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

by Jim Rasenberger

  According to reservation lore, the women of Kahnawake imposed a condition on the men: they would no longer travel to jobs in large groups. Rather, they would spread out in smaller groups, minimizing the chances for wholesale slaughter of the sort that had occurred on the Quebec Bridge. It was thus, according to the lore, that men began “booming-out,” traveling in smaller groups to faraway places like Buffalo and Detroit and New York City.

  Mohawk ironworkers had been working as far south as New York well before the Quebec Bridge disaster—as early as 1901, in fact—but over the decade that followed they came in greater numbers. By the early 1920s, Mohawks were regularly crossing the border to work on bridges and buildings up and down the Eastern Seaboard, traveling together in tight four-man gangs, communicating on the steel in Mohawk, boarding together wherever they could find inexpensive housing. The practice was nearly halted in 1925 when an ironworker named Paul Diabo (a common surname at Kahnawake) was arrested for illegal immigration while working on the Delaware River Bridge at Philadelphia. Diabo’s case resulted in a landmark decision by a federal court in 1927. Citing the 150-year-old Jay Treaty, the judge ruled that Mohawks, whose land had once overlapped parts of both countries, were entitled to pass freely over the border from Canada into the United States.

  The ruling removed legal hurdles for the Mohawk itinerants but it didn’t make the commute any shorter. The drive between Kahnawake and New York still took nearly 12 hours, making frequent visits home impractical. In lieu of returning home to their families, many of the men moved their families down from the reservation to live with them near the job site. Communities of Mohawk ironworkers quickly grew up in sections of Philadelphia, Detroit, Boston, and, most significantly, in Brooklyn.

  The Brooklyn families lived close to each other in the neighborhood of North Gowanus (now Boerum Hill), around the intersection of Fourth Avenue and Atlantic Avenue. Over the next several decades, the Mohawks’ presence there grew into a full-fledged ethnic enclave. By 1950, at least 400 Mohawks lived in Brooklyn; as many as 800 were there by the end of the decade. Apartment buildings filled up with Mohawk families. Bernie’s Grocery on Atlantic Avenue sold a special cornmeal called “o-nen-sto” that the Indian housewives needed to make their boiled cornbread. The tiny Nevins Bar and Grill became known as “the Wigwam,” the center of the community where men could meet, learn of jobs, and keep in touch with home. Drawings of Iroquois warriors and photos of the Native American athlete Jim Thorpe decorated the walls, and the hard hats of Indian ironworkers who had died on the job were displayed as memorials. “The Greatest Iron Workers in the World Pass Thru These Doors,” read a sign posted at the entrance.

  The children attended the local public school or one of several parochial schools in the neighborhood. Most Mohawks still practiced Catholicism, but there were enough Protestant converts among them to inspire the local Presbyterian minister, Reverend David Cory, to learn Mohawk and offer a service every week to the Indians in their language. Cory’s church, the Cuyler Presbyterian on Pacific Street, became a gathering place for Presbyterians and Catholics alike.

  Ironically, even as Reverend Cory was learning Mohawk, the Indians were forgetting it. Their children were growing up on English—Brooklyn English, no less—and American television. Many of the young ironworkers married non-natives, Italian and Jewish and Puerto Rican women who lived in the neighborhood. Some even moved from Brooklyn to the suburbs of Long Island and New Jersey. They were partaking of that all-American rite of passage: assimilation.

  The Mohawks lived quietly in Brooklyn for a decade or two without much remark from others. They simply formed one of the many ethnic enclaves in the demographic stew that was New York. But in the middle of the century, white people—white journalists, more precisely—began to take notice. The city-dwelling “redmen” who performed death-defying stunts on steel proved irresistibly exotic.

  Joseph Mitchell deserves much of the credit, and blame, for sparking interest in the subject. His 1949 article for the The New Yorker, “Mohawks in High Steel,” described the settlement in Brooklyn and included a history of the itinerant Mohawks from Kahnawake, “the most footloose Indians in North America,” as Mitchell referred to them. While Mitchell’s article was clear-eyed and well grounded, it contained the seeds of a misconception that many white people, and some Indians, have held about Mohawk ironworkers ever since: that in addition to being footloose, they are preternaturally sure-footed; that they are innately endowed for life in high places and immune to fear of falling. It was Mitchell who first quoted a Dominion Bridge official’s opinion that the Indians were “agile as goats” and gladly would “walk a narrow beam high in the air with nothing below them but the river…and it wouldn’t mean any more to them than walking on the ground.”

