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

by Jim Rasenberger

  Economics was, as always, the ostensible reason to build high: as real estate prices rose, it only made sense for builders to add vertical square footage. That said, it wasn’t always clear whether real estate prices were driving skyscrapers upwards or skyscrapers were driving real estate prices upwards. Because the capacity to build high on a plot of land automatically increased its value, builders had to build high to recoup real estate costs. “If laws were passed restricting the height of buildings here as height is restricted in London,” wrote architect Harvey Wilson Corbett in 1929, “the price of our most valuable parcels of land would drop at least sixty percent.”

  Economics did not adequately justify very tall buildings in Manhattan in any case, for at a certain point the price of the structure canceled out any possible income to be derived from it. And economics did not explain why tall buildings continued to rise, ever more urgently, through the late ’20s, even though the real estate market was already glutted with office space by 1927. Clearly, the bottom line wasn’t driving the skyline.

  The truth is, tall buildings told more about American swagger and one-upmanship than about the rational application of greed. This truth was demonstrated in the spring of 1929, when two buildings—or, more accurately, the egos of the men who financed and designed them—competed to vault past the Woolworth Building and claim the title as supreme master of the skies. One of these men, Walter Chrysler, founder and president of Chrysler Motors, had hired the architect William Van Alen to design an appropriate object of grandeur as his headquarters. No sooner had Van Alen finished his plans for an 808-foot tower than an architect named H. Craig Severance announced that his Bank of Manhattan building at 40 Wall Street would be 840 feet tall, or 32 feet higher than the Chrysler. As it happened, Severance and Van Alen were ex-partners who despised each other, so the competition to build the highest building in the world became intensely personal. Through the summer, the buildings rose, four miles apart. The architects fiddled with their plans and jockeyed for position. By autumn, the Bank of Manhattan appeared the winner at 927 feet. But Van Alen had a final trick up—or rather down—his sleeve: a stainless-steel pole, 185 feet long, that ironworkers secretly assembled inside a shaft in the center of the building’s peak. On October 16, the ironworkers hoisted the pole out through the top of the roof. The Chrysler was now 1,046 feet tall, over a hundred feet taller than the Bank of Manhattan.

  The press called the competition the “Race Into the Sky,” but it hadn’t been a race, exactly, for victory went to the highest, not the fastest. (In fact, the Bank of Manhattan had gone up much faster than the Chrysler.) What this competition really resembled was two boys standing back to back on their tippy-tippy toes, then brushing their hair up into a ducks’ bill to gain a few inches on each other. There was nothing intrinsically significant about the outcome. The Chrysler Building “won” with a steel pole—an uninhabitable, decorative, eminently useless pole. How odd that skyscrapers, born 45 years earlier of practicality and common sense, had come to this.

  But somehow this “race,” and all that useless height, mattered. It captured the exuberance of the 1920s and seemed to suggest deeper truths about America, land of the skyscraper. Skyscrapers had graduated from mere real estate and become symbols—the primary symbol—of everything that was extraordinary about this country, including its ingenuity and its ambition, but also of what was a little scary and silly about it: the grown men up on their tippy-tippy toes, doing whatever it took to win.

  A writer named Edmund Littell visited the Chrysler Building and the Bank of Manhattan while they were going up. For him, the most compelling participants in the “race” weren’t the architects or the financiers, but the men who were out there on the steel. “Yes, here it is that real battles…are being waged, and here is where the romance of the skyscrapers is being worked out. Up there in his habitation of height and steel the ironworker heaves himself from one beam to another, upward, always upward—his shoulders bulging, his knees tense, but his face as placid as the blue sky only an arm’s reach beyond him.”

  Never had there been a finer time to be an ironworker than in the late 1920s. Putting aside labor disputes for a moment, and ignoring the fact that most of the ironworkers were employed under open-shop conditions the union had been fighting against for years, the work was abundant and the money was good—$14 a day in New York by 1926, $15 a couple of years later. Itinerancy was a constant, but the travel had been eased considerably by automobiles, the inexpensive “flivvers” that ironworkers earned enough to own and fuel.

