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

by Jim Rasenberger

  Early spring was the seal fishery. Sealing, or “swiling,” as Newfoundlanders call it, was an even more treacherous business than cod fishing. The men would sign on for a berth on a schooner out of Conception Bay or St. John’s and sail “down to the Labrador”—actually, hundreds of miles to the north. Starting out in early March, the schooners battered their way into the loose ice pack flowing south out of the Baffin Islands. For a short season, no more than a few weeks, mother seals gave birth to their young on the moving pans of ice. The baby seals, called whitecoats, were the prey of the hunt.

  Once the schooners were lodged in the ice pack, the men went over the side and hiked for miles on a rough landscape of pressure ridges and slushy troughs, jumping from ice pan to ice pan, often venturing beyond sight of the ship. Finally, they would spy the seals, thousands of whelping pups grouped together in herds—“whelping ice,” it was called. Killing the whitecoats was a matter of walking up to them and whacking them on the head with a gaff. That was the easy part. Afterward, the men gutted the carcasses with sculping knives, then hauled the hides back to the boat as the sun fell and the sky turned dark, with the prospect of sleeping on a ship oozing seal blood and grease. The ship would have tens of thousands of pelts stowed aboard before the trip was done, as many as 50,000 in a bumper season.

  The seal hunt was a gory and brutal business, and it did little to enrich the men who partook in it, since most of the profit went to the ship owners and the captains. Sealing was also, on the face of it, ludicrously risky. Ships routinely got locked in the ice. When this happened, the crew would try to tow the ship by rope and hand to freedom, exploding dynamite to loosen the surrounding ice. This failing, they might abandon the ship and try to walk to land, many miles over drifting ice. Sometimes they made it, sometimes not.

  Men died on the seal hunt even barring these larger calamities. A storm might come up and they would lose their way back to the ship and freeze to death out on the ice field. Or they might find themselves on a pan of ice that had broken free from the pack, surrounded by dead seals, floating out to oblivion. Altogether, it was a hard, dangerous, ruthless business. It was also excellent training for an ironworker.

  THE HIGH LIFE

  No one knows exactly when the first Newfoundlander left the water and took to ironwork, but the turn of the last century is a good bet. A ship from Conception Harbour or St. John’s probably sailed down the New England seaboard, to the “Boston states” with a catch of fish to sell. Aboard that ship was a restless young man from the head of Conception Bay. When his ship docked in Boston, or perhaps it was New York or Philadelphia, he jumped off during shore leave, took a stroll around the city, and marveled at the tall buildings and sweeping bridges. He found his way to a skyscraper under construction, watched the men work, inquired how much they earned, and liked the sound of it. He let the ship sail home without him.

  The Newfoundlander would have been a natural for the work. Like the Scandinavians who were already common in the trade by 1900, he would have possessed the sea legs and the rigging skills that were so important to the job. He also would have been accustomed to working hard under risky circumstances and not fretting too much about it. Compared to hauling seal carcasses across a shifting ice field in the Labrador, or climbing a ship’s mast on a stormy sea, the feat of balancing on a steel beam several hundred feet above the streets of New York was a cakewalk.

  The lore around the head of Conception Bay has it that the original Fish ironworker was Frank “Red” Treahy (pronounced Treddy) from Conception Harbour. Those who later worked with Treahy say he was a tireless and prodigious ironworker, the kind of man who would show up an hour early at a job site and leave an hour late; the kind of man, in other words, employers love. According to lore, Treahy sent word back home of this new lucrative trade, and other men followed him to the States. When he vouched for a fellow Newfoundlander, contractors took his word.

  Whether on Treahy’s invitation or their own initiative, other Newfoundlanders were working steel in the States by the turn of the century. Evidence of this hangs on a living room wall in Bayside, Queens, at the home of a retired ironworker named Jack Costello and his wife, Kitty. Like Joe Lewis, Jack Costello was born and raised in Conception Harbour. Unlike Joe, he moved to New York as a young man and has lived there as an American citizen ever since.