  Several years after Mitchell’s article, National Geographic ran a profile of the Brooklyn Mohawks that gave this notion greater credence and wider circulation. “Why did the Caughnawaga Mohawks take so eagerly to this spine-chilling high-iron work?” the magazine wondered rhetorically. “The answer seems to lie in a puzzling characteristic found in many North American Indian tribes, and outstandingly in the Iroquois: they are almost completely lacking in fear of heights.” The magazine quoted an early eighteenth-century English surveyor named John Lawson, who wrote of the Tuscaroras, another Iroquois nation: “They will walk over deep Brooks and Creeks, on the smallest Poles, and that without any Fear or Concern. Nay, an Indian will walk on the Ridge of a Barn or House and look down the Gable-end and spit upon the Ground, as unconcerned as if he was walking on Terra firma.” Scientists, according to National Geographic, could not explain this peculiar behavior.

  In his Apologies to the Iroquois, published in 1959 (in a volume that included Mitchell’s article), the writer Edmund Wilson suggested that the Mohawks’ fearlessness derived from their earlier life in the forest, from scaling mountain peaks and canoeing in rapids. He also noted their habit of walking by “putting one foot in front of the other, instead of straddling as, when they see our tracks, we seem to them to do.” Presumably, this peculiar stride (which sounds more like that of a fashion model on a catwalk than an ironworker on steel) equipped them for traversing narrow surfaces.

  The claim for Mohawk fearlessness and sure-footedness has been repeated, with greater or lesser degrees of credulity, in countless newspaper and magazine articles. Alongside it has grown another popular idea: that only Indians have the capacity to walk high steel. “Virtually all of New York City’s skyline has been built by American Indians; Mohawk Indians,” began a brief article in Parade in 1982. The first misconception—that Mohawks are genetically equipped for life in high places—naturally gives rise to the second.

  In fact, Mohawks have never made up more than 15 percent of the ironworking force of the city. As for fear and agility, they exhibit no more or less of these than any of the other 85 percent of the men who walk steel for a living. Nor do they get injured or die less frequently than their Caucasian counterparts.

  Around the same time that journalists were discovering Mohawk ironworkers, a young Columbia University–trained anthropologist named Morris Frielich undertook a more scholarly study of the subject. He began hanging out as unobtrusively as possible at the Wigwam (he feared getting beaten up, he admitted), observing the behavior of the Mohawks. He published his findings in 1958.

  The Mohawks’ affinity for ironwork, both for its itinerancy and its danger, was best explained not by genetics, thought Frielich, but by cultural atavism. For hundreds of years, the role of the male in Iroquois society had been to leave his family for long periods of time to hunt and wage war. Working on high steel, a Mohawk man reprised his warrior role, traveling to perform acts of daring and either getting killed or returning home with booty (U.S. dollars, in this case). “Here in the world of men, one could fight, boast, talk men’s talk and be a warrior,” wrote Frielich. “Colloquially speaking the warrior returned to the tune of ‘Home the Conquering Hero Comes,’ and to hear
it again and again, he necessarily had to keep leaving for war.” In short, “that the formula ‘to be a man = to be a warrior’ changed in a relatively short time period to ‘to be a man = to be a steel worker’ was due to similarities in the essence of the two ways of life.”

  Frielich’s cultural explanation, while intriguing, is in some ways as problematic as the genetic explanation. The very existence of the place where he did much of his research—the Mohawk community in Brooklyn—seems to contradict his premise that Mohawk ironworkers were intent on getting away from their wives and families. Wouldn’t their role as warriors have played more convincingly if they’d kept the wife and kids up on the reservation while they whooped and plundered afar? Apparently, they felt the tug of other roles Frielich doesn’t consider: father and husband.

