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

by Jim Rasenberger

  Joe still remembers the first time he drove into New York. It was the late 1960s and there was a strike on in Toronto, and Joe and a friend named Patrick Grace boomed south in Patrick Grace’s brand new bright yellow Plymouth Road Runner. They drove straight into Manhattan. Patrick Grace was afraid for his car, that it would get scratched or dented or stolen in the mayhem of the city. Joe, as he looked up at the buildings, had other concerns on his mind. “Holy shit, man, I hope we don’t get on one of those jobs, way up in the sky,” he thought to himself. They drove down to the Local 40 shape hall. Patrick Grace told the business agent he wanted to go connecting. “Well, I ain’t goin’ connecting on them,” announced Joe. So Patrick went connecting, and Joe went out on tagline with a gang of Indians. A few weeks later, Patrick Grace got caught in the drift of a column and seriously injured his leg. He returned to Toronto to recuperate, dropped out of ironwork, and Joe never saw him again.

  Joe soon got over his initial trepidation. He started connecting and found he loved it. Beverly came down to join him in New York, and they moved into an apartment next to her parents’ home in Park Slope, over an ironworkers’ bar called the High Spot. Newfoundlanders were all over Brooklyn in those days, at Snitty’s and Tyson’s, at the shortlived Newfoundlanders Club on 69th Street in Bay Ridge, at church on Sundays. Most of the Newfoundlanders came from the head of Conception Bay, but ironwork had spread to other pockets on the Avalon Peninsula. The Hartley brothers, for instance, came from Placentia Bay, on the southern shore of the peninsula. They settled in a small Newfie outport in Lindenhurst, Long Island. (The director Hal Hartley, son of a Newfoundlander ironworker, later used this neighborhood as a backdrop in several films.) Newfoundlanders were well represented in the union, too, constituting about a quarter of Local 40’s membership and holding much of its political power. They ran the union as they had been running it since 1937, when Jim Cole, a Colliers man, was voted in as president. Jim Cole was succeeded by Ray Corbett, whose family came from Harbor Main, and Ray Corbett would soon be succeeded by Ray Mullet of Conception Harbour, who would eventually be succeeded, in the 1990s, by Jack Doyle of Avondale.

  One afternoon, on a skyscraper job on State Street, Joe saw an ironworker die for the first time. The victim was a fellow Newfoundlander named Bobby Burke. Joe glimpsed him plummeting off the edge of the 44th floor. “It looked to me like a bag of garbage. That’s what I thought it was. I said, ‘Someone’s thrown a bag of garbage off the side of the building, they shouldn’t have done that.’ When we went down, they called out the name of everyone there, ’cause they didn’t know who it was. There was nothing there, just—I don’t know what it was. Just his boots. Some clothes. And a little soap stone that must have fallen out of his pocket, a little white spot.” It was difficult to go back after something like that; you’d feel sick to your stomach for a few days. But then the sickness would pass and work, and life, would resume.

  Most of Joe’s memories from back then are good ones. It was wonderful to be young and strong and building skyscrapers in the grandest city on earth. The days were exciting and interesting, and there was always beer or something stronger around to lend a festive atmosphere to the proceedings. All the drinking was foolish, in retrospect, but at the time it made you feel invulnerable, like you could dance over the steel—hell, you were a hot shit Newfoundlander ironworker—and no one, not even a hot-wrench Indian, could touch you.

  Ironworkers still had a foot in their antic past in those days. Riding the load was by now strictly forbidden, a firing offense, but men still did it when they thought they could get away with it. Joe remembers going to a bar for lunch one afternoon with a fellow ironworker who was already so drunk the bartender refused to serve him. The ironworker threw a fit, then tossed a glass into the mirror behind the bar, shattering both the glass and the mirror. As the bartender called the police, the ironworker dashed out of the bar and jumped onto a load of steel that happened, at that very moment, to be rising off the back of a truck across the street. He ducked down and rode the steel up to the top floor, where he hid until the police had come and gone.

