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

by Jim Rasenberger

  There are other, less conventional ways to climb. Some ironworkers press their knees and shins against the outside of the same flange they’re grasping with their hands, and then shinny up it. This looks a bit like a baby crawling up a wall. A few connectors prefer this method, though it’s difficult to say why, as it has a tendency to shred the skin off a man’s shins. In both cases, the trick isn’t strength—many a musclebound hulk has tried and failed to climb a column—but weight distribution, finding the right balance between the push of the legs and the pull of the arms.

  Ironworkers, particularly connectors, fly up and down columns all day. They speak of climbing thirty-foot columns as if it were no more difficult or dangerous than, say, walking up a flight of stairs. In fact, climbing columns is very difficult and very dangerous. Descending a column is slightly less difficult but slightly more dangerous. The position is the same, with the ironworker’s hands cupping the near flange and his feet pressed against the inside wall of the far flange, but now instead of using his feet to climb, he uses the rubber soles of his boots as brakes to slow his descent. It’s a controlled fall.

  Joe Emerson, a connector at Time Warner Center, climbing a column.

  (Photo by Michael Doolittle)

  On a breezy afternoon early in May, Bunny and Jerry finally climbed above the rim of the hole. The rest of the gang stood on the corrugated derrick floor 30 feet below. Columns and beams lay on the floor in more or less the same configuration they would later assume in the frame. Earlier in the morning, the gang had “shaken out” the steel, arranging it on the derrick floor so as to make setting as efficient as possible. As Jerry and Bunny hoisted themselves up to perch on their respective columns, they could see the other raising gang to the west, shaking out their own loads of steel on the deck. David “Chappie” Charles, the foreman of that gang, was shouting something at Chad Snow, the connector, and Chad was shouting back at Chappie, and everybody was laughing.

  Bunny envied the men in Chappie’s gang a little. It was easier working with other Mohawks. You knew each other from home; you knew how the other men worked, and you knew their quirks of personality and wasted little time in cultural translation. But it was also true, as Chad Snow once remarked, that you pushed yourself harder when you worked with other Mohawks. In a Mohawk gang, your pride was on the line; you cared what your fellow Mohawks thought of you in a way that you did not of non-Indians. “They’re not expecting you to be the best you can be,” said Chad of the latter. “You can float a little. But if you work with guys from home, everybody expects you to be the best. You want to make them proud.”

  There was no time for Bunny to consider such distinctions at the moment. He knelt on the top of his column and looked down. Below, Matt Kugler and John White were preparing the beam. Matt hooked his tag line into a bolthole at one end. Standing a few feet back, John scanned the length of the beam, eyeballing its center and estimating the gauge he’d need for his choker. A choker is a wire cable with an eye on each end. It wraps around the steel like a noose, one eye slipping through the other, the open eye then looping onto the crane hook. Of the two sins a hooker-on must never commit, the first is hooking the steel off center, in which case the piece will rise lopsided and might slip out of its noose. The second is using the wrong gauge of choker. Too thin, the choker will snap. Too thick, the noose won’t close tightly around the steel. This was a fairly heavy beam, so John grabbed a ?" choker, then leaned over the center of the beam and looped the cable around it. He pushed the one eye through the other, and pulled hard. The noose tightened. John slipped the open eye over the hook of the crane and nodded to Chett.

  “O.K.,” said Chett into the yellow squawk-box, “load up real slow.”

  A hundred feet over their heads, the sheaves at the end of the crane’s boom began to turn. The choker pulled snug, biting into the steel. John stamped down on it and rode the beam a few inches, trying to get the choker to bite harder, then hopped off. The beam popped up, see-sawing in its sling. It was Matt’s to handle now.