  What, then, does explain the persistence of Mohawks in high steel ironwork for 120 years? If you ask a Mohawk ironworker this question, he is likely to shrug and blame it on luck. “I’m just glad we didn’t go into plumbing,” is how a young ironworker named J. R. Phillips put it. “Nobody would be interested in us if we were plumbers.”

  Ironwork happened to become available to the Mohawks at a time when few occupations were open to them, and they were happy for it. They stuck with it because it paid well and they’d learned it well; it offered a lucrative, if perilous, niche. Were they good at it? Yes. Was it exciting work? Yes. Did it provide its practitioners with pride? Certainly. But in all likelihood, these were secondary considerations, and fortuity, not genetic or cultural destiny, best explains the Mohawks’ predilection for high steel; and practicality, not anthropology, best explains their footloose ways. In the end, the most remarkable aspect of the Mohawks’ itinerancy is not how far they went away from home but how much effort they always made to come back.

  In 1949, Joseph Mitchell wrote that the Mohawks showed signs of “permanence” in Brooklyn. Ten years later, their population there peaked at around 800. Ten years after that, they were all but gone. The Mohawks’ exit from Brooklyn was triggered, in part, by the soaring crime rates that hit New York City in the 1960s. At the same time, many native communities in the United States and Canada were undergoing cultural retrenchment, embracing their Indian heritage and rejecting assimilation into mainstream white culture. At Kahnawake, this new sentiment found expression in the growing popularity of the Longhouse religion, a traditionalist faith based on the teachings of an eighteenth-century Iroquois prophet named Handsome Lake. It found expression, as well, in the determination of many Mohawks to return and live on the reservation, on the land of their ancestors.

  The simplest explanation for why the Mohawks left Brooklyn, though, was neither crime nor culture. It was a highway. In the 1960s, Interstate 87 was extended north beyond Albany to the Canadian border. The new road, the Adirondack Northway, halved the driving time to Kahnawake, making weekly commutes plausible if not quite pleasurable. Now the ironworkers could board in Brooklyn during the week and return home to their families on the weekends. Which is what they have been doing, in greater or lesser numbers, ever since.

  HOME

  On a steamy Sunday afternoon in late July, Bunny drove to the outskirts of the reservation to visit his cousin’s grave. Kenneth McComber had been laid to rest in the wide yard between the Longhouse and the quiet two-lane highway leading out to the golf courses. A knee-high mound of dead flowers and bright ribbons marked the grave. Clumps of upturned dirt lay scattered in the grass. A holly bush and wildflowers grew nearby. Bunny stood at the grave for a few minutes, his hands tucked into the pockets of his cut-offs, then turned and walked across the yard to the Longhouse. His flip-flops skimmed through the grass.

  The front door of the Longhouse was unlocked. Bunny pulled it open and stepped inside. The air was cool and smelled of cut pine. Everything was wood—floor, ceiling, walls, benches—except the iron stoves at each end and the light fixtures hanging from the ceiling. Afternoon sun slanted through the windows. A month earlier, the Longhouse had been filled with the grief and tears of mourners. Now it was empty and tranquil. According to Handsome Lake, the Iroquois founder of the Longhouse religion, the spirits of the dead rise into the sky and travel the Sky Road (the Milky Way) to heaven. That is where Kenneth McComber had gone now. The light in heaven was forever dazzling, promised Handsome Lake, and the air was fragrant with the sweetness of wild raspberries that grew there in abundance.

  Back outside, Bunny ducked into his car. He turned out of the parking lot onto Route 207. The windows were open and the radio was set to K103, Kahnawake’s local radio station. Bunny smoked and piloted the big sedan toward the center of the reservation. He was subdued, maybe pensive after the visit to his cousin’s grave or maybe just listening to the music. It was a Sunday afternoon. Earlier in the day he’d taken one of his daughters into Montreal to go shopping. Soon he’d go home and eat dinner with his family, then lie down for an hour or two before setting out for New York.

  Bunny cruised down Old Malone’s Highway, a sort of main street for the reservation, lined with gas stations and shops and restaurants. He waved to a guy passing the other way in a pickup, then turned off Old Malone’s into the welter of side streets.