  New York was a town of extraordinary events. There was that morning on the East Side, for instance, when a 7-ton derrick lifting a 10-ton load of steel broke loose from the guy wires holding it atop a building and all 17 tons of steel plunged 18 stories onto the street in the middle of rush hour. The falling steel demolished the flatbed truck below and turnbuckles smashed through a restaurant window across the street, but, miraculously, nobody was seriously injured. And then, moments later, another miracle: a geyser of water burst from a broken water main under the street and shot a 100-foot spout into the sky. As Joe remembers the story—he was not there himself to confirm it—hundreds of tiny fish came raining out of the geyser and landed flopping on the streets of New York. Real live fish.

  No event was more extraordinary than the building of the World Trade Center. Joe went there in 1968 and stayed two full years, working in a gang on Tower One. Few jobs were as swarming with Fish as that one. The Moores were all there, and Willie Quinlan and Jack Doyle, and Jack’s brothers, and Joe’s brothers, Ron and Jerry, and dozens of others. There were times, standing a thousand feet above the city, with a watery view of the harbor and a fog sweeping in from the east, when you could look around the derrick floor and everyone you saw came from a small patch of rock at the head of Conception Bay.

  But New York was not home, and in 1975 Joe and Beverly, realizing that it never would be, moved the family back to Conception Bay. They wanted to raise their three sons—and later, a daughter—in Newfoundland. “Growing up in the place, I just loved it that much. I figured, why let them miss what I had growing up at eight, nine, ten years old? The fishing and the woods and the water. There’s no place like it on earth. And it’s what I wanted for them.” The old Newfoundland catch, of course, was that Joe had to leave his family at once and go back out into the world to make a living. Like his father and many other fathers before him, he would be gone months at a time, returning home at Christmas and summers, his children grown a few inches taller every time he saw them.

  The separation was probably harder on Beverly than on Joe. She raised the four children mostly on her own. Then Joe came home on holidays, barging into the order she had arranged, and they were like strangers who hardly knew each other. In retrospect, this wasn’t all bad. “There’s a special thing to it, even it being hard,” says Joe. “You get that special time when you come home. It’s like you met her for the first time in your life. When you’re living with a person day after day after day, maybe it’s good. But I don’t think it’s the same.”

  Joe missed home terribly when he was away. “You go out to the bars on the weekends, meet up with the guys, have a few beers. You go home half-drunk, then get on the phone for an hour talking to your wife—you’d want to be home—and the next day you gotta break your back to work again. The only time you wouldn’t think about home was when you’re working, ’cause your mind was on the job, to watch so you didn’t get hurt.” Mose Lewis’ death had put an end to any aspirations Joe once harbored of being a full-time professional musician, but music remained central in his life. He played with his brothers in bands all over New York, and when he boomed out to California and Tennessee, he always brought along his guitar or fiddle. Music was a consolation for a man far from home.

  The part that made it all worthwhile—the flip side of the catch—was the return. The pre-Christmas drive through Maine and Nova Scotia, the endless quiet highway. The hours of anticipation on the ferry, standing on the deck, the bow breaking through the North Atlantic, and somewhere in the foggy distance your family waiting for you. No place on earth was better than the head of Conception Bay, and a man could put up with a lot of hardship for the pleasure of going home. “It was,” says Joe, “like going back to heaven.”

  Joe did not see much of his sons while they were young, but when they grew up they followed him into ironwork, and now he spent most of his fre
e time with them. They were more like brothers than sons, solid and capable young men to whom he could speak of anything. Like Joe, they traveled between Brooklyn and Conception Bay. All three of them had bought houses in Conception Harbour, and it was there they planned to raise their own families. “I say, son, you’re going to do the same thing I did, all over again. Maybe that’s the way it’s got to be. I say if you’re happy with it, then go for it. They’re like me. They work in the city, but all they want is to be back home.”

  By the summer of 2001, Joe Lewis and his three sons were among the last of the true migrating Fish. Most of the old timers had made their lives around New York. Their children and grandchildren were born and raised in the suburbs, spread out over Westchester County or Connecticut or Long Island. Many of the younger generation earned their livings as ironworkers, but they were not Fish anymore, not really. They were Americans.