  Matt’s job was arguably the most difficult and thankless in the gang. The tagline man keeps the steel steady and steers it away from impediments—columns, other beams, ironworkers—in its flight path. Running tagline is like sailing a kite on a blustery day, only the kite weighs several tons. The crane operator controls the broad outlines of the steel’s route but he can’t check the small unpredictable motions that make a piece of steel potentially lethal: the see-sawing, the yawing, the spinning of a line un-torquing itself, the sudden swing of a piece caught broadside by a gust of wind. Steel moves through the air like a drunken giant, resolute, inexorable, and dangerous. A drifting five-ton beam can take out a brick wall, much less flick a connector off a column. In Newton’s second law of motion, the acceleration of an object (a) is determined by the force (F) exerted upon it relative to its mass (m): a=. In this case, m was a 10,000-pound steel beam. Matt’s unenviable job was to be F.

  Matt glanced up, trying to steer the metal while taking long steps across the cluttered deck. Tagline men have little choice but to keep their eyes up, on their errant charge. If they aren’t careful, they’re liable to walk right off the edge of the deck or, at the very least, bang their shins and twist their ankles. Too careful, though, and they lose track of the steel and, inevitably, it hits something, and everybody yells. Everybody realizes that tagline is a difficult and thankless job, but they yell just the same. A few days earlier, an apprentice had filled in for Matt and accidentally let a large girder slice inches over the hard hat of a bolter-up and slam into a column, sending a spinetingling shiver through the metal of the entire building.

  “Jesus,” said Bunny.

  “Whoa—that was close,” said Jerry.

  The bolter-up put his hand on the top of his hard hat as if to make sure his head was still there. Down on the deck, the apprentice grinned sheepishly.

  “Watch it, asshole!” somebody shouted. “Christ! You are useless!”

  Now Matt let the rope go and the piece flew high over the deck, then started down. Chett spoke softly to the crane operator in the radio. “Nice and slow, that’s it, down…down…load down…a hair more….” When the piece dangled almost within reach, Jerry made a downward clockwise motion with his left index finger, then reached up and pulled his end in with his right hand. He brought the web of the beam flush against a plate, so that the holes in each lined up. From his belt he pulled a two-foot-long tapered bar—a connecting bar—and stabbed the skinny end through the matched holes. This held the beam and column in alignment while he dug into his bolt bag and fished out a bolt. With a few spins of the wrist, he removed the nut. He stuck the bolt into the hole, then tightened the nut by hand. On the other side, Bunny straddled the beam and “made” his hole with the tapered handle of his socket wrench. He was still tightening his nut when Jerry stepped out onto the beam. As Jerry started across it, the beam wobbled slightly. This was a fairly wide beam, a header, so the wobble was slight, but thinner pieces could start to oscillate side to side, alive with harmonic vibration. Ironworkers call this motion the “wow” of the beam. If a man feels a wow coming, he’ll try to stay ahead of it, and get across the beam before it has a chance to build. This is why you sometimes see an ironworker running, actually running, across a thin beam to get to the other side. He’s trying to beat the wow.

  Along with climbing columns, walking steel is part of the job description. In fact, it is a prerequisite. Anyone hoping to become an ironworker in New York City has to pass a physical aptitude test that includes climbing a 15-foot column, walking across a narrow beam, then sliding down the opposite column. The test tends to weed out the frail and the fat. It also weeds out acrophobes. Why an acrophobe would apply to be an ironworker is a mystery, but it happens occasionally.

  Once out at a job site, a few apprentices take to walking steel as if they’d been hatched on the edge of a cliff. Most, however, need a few months to adjust. “Ye, gods!” wrote the builder William Starrett in 192
8. “If there ever was an experience to bring to the human body its sense of helplessness and despair, its agonies and terrors, it is the sensation felt by one who has not had training when he suddenly finds himself out on a narrow beam or plank, high above the ground and unprotected by a hand-hold of any kind.”

  Two things have to occur inside of a young ironworker before he will manage to walk high steel competently. The first of these is psychological; the second is physiological.