  When a guest visits, Jack and Kitty steer him to a wall on which hang three framed photographs. Jack points to an old black-and-white print of two serious-looking young men posed formally in a photographer’s studio. They sport thick moustaches and identical uniforms, probably in anticipation of a Labor Day parade. Badges on their lapels read “International Association of Bridge and Structural Ironworkers.” The men appear to be in their late 20s.

  “His name was Tim Costello,” says Jack. “He was my grandfather.”

  “And the taller man on the right was Charles Newbury,” says Kitty. “He was my grandfather.”

  “My grandfather,” continues Jack, “was born in Conception Harbour in 1869. He can’t be older than thirty there.” Meaning the photograph must have been taken around 1900.

  “Your grandfathers knew each other?”

  “Oh, they were good friends,” says Kitty, clearly relishing her guest’s astonishment.

  “Now look at this,” says Jack, pointing to another studio photograph. Two different young men, some years later. “This was taken in the twenties, we think in New York. These are our fathers.”

  “So your fathers were friends, too?”

  “Best friends,” says Kitty, grinning.

  Finally, hanging between these two old black-and-white photographs, is a color photograph from the mid-1990s. This one shows Jack and Kitty’s three sons, two of whom are currently ironworkers. A concise history of Newfoundland ironworkers—four generations, including Jack himself—is contained in that living room in Bayside.

  Jack Costello’s grandfather, Tim Costello, deserves as much credit as anyone for stocking the trade of ironwork with Newfoundlanders. Even as he worked steel in New York, he returned home often enough to sire nine children. Seven of the nine were boys, and every one of them grew up to be an ironworker. Each of these seven sons then had a large family, and all of their sons—Jack and his many first cousins—became ironworkers in the 1940s and 1950s. By the time Jack and Kitty married in 1960 and started raising little ironworkers of their own, the name Costello was ubiquitous among ironworkers in New York.

  This same pattern of proliferation occurred in other large Catholic families from the head of Conception Bay. They sent five or six boys at a time to Boston or Philadelphia or New York to become ironworkers. Whichever city the men settled in, they tended to lodge near each other. In Brooklyn, young men who had grown up a mile or two apart at the head of the bay pressed into rooming houses around Ninth Street and Fifth Avenue. Many of the married men had left their families back home, but others brought their wives and children along, and together they made a Little Newfoundland neighborhood in Park Slope: the bars where the men gathered after work, the living rooms and kitchens where they socialized on weekends, St. Thomas Aquinas church on Sundays. One of the peculiarities of the arrangement was that men who left their families back in Newfoundland came to know their fellow Brooklyn Newfoundlanders better than they knew their own wives and children. So while young Kitty Newbury, born and raised in Brooklyn, saw her future father-in-law nearly every weekend—she called him Uncle Willie—Jack Costello, growing up in a house on the Pinch, saw his own father but once a year.

  The married men must have experienced occasional carnal temptations, 1,400 miles from home and wives 11 months of the year, but the presence of other Newfoundlander families, and the ties to home they represented, tended to keep the men on even moral keels. As for the wives back home, there was little chance of their straying from the bonds of matrimony. Their workloads, as they singlehandedly raised large broods in small houses without benefit of electricity, running water, oil heat, or refriger
ation—while also tending vegetable gardens, caring for livestock, and making nearly every financial and parenting decision alone—would have made the very idea laughable. In any case, there were few men around other than the priest, who must have been pleased knowing that when sex did occur, it was demonstrably procreational. You could plot a man’s visits home by his children’s birthdays.

  At mid-century, as post-war America marched steadily toward its modern destiny of steel and automobiles and electronics, the people of Conception Harbour continued to live a kind of rural existence most Americans had left behind in the nineteenth century. Cars were rare and roads were dirt. Fires and kerosene lamps provided indoor light, and the only radio in town was a battery-operated device owned by Master Keating, the school headmaster. Electricity was ten years off. So was plumbing. Medical care was rudimentary. Doctor O’Keefe from Avondale, the only physician for miles around, doubled as the dentist, pulling teeth without novocaine. Babies were delivered at home by Agnes Walsh, the midwife.