  A great many men from Conception Harbour still practiced the trade of ironwork, but most did it in Canada now, going out to build oil rigs in the North Atlantic or traveling a few thousand miles west to Alberta. Newfoundland had come a long way since Joe was born. The cod were gone and Greenpeace had put an end to swiling, but oil and mining were strong. Tourism was on the rise, too. Many of the tourists who visited Newfoundland in the summer were American-born sons and daughters and grandchildren of ironworkers come back to see the Rock. They’d show up at Frank’s, which everybody still called Doyle’s, and drink and talk with the Newfoundlanders who shared their last names and some of their blood. The Yanks and the Fish sometimes had difficulty understanding each other after a few beers or a shot of screech (a rum-based drink so called because it makes you screech when you drink it), when the most frequently uttered word in a conversation between a Yank and a Newfoundlander was likely to be “What?” Or, as the Newfoundlander would put it, “Wha’?”

  Joe Lewis would finally get the O.K. from the doctors and the lawyers to go home. It would be late fall by then, many weeks after the terrorist attacks of September 11, and the world would be a very different place than on the August day Joe sat at the kitchen of the row house in Brooklyn and spoke of the bad luck that had afflicted his old raising gang. Newfoundland had never seemed as utterly peaceful and distant from Manhattan as it would in the autumn of that annus horribilis. Joe would celebrate Christmas in the old house near the bay, where he grew up and where his mother still lived, just across the street from his own well-tended white clapboard house.

  The numbness in Joe’s hand would improve, but only slightly. Joe would never pick the strings of a guitar or handle a fiddle with his old finesse. On New Year’s Eve, Joe and his brothers would take the stage of the Oasis, the tavern he and Beverly owned in Colliers, just over the Pinch from Conception Harbour. Joe would look out into the crowd and know every one of the two hundred or so faces looking back at him, and the Lewis brothers would begin to play. During the instrumental sections, Joe would mostly pretend to strum the guitar while his brothers covered for him. But when it came time to sing, Joe would not have to fake anything. He’d still have his voice. He’d sing a country song, then a few rock ballads, and then, for the old-timers, some of the jigs and reels he used to play in the kitchen when he was a boy. He’d sing “The Star of Logy Bay.” He’d sing “Kelegre’s Swarree.” And then, of course, he’d sing the song that every true Newfoundlander knows by heart, “I’s the B’y”:

  I’s the b’y that builds the boat

  I’s the b’y that sails her

  I’s the b’y that catches the fish

  And brings them home to Lizer.

  Cods and rinds to cover your flake

  Cake and tea for supper

  Cod fish in the spring of the year

  Fried in maggoty butter.

  Everybody in the Oasis would be stomping their feet and singing along, and a few of the old-timers would stand and begin to dance, the large tavern vibrating and warming with moving bodies. Then the front door would open and someone would enter, and as a blast of cold air rushed into the Oasis, a scrap of music would slip out into the night and go skipping up over the spruce trees to the cemetery on top of Colliers Hill, where Mose Lewis and the other dead lay buried. A clear cold sky would be glittering overhead, and the black bay heaving in the distance, and if you were lying on top of the hill on this frosty night, you might hear the faint strand of music from below and you might remember, for a moment, what it was to be alive.

  PART III

  The Fall

  NINE

  The Old School

  Bunny Eyes quit one hot afternoon at the start of August. Or was fired. Or was fired and then quit—the details depended on who was offering them and nobody was offering much. This part was certain: Bunny and George, the gang’s foreman, got into some kind of dispute about the heat, which had soared into the high nineties several days earlier and been parked there every day since. Heat waves brutalize ironworkers. All other trades on a skyscraper job work under the derrick floor, in shade, but there is no shade for the ironworkers on top. The sun beats down on them mercilessly, and it radiates back up at them from the stainless steel decking and the beams and columns.

