of Lebanon, smelling of cut grass and damp earth. Here, among the Teutonic names—the Grimms and Geissenhainers and Knolls and Schoensiegals—an Irish-born ironworker named Sam Parks lies in eternal rest.

  Or maybe he doesn’t.

  “There is no one named Sam Parks in our files.” The woman behind the desk of the cemetery office declares this with a finality that brooks little discussion. She has been to the files—twice—and she is certain that no Parks, Sam or otherwise, was buried in Lutheran All-Faiths Cemetery. Not in 1904; not in any years around it. “If he was here, we’d have a record. And there is no record. Who did you say he was?”

  Sam Parks was an ironworker who rose to become o
ne of the most powerful, beloved, and reviled figures in New York City at the start of the twentieth century. He was a union walking delegate for Ironworkers Local 2 who managed in a few years to take control of the entire building industry in New York City and dictate its operation. With a few choice words—Hit the bricks, boys!—he could shut down construction in the city, putting tens of thousands of men out of work and bleeding millions of dollars of capital from the booming building industry. Hundreds of newspaper articles were devoted to him during his brief reign, along with feature articles in many of the leading magazines of his time. The fierce attention continued unchecked through his death in the spring of 1904, when 1,500 mourners marched in his funeral procession and 10,000 spectators crowded the streets to glimpse his hearse. The procession wended a circuitous route around the Upper East Side of Manhattan, arriving at a pier at the foot of East 92nd Street. From here, Parks’ casket was ferried across the East River, then taken by carriage to Middle Village, and there interred—according to the newspapers—in Lutheran Cemetery.

  Then the articles ceased. Sam Parks promptly vanished into an oblivion so thorough that not even his grave—not even a record of his grave—survives.