  It was Agnes Walsh who delivered Joe Lewis on July 4, 1945, in an upstairs bedroom of a small white saltbox, just down the street from the house where Joe’s mother lives today. At the time of Joe’s birth, his mother, Bride, was a pretty young woman, barely 20. His father, Moses, was a 28-year-old ironworker.

  Joe began his education in a one-room schoolhouse on the Pinch. Older boys attended Master Keating’s Academy near the church, while older girls attended the convent school. Discipline was strict and harsh, the slightest infraction met by a sound strapping. Greater infractions were handled by the priest, Father Casey, the voice of patriarchal certitude in a place where adult men were scarce.

  For all the punishment and privation, life was hardly dour. On the contrary, people who grew up in Conception Harbour remember it as an idyllic place. Children were free to wander as they pleased, to fish and swim and climb trees in search of robins’ eggs. In August, the annual garden party drew people from all over the head of the bay to the church lawn. Winters were magnificently cold and snowy and brought different excitements. There was skating on Healy’s Pond and sledding down Lewis’s hill or over the other side of the Pinch into Colliers. At Christmas, gifts were rare but fathers came home and pigs were slaughtered, so for once there was meat instead of tiresome fish.

  Joe Lewis, like most of the children in town, did not see much of his father. Even when Moses Lewis was home from ironworking he spent most of his time cutting firewood for the long winter. Two hundred years of human habitation had stripped the shore clean of trees, so Moses and the other men woke before dawn and rode horseback inland for several hours to the forest. By the time they cut the wood and hauled it back home, the December sky was well past dark.

  But the moments Joe spent with his father he would not forget, for Moses Lewis—Mose, everybody called him—was one to leave an indelible impression. He was a high-spirited, fun-loving man, “always jolly and laughing, steady-go,” as Joe recalls. “And everybody that knew him, they’d say, ‘Oh, your father, he was something else, he was some fellow to be around.’”

  One of Mose’s friends had a car, among the first in town, and Joe remembers how as a small boy he’d squeeze into the rumble seat in back with his father and they’d drive out to Bacon’s Cove, where his father was born, speeding along the church road on the high bluff above the sea, laughing and singing. There was always singing when Mose Lewis was around. He loved to sing, and was much admired for his voice. One ballad Joe recalls his father singing, called “Babe in the Woods,” told the story of a mother searching for her lost children. It was 46 verses long and took over half an hour to complete. His father knew every word.

  Both of Joe’s parents were gifted musicians, so it was no surprise that their children proved to be quick studies. Moses taught Joe, the eldest of the ten children, how to play the fiddle. He started him on a simple jig, “Maple Sugar.” Joe picked it up effortlessly and he, in turn, helped the younger ones learn. On Saturday evenings, Mose would chug up the hill to Doyle’s tavern and return home with a dozen friends, men and women, and they would gather in the kitchen around a pot of soup and sing. Much of the singing was a cappella, but when the adults wanted instrumental accompaniment, they turned to Joe and his siblings. The children would take turns playing fiddle or accordion, and afterward one of the men would say, “Come here, little fellow, ’tills I give ya some money,” and hand Joe or one of the others a coin. Joe loved music, and he liked the idea of making money from music. He thought that instead of becoming an ironworker, like his father, perhaps he’d be a musician when he grew up.

  On a summer day in 1958, Joe and two friends walked out to the great blueberry patch at the Cat Hill Gullies, about seven miles inland from the sea. Joe, now 13, had recently become interested in girls, and he and his friends had taken to hanging out in the shadows of the big stone tolt that jutted up along the road between Avondale and Conception Harbour. Teenagers would congregate and stroll along the lane under the tolt, flirting and teasing. Joe and his friends had set their sights on a few pretty Avondale girls they’d met under the tolt. When the boys caught wind of the girls’ plan to go blueberry picking in the Cat Hill Gullies, a cluster of ponds and thickets, they conspired to try a little blueberry picking themselves.