  The work was less dangerous, too. Derrick floors were more likely to be planked, and men were less likely to engage in the perilous practice of riding loads up from the street. “Nowadays, of course it’s different,” commented a veteran ironworker named Bill Ritchie, who figured he’d seen about forty men fall to their deaths. “Hardly anyone gets hurt. Not what I call hurt.” Ironworkers still suffered about twice as many accidents as general construction workers or coal miners, but the odds that a man would make it to old age were certainly better than they’d been when Bill Ritchie entered the trade.

  The greatest difference in the now prolonged lives of ironworkers was how they were perceived by the public: with admiration and respect rather than fear and loathing. The whole city seemed suddenly enthralled by these high-steel men. Crowds gathered at every new steel frame to watch them walk beams overhead or illicitly ride loads of steel hundreds of feet over the street.

  Journalistic emissaries from terra firma made frequent excursions skyward and brought back breathless reports for popular magazines like Collier’s and Literary Digest and The American Magazine. The writers told tales of falls and near falls and related encounters with remarkably fearless men who, in the words of one writer, did “a good deal of strolling on the thin edge of nothingness.” Their feats were prodigious. Even their appetites were prodigious. One ironworker named Binzen, Collier’s informed its readers, sat on a beam 38 stories above the ground and ate “four three-ply beef sandwiches, two bananas, two apples, a quarter of a four-story cake, a pint of black high-voltage coffee and a load of scrap eating tobacco.”

  In years to come, Indians and raising gangs would get star billing, but now it was Scandinavians and riveting gangs. The square-rigger days were long gone, but the squareheads still had it in their blood, or so they said, and every magazine story featured a “Swede” named Gunderson or Hagstrom or Sorenson. As for the riveting gangs, they were nothing new to Manhattan, but the higher the buildings rose, the more spectacular their feats appeared—the heater tossing his white-hot rivets in “hissing parabolas” (Collier’s), the catcher snatching them from the air, as insouciant and consistent as Babe Ruth at Yankee Stadium. “There, in the windy reaches of the unfinished frame,” wrote C. G. Poore in the New York Times Magazine, “they put on a show that most unfailingly delights the crowd below.”

  As magazines provided the public with close-up views of life on the girders, daily newspapers published stories of off-the-steel escapades that seemed to confirm the ironworkers’ reputation as daredevils and lunatics. In 1925, Joseph Maloney, an ironworker from the Bronx, bet his friends a dollar that he could climb the brick façade of an apartment building. He’d almost made it to the fourth floor when police reached out and hauled him in through a window. He didn’t get to keep his dollar but he got his name in the papers. The kind of man who would climb a brick wall for a dollar was a man born for exaltation in the 1920s.

  Probably no ironworker expressed the spirit of the age more dramatically, and more succinctly, than James Bennet. Bennet had been committed to the Manhattan State Hospital for the Insane on Wards Island after suffering delusions that he was a famous inventor. On an autumn morning in 1929, a few weeks before the stock market went into free fall, he escaped from the hospital and climbed up a pier of the Hell’s Gate Bridge. “Stay where you are,” the ironworker shouted at an attendant who tried to follow him. “I know what you are after. You want to lock me u
p so you can get my invention.” For six hours, as a crowd of thousands watched from below, police chased Bennet through the steel superstructure of the bridge, but none of the officers could match his climbing skill. Finally, a policeman named Charles Saeger of the Marine Division snuck up on Bennet and grabbed him. The two men tussled for 10 minutes on a catwalk 135 feet over the deadly cross-currents of the East River. Several times, to the gasps of onlookers, they nearly tumbled off together, but at last Saeger managed to get the ironworker into an arm-lock and subdue him. Police tied Bennet up and lowered him from the bridge with a rope. “Gosh,” said a woman spectator holding a baby, “that was better than a movie thriller.”