  Psychologically, the apprentice must learn to control the natural fear that Starrett described. Exactly how afraid he feels initially is probably genetically determined, at least in part, but it’s also changeable. Studies suggest that even severe acrophobes can be successfully treated by exposure therapy, in which they are exposed to ever-increasing heights and slowly become accustomed to them.

  An ironworker’s apprenticeship is a crash course in exposure therapy. Ideally, the novice starts working in the hole, near the ground, straddling the beam and scooting along on the bottom flange—“cooning” the beam, as it’s called. Then he works up his courage and steps onto the top flange of a wide beam, a header perhaps, and tries a few baby steps, then a few more, and gradually it takes. Or doesn’t, in which case he might reconsider his career choice.

  In the meantime, physiologically, the apprentice is daily improving his balance. Balance is an extraordinarily complex reflex system involving three of our senses—sight, sound, and touch—all of which play critical roles in navigating us through space. And then there is the all-important sixth sense located in the “vestibular apparatus” of our inner ear. The vestibular apparatus is a labyrinth of tiny curved canals filled with liquids and gels, and lined with microscopic hairs. What the vestibular apparatus “senses” is gravity. Depending on how the liquids and gels pool and slosh inside these canals, we are able to distinguish up from down and acceleration from inertia; we are able to dive into swimming pools, ride bikes without training wheels, and walk across dark rooms confident that our feet are on the floor and not on the ceiling.

  As we navigate the world, or even just lay in beds, our brains busily collate input from our vestibular apparatuses with input from our other senses, with yet more input from nerves that control our muscles and joints (neck and ankles provide especially useful data) and assorted other inputs (the concentration of blood in our bodies), then instantly compute all of this into a three-dimensional matrix through which we ever so blithely saunter. At least, that is, until we find ourselves swooning on an eight-inch-wide beam 200 feet over the sidewalk.

  To what extent is balance innate and to what extent is it learned? According to Dr. Bernard Cohen, a neurologist at Mount Sinai hospital in New York and a specialist in balance disorders, “this is a very basic question we don’t have an answer to yet.” What Dr. Cohen and his colleagues do know is that the balance system is highly flexible and adaptable. Which brings us back to ironworkers.

  In 1909, The Bridgemen’s Magazine published the speculations of an engineer on the subject of ironworkers and heights: “If it were possible for the average man to so concentrate his vision on the beam upon which he stands, that he could see nothing else than the beam, there would be no danger of falling. The moment he would catch a glimpse of the abyss on either side he would be gone.” The key to balancing up there, thought the engineer, is “concentration of vision.” Dr. Cohen agrees that changes in visual perception must somehow account for humans’ ability to adapt to life in high place, but won’t speculate much beyond this. “There can be a very powerful adaptation of the vestibular-ocular reflex, the interaction between the ears and the eyes. You can change how your eyes move depending on experience and circumstances. But exactly what goes on with them, I don’t know.”

  Whatever the precise mechanics of adaptation, it is, in the end, difficult, if not impossible, to separate the physiological from the psychological. Fear makes people woozy and disoriented, and this, in turn, makes people more afraid. The biofeedback loop is a dog chasing its own tail. But this dog, to swap aphorisms, is one that can learn new tricks. With the exception of those who are clinically acrophobic or extraordinarily clumsy, most people could learn to walk steel beams high in the sky if only they were willing to apply themselves to it as diligently as ironworkers do. That, of course, is a very big if.

  For some ironworkers, cooning remains the preferred method of transit long into their careers. It is safer, and if you aren’t in any particular hurry, it’s a perfectly adequate way to get around. Welders and bolter-ups, for example, can spend hours working on one bay of steel; they hardly ever need to walk on top of a beam. Most do anyway. Cooning is awkward and uncomfortable. Also, like “seagulling” (walking with your arms stretched out), it’s faintly ignominious.

  Connectors have no choice but to walk on top. They move quickly when they set steel, from point to point, traversing the grid. They can pass whole days with nothing wider than six inches—the width, say, of a hardcover book—beneath their feet. Some days, and these are generally bad days, they set hollow square-shaped beams called tubes. The only way to walk a tube is on top; there is no bottom flange to drop down to if things get hairy.