  “Oh, jeez, they had big buckets already full with a few gallons by the time we got there,” recalls Joe 43 years later. “We only had little cans, little bean cans, probably not even a pint. We were just going to chase ’em, that’s all. We started chatting and following them around in the berries. Well, I guess they knew what we were about, and told us to go on back home. ‘Go on and get a bucket,’ they said, ‘never mind your bean cans.’ Before we goes, though, I spoke to her. I don’t remember what I said. Probably something foolish.” The girl to whom he uttered his foolish words had auburn hair and freckles, and her name was Beverly Moore.

  Joe wasn’t sure he was in love—he was just a kid, after all—but he would never regret that walk to the blueberry patch at Cat Hill Gullies. He had his sweetheart, he had his music, and for the next two years, he was as contented as a boy could be.

  Joe was visiting his friend Frankie Mahoney’s house on a June afternoon in 1961, sitting on the couch and watching the Mahoneys’ new television, one of the first in town, when the front door opened and the priest walked in. Not Father Casey, who was on vacation, but his stand-in, young Father Hearn. “Joe, I got bad news for you, son,” blurted out the nervous priest. “Your father has died.” Joe did not hear any more. He got to his feet and ran out through the Mahoneys’ front door onto the street. He ran all the way home, tears streaming from his face, then ran up the stairs into his room—the room he shared with three of his brothers—and cried without pause for two days.

  Joe’s father had been working up north in Labrador on a steel-enforced dam near Churchill Falls. A poorly moored derrick toppled and fell onto him, killing him instantly. He was 43 years old. His widow, Bride, was 35. The 10 children ranged from a baby girl of 8 months to Joe, at 15.

  “Oh, man, it was something. I think music is what kept us together through that,” Joe recalls. “There’s something about music, when you’re playing it, your mind thinks of nothin’ else. It just goes into the music. We all got together in the kitchen, and we played and played, until my mother begged us to stop.”

  There wasn’t much time for grieving. Joe, as eldest, was the man of the family now. Money would come later from the union and from a settlement with the steel company, but even then it would be hard going for a family of 11. So a few months after his father died, Joe boarded a plane and flew to Labrador City to find a job at the iron ore mines. A man who knew Joe’s father hired him to clean the miner’s bunkhouse. Joe did that for a few months, got lonely and went home, then returned to Labrador. The spring he was sixteen he signed on for the seal hunt—still active in the 1960s—but found he had no heart for the brutal work. “I let ’em go,” says Joe. “I didn’t want to kill ’em. They were too cute to
kill, like little puppy dogs.”

  While Joe was shuttling back and forth to Labrador, Beverly Moore had moved to New York, where her father was an ironworker. There was nothing in Conception Harbour for Joe now. It was time to make a move and earn real money. So he got on a bus and traveled 1,300 miles west to Toronto. He kicked around at a few jobs there, none of which paid well or gave much satisfaction. All along Joe knew what he wanted to do. It was the last thing on earth he should have wanted to do, but he wanted to do it anyway. One evening he sat down and wrote a letter to his mother telling her that he’d made up his mind: he was going into ironwork. She wrote back at once. You will do no such thing, she instructed him. Your father was an ironworker. Don’t you know he got killed? Don’t you know the danger? You’ll probably end up the same way he did.

  Joe read the letter through a few times, and then wrote his response. It was already decided, he told his mother. The money was good, and they needed it. He would be all right. He would take good care of himself.

  He neglected to tell her how afraid he was. He knew very well the dangers of the job, and was none too fond of heights, either. Yet there was something about it that drew him, something other than the money. “I don’t know how to explain it. It’s a rush is what it is. It’s like driving fast. You know there’s danger there, but you push yourself to see if you can do it. People say you’re crazy, and maybe you are in a way.”

  He was lonely one evening in Toronto and picked up the phone, but instead of calling home to his family, he dialed a number he’d been holding onto for a while. It was a Brooklyn number. Beverly Moore picked up the phone. Joe hadn’t seen her for a couple of years and he didn’t know what made him call her now, but they spoke for a long while, and by the time they hung up, she’d promised to come up to Toronto to see him. A few months later, in the fall of 1965, they were married in a small church downtown. Joe was 21 years old. Beverly was 20.