  In fact, the DeMille film company had already produced a movie about ironworkers in 1928, but it was more of a “farcical melodrama,” as one reviewer put it, than a thriller. Skyscraper starred William Boyd as a riveter named Blondy working on a skyscraper with his best friend, Swede. They were “bang-’em and slam-’em rough neck riveters, flirting with death far above the street,” according to the film’s ad copy. The plot involved Blondy falling in love with a dancing girl, but the real subject of the movie was the high jinks of ironworkers. There were practical jokes and fistfights, harrowing close calls and, inevitably, death. It was not a good movie (“A wild attempt to glorify the steel riveter,” is how the unimpressed Times dismissed it), but that hardly mattered. The age of the ironworker had arrived, not only in New York but all the way across the country in Hollywood, in the very city where ironworkers had been convicted, not so long ago, of extraordinary crimes.

  HEROES

  A few weeks after the ironworker James Bennet climbed into the steel trestle of the Hell’s Gate Bridge, the exuberance of the 1920s came to an abrupt end. The stock market crashed in late October and the economy tumbled wildly. In a matter of months, businesses shut their doors and thousands of workers found themselves on the street with nowhere to go and little to do but loiter on corners and watch the escapades in the air.

  The ironworkers were lucky, at least initially. Many of the buildings conceived in the height of the boom were too far along to halt. Among these was the grandest and tallest of them all, the Empire State Building.

  The Empire State Building was the brainchild of two immigrants’ sons who rose to the height of power in New York. John Jacob Raskob was a prominent millionaire; Al Smith had been the governor of New York. The wisdom of adding 85 stories—2,158,000 square feet—of office space to a city that needed exactly none was questionable, but when it came to the construction of the building, the decisions of Raskob and Smith were generally sound. Their best decision was to hire the construction firm of Starrett Brothers & Eken.

  The Starrett brothers, William and Paul, were living biographies of the skyscraper age. Born in Kansas, they moved as children to Chicago with their three other brothers (two of whom also became well-regarded builders). They were young men in Chicago as skyscrapers began to rise there. Both Paul and William eventually went to work for the George A. Fuller Company and moved to New York in time to help build the Flatiron Building. Since then, a Starrett had had a hand in nearly every important skyscraper in the city.

  The Starrett brothers had a reputation for working fast; these were the contractors, after all, who managed to erect the steel of the Bank of Manhattan Building in three months. Now they resolved to outdo every record of construction they or anyone else had ever set. The average rate for setting steel in those days—it’s still true today—was about two floors a week. The Starretts, with Post & McCord as their steel erector, intended to set four floors a week at the start, then five floors a week as the building rose and narrowed, and they intended to do this without resorting to costly overtime. The only way to succeed was with planning and organization, and with a force of ironworkers willing to work like hell.

  Post & McCord hired two companies to fabricate the steel, American Bridge Company and McClintic-Marshall. The order for 57,000 tons of steel—almost 50 percent more steel than had been used in the Chrysler and the Bank of Manhattan combined—was the largest in history. U.S. Steel milled the shapes at its plants near Pittsburgh, then shipped them to the fabrication shops, where the columns and beams were cut and hole-punched to specifications. The steel was then shipped by rail to Bayonne, New Jersey, stacked and sorted, floated by barge to docks on the East River, and finally hauled by truck to 33rd Street and Fifth Avenue. Enormous derricks bowed and lifted whole loads in a single pick. As the building rose beyond 30 stories, relay derricks lifted the steel partway, then erection derricks lifted it to the top. From the moment the rolled steel came out of the mill to the moment the raising gangs slipped in the first temporary bolts, the journey took as little as 80 hours.

  None of the Starretts’ methods of construction were exactly revolutionary; most were techniques that had been honed since they were young men in Chicago, and since that day long ago when William Starrett hired Sam Parks to push his riveting gang. The incredible speed they achieved, as Paul Starrett acknowledged, was facilitated by the simplicity of the structure. The frame of the Empire State was made up of classic box-shaped grids, with lots of repetition from floor to floor. As a result, the builders could achieve an assembly line–like efficiency. In many ways, the Empire State was the ultimate triumph of Taylorism applied to construction. But this was a humanized version of Taylorism. The Starretts did not use men up and spit them out; indeed, they paid a good deal of attention to their employees’ comfort and safety. Rumor had it that as many as 48 men died during the building’s construction; in fact, just five men died, a remarkably low number for the day.