  Jerry walked steel as he did most things, without much fuss. His limbs were loose, his toes turned in slightly, his speed moderate but steady. When he came to a corner, he stepped across it onto the perpendicular beam, and continued along. Bunny walked with more crispness, an almost martial precision. He carved his corners sharply and cleanly, paused a moment to give each new beam a quick scan, then started across it. Every man finds his own way. There is nothing in the apprentice training manual about walking steel. Some men walk with measured deliberateness, heel to toe, heel to toe, as if counting their steps. Others scurry across as if chased by the devil. New ironworkers often walk duck-footed, trying to maximize their lateral support. One veteran connector working in New York in the summer of 2001 leaned forward and bent his knees, contorting his body into an italicized S. He might have passed for an old woman with scoliosis but for the fact that he darted across the beam with astonishing speed. He brought to mind a python striking prey.

  Once an ironworker has learned to walk steel, he has to perform another kind of balancing act: finding the happy medium between comfort and fear. He must be comfortable up there to do the work, but it is possible, and risky, to be too comfortable. There are stories of men so relaxed they fell asleep while sitting on beams hundreds of feet over the ground.

  No one at Time Warner Center ever fell asleep, but an agile ironworker did once stop in the middle of a beam to light a cigarette, cupping the match from the wind gusts blowing off the river. Another man counted a wad of cash on a narrow beam. Two others stopped to share a joke, no more than a 10-inch width of steel underfoot—and a concrete floor 30 feet below—then, laughing, passed each other and continued on their separate ways. A young ironworker sprinted across a beam, taking the whole length of it in three or four strides, then leaped over a two-foot-wide gap onto the deck. He grabbed a tool and ran back exactly as he had come. He would either make a great ironworker or a dead one.

  According to John McMahon, who ran the Institute of the Ironworking Industry in Washington, D.C., until his retirement in the spring of 2001, it wasn’t the young rookie ironworkers who suffered the most accidents; it was the good experienced men. “We used to keep track—we don’t anymore—but we used to get all the reports that came in on the guys getting killed. And it would be amazing. You would think it would be either the apprentices or the old guys, but it’s not. It’s the guys who are at the absolute peak of their game, guys thirty to fifty, that’s when most them get hurt. You think, now how could this be? These guys are physically fit, they’re alert, they’re strong. I guess it’s a case of maybe taking things for granted. They forget to remember just how dangerous it is up there.”

  Forgetting to remember: this was the easiest way to get injured on a building. You might be walking along the decking at the top of the building and forget to re
member the two-foot-square hole cut in the corrugated metal. Or you might be laying out sections of decking to cover the beams and joist, a fairly simple procedure that caused an enormous number of accidents. A decker would set down a section of deck, then take a step back, forgetting to remember that he was working along the leading edge. (“Leading edge” being the term for that place where the metal ended and the open air began.) It was, strangely, deckers who suffered the highest rate of fatalities among structural ironworkers. Why? McMahon’s theory is that decking gives men a false sense of security. They’re more inclined to worry about falling when they’re walking a thin beam than when they’re standing on a sheet of corrugated metal.

  The history of ironworkers is replete with tales of men who died because they forgot to remember. Like the man working high on a tower of the George Washington Bridge in the early 1930s who burned through most of a steel beam with a torch, then stood up and stepped out onto the very piece he was cutting off. It snapped, he fell, the end. Where was his mind the moment before he made that dreadful choice? What was he thinking? What did he think the moment after?

  The right to space out is one most people take for granted. If an office worker sitting at his desk happens to lose himself for a few moments in a dreamy reverie, it’s no great matter. No one dies. Ironwork isn’t like that. The construction site of a steel-frame building is a three-dimensional field of hazards. Hazards come from above, from below, from every side, and a man up there has to stay alert to these hazards many hours a day. Spacing out can be lethal.