  It is one of the oddities of modern Kahnawake that most of its streets still follow the maze of the dirt trails scuffed out by ancestors who lived on the reservation hundreds of years ago. As a result, it is entirely possible for an outsider to believe he is driving east for ten minutes and end up, somehow, west of where he started. To make navigating somewhat more challenging to the outsider—and this must be partly the point—none of the streets off Old Malone’s Highway are named. Street names are unnecessary in a community where everybody already knows where everybody else lives.

  Other than the streets, which have always been loopy and nameless, life has changed considerably on the reservation over the last century. No longer does Kahnawake resemble the small rustic village with outlying farms that it was at the time of the Quebec Bridge disaster. The population has quadrupled to 8,000. The Catholic Church now shares its formerly exclusive metaphysical turf with Pentecostals and Presbyterians and the followers of the Longhouse. The town’s infrastructure is thoroughly modern. Plumbing did not arrive here until the late 1950s, but you’d never know it from the countless swimming pools shimmering in backyards.

  Altogether, Kahnawake is a prosperous, even idyllic place where you can feel, at moments, as if you’ve stepped back in time—not to 1907 but to 1957, to a suburban tableau of kids in bathing suits sprinting across lawns from house to house, pool to pool, and young moms calling to each other over back fences, while friendly local police officers (they’re called Peacekeepers here) glide by in cherry tops, waving through open windows. Crime is low. Families usually live in close proximity to each other, brother by brother, adult children near elderly parents. On summer weekends, the reservation gives itself over to recreation, to the bustling community pool and the canoe club, to speedboating on the river, and, most of all, to golf. No less than four golf courses accommodate the residents of the reservation. This is one of the other oddities of Kahnawake: there must be as many acres of links per capita here as anywhere in the world.

  Bunny drove by the canoe club and the community pool, then turned at the old stone church, the Mission of St. Francis Xavier. Beyond the church, the St. Lawrence glinted and boats plied the Seaway. Farther along the river, children played lacrosse on the wide green lawn next to the Cultural Center. An odd dark structure rose from the grass there: two steel columns, about 10 yards apart, joined at the top by a steel crossbeam. It looked like the sort of modern sculpture you might expect to find on the campus of a well-endowed liberal arts college, but in fact its purpose was sport, not art. The steel had been erected some years ago for field day competitions. Ironworkers would take turns racing up and down the columns (sometimes greased to make the sport a little more interesting). Bunny remembered the competition from his childhood as a thrilling event, but it had been stopped years ago. �
��Too many guys were getting their pride hurt, I think is what happened.”

  As Bunny continued along the river, he passed a tall steel cross erected in 1907 to commemorate the dead of the Quebec Bridge—a reminder that the pleasures of life at Kahnawake have not come cheaply—then drove through a tunnel under the railroad tracks. He turned sharply into a small gravel lot and parked. He got out and walked to the steps that rose to the bluff where the tracks ran. A uniformed sentry came out of a small shack near the tracks. “Where are you going?” she asked Bunny.

  “Out onto the bridge. Any trains coming?”

  She gave him a once-over, enough to satisfy herself that he was a Kahnawake Mohawk and therefore entitled to trespass. “You’ve got some time,” she responded casually, then stepped back into the shack.

  On the sentry’s vague assurance—some time, whatever that meant—Bunny climbed the stairs to the railroad tracks, then started walking across the short drawbridge that spanned the Seaway. He continued out onto the dark steel of the Canadian Pacific Railroad bridge.

  This latter bridge is the rebuilt version of the Canadian Pacific Railroad span where Mohawk ironworkers got their start in 1886: the same Black Bridge where Bunny, and so many other young Mohawks, first pitted their skill and courage against high steel. A great many stories regarding the Black Bridge circulate around Kahnawake. Some of these stories involve daredevil stunts, like the one about the boys who rode their bikes over the bridge—not on the rail bed, which would have been challenging enough, but on the 16-inch-wide top chord of the bridge. One ironworker dismissed this account as extremely unlikely—The top chord? Ridiculous!—then proceeded to tell a story of a fire-breathing white horse that haunted the bridge, which he swore was absolutely true.