  “[W]hile the theorists lament that the machine age is making robots and automatons of all men,” wrote Margaret Norris after visiting the Empire State during its construction, “here is one type of workman, the steel man, the very spirit of the skyscraper, a direct product of the power age, whose personality the machine exalts.” Ironworkers reconciled the two opposing ideas of a worker, one as an efficient automaton, the other as an autonomous individual of spectacular achievement. It was a combination that both capitalists and the proletariat alike could share, admire, and mythologize.

  As it happened, the perfect mythmaker was on hand. He was Lewis Hine, a shy 56-year-old photographer who’d made his reputation years earlier photographing the poor and the vanquished inside coal mines, sweatshops, and overcrowded tenements. The assignment to photograph workers on the Empire State Building was an odd one for Hine, as his employers were the capitalistic builders. In lesser hands, the job might have amounted to that of corporate flak. Hine turned it into exhilarating art. He climbed out onto the steel with the ironworkers and dangled from a derrick cable hundreds of feet above the city to capture, as no one ever had before (or has since) the dizzy work of building skyscrapers. His subjects sit or stand on minuscule purchases, the street a thin gray strip below. They hang off guy wires and catch forbidden rides on the steel balls of derricks. To Hine, many of these men were “heroes,” and he portrayed them in heroic poses, shirtless and musclebound, with strong jaw lines and sun-bleached hair.

  One of Hine’s heroes was a young connector named Victor Gosselin, known as “Frenchy.” Born and raised in Montreal, Frenchy had been an ironworker for 15 years when he got to the Empire State Building. Before that, he’d been a sailor, a lumberjack, and a deep-sea diver. He’d traveled all over the country, and to France and Persia. He’d been everywhere and tried everything. In Hine’s photographs, Frenchy is shirtless and wears cut-off blue jeans that reveal scrapes and bruises on his legs. Why a connector, who slides up and down rusted steel columns all day, would wear shorts is beyond imagining, but there he is, riding the derrick ball, handsome and swashbuckling, a half grin on his face. In one shot, his cut-off shorts ride up his legs like a chorus girl’s.

  “Frenchy” on the Empire State by Lewis Wickes Hine.

  (Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York)

  “It’s funny about thi
s business,” Frenchy said one afternoon while chomping a huge steak sandwich on the edge of the 84th floor. “Everybody seems to think you have to be a superman or something to work on steel. Of course, it ain’t no picnic, but then there’s lots of jobs I’d pass up for this. I wouldn’t wanna be no taxi driver, for instance. Looka them down there, dodging in and outa that traffic all day long. A guy’s apt to get killed that way.”

  Frenchy himself had come close to getting killed in falls several times. He’d seen dozens of men die. He’d seen many men lose their nerve. And what did his wife think of his work?

  “She don’t think nothin’ about it,” shrugged Frenchy. “You don’t see Lindbergh’s wife telling him he can’t fly around in airplanes, do you? All she ever said about it was, ‘Good-by, baby; don’t get hurt.’”

  Sometimes titled “Lunchtime on a Beam” or simply “Men on a Beam,” this famous photograph was shot in late September of 1932, 800 feet over Sixth Avenue during the construction of the RCA Building, as part of an elaborate Rockefeller Center publicity effort. It is often taken, incorrectly, for a Lewis Hine photo; in fact, it was shot by a publicity photographer named Hamilton Wright, Jr. As for the identity of the ironworkers, many Mohawks are convinced that the fourth from the left is Joe Jocks of Kahnawake, while Newfoundlanders insist that the shirtless man in the middle is Ray Costello of Conception Harbour. Captions on other photographs taken that same day identify the three men on the far left as John O’Rielly [sic], George Covan, and Joseph Eckner. The shirtless man whom Newfoundlanders believe to be Ray Costello is identified elsewhere as Howard Kilgore (though people who knew Costello swear it’s he) and the next three are identified as William Birger, Joe Curtis, and John Portla. The name of the man on the far right, drinking from a flask during Prohibition, is not recorded.