  On the fourth day of the heat wave, Bunny announced that he favored cutting out early. George wanted to keep working. The argument quickly escalated, and before it was over, George told Bunny he no longer wanted him in the gang and he could now consider himself a bolter-up. No one expected Bunny to accept this—“Bunny’s a raising gang man,” said Matt, “no way was he gonna bolt up”—and Bunny promptly quit. It had been a long time coming. As Matt said later, “Bunny was never happy in this job.”

  The real reason Bunny quit, or got himself fired, or whatever happened exactly, wasn’t that he held anything against George or the gang, and it wasn’t that he couldn’t take the heat—Bunny liked it hot. It was, simply, that he hated the job. He had come to loathe it. “That job was just a horror,” he would say later. What made it such a horror? “Just the job itself,” he would vaguely elaborate. “Christ, just everything.”

  The job had turned out to be nothing like what he, or any of the men, expected. The great competition he’d looked forward to, those four kangaroos bobbing and swinging, the four raising gangs clambering over the frame, pushing themselves to excel—none of this had come to pass. Instead, the Time Warner Center had crept upwards at an excruciating pace. Six months had elapsed since that morning in February when Bunny and the rest of the raising gang arrived, five months since the ironworkers began setting steel. And the building was only on the fifth floor. A floor a month. Given the acreage and the size of some of the steel members, this represented a good tonnage of steel, but still—five floors in five months? No ironworker at Columbus Circle could remember a job that had advanced at such a slow grind.

  The problem was the same one that had plagued the job since May: lack of steel. The ADF plants in Quebec were pumping out fabricated shapes at full throttle, but this was not fast enough to feed the hunger of the Time Warner Center. To make matters worse, when the steel finally did arrive, the ironworkers complained that it was poorly fabricated. It didn’t fit as it was meant to. The bolt holes did not align properly. Or the piece came a few centimeters too long and had to be trimmed to size with an acetylene torch. Often, the only way to get the steel to match was by hitting it again and again with beaters, or by slamming the ball of the crane into it, or by straddling it and bucking up and down on it or, all else failing, kicking the shit out of it. The goal of all this activity was to get the holes of the facing pieces close enough together that you could stick the tapered end of your drift pin through both—getting a “bite,” this was called—then pound the pin in with a beater, pulling those two holes, and all the others on the facing pieces, into alignment. Only then could you fit your bolts and move on.

  It was arduous and joyless work. Connections that should have been made in three or four minutes routinely took an hour. Instead of setting 40 or 50 pieces a day, as they should have b
een doing, the gangs were lucky to set 10 or 15. Joe Kennedy, the superintendent, had recently brought in Tommy Emerson’s raising gang from the Random House job to take over the northeast crane but he hardly had enough steel to keep two cranes busy, much less three.

  The last anyone saw of Bunny around Columbus Circle, he was sitting at the bar of the Coliseum on a Thursday afternoon. The place was sparsely populated and deliciously cold. A few men slumped listlessly over the bar, and a few other men slumped over tables against the wall. Nobody was saying much, certainly not with any animation, except for Chad Snow, the connector in Chappie’s gang. Chad sat on a bar stool near Bunny telling stories about close encounters he’d had with death, each story slightly more harrowing than the last. “When I landed,” Chad was saying, “I hit right on my sternum. They wanted to take me down in a scale box but the last guy I’d seen go down in a scale box died, so I said no way, and I walked down the stairs. All I knew,” said Chad, “is there was no way I was going in that box.”

  Chad had suffered many accidents in his 36 years. Even before he’d learned to walk he’d almost killed himself by crawling into his older sister’s walker, pulling himself up to his feet, then shuffling over to the stairs and tumbling down them. Since becoming an ironworker, he’d fallen badly three times and had many close calls. Chad was short but quick and solidly built, with wide bow legs and large thighs, and he had proven himself to be fairly indestructible. He was in the middle of telling a new story about the time a piece of steel flew out of control and nearly knocked him off the edge of a building when Bunny, who had been quiet and remote, looked up from his beer and turned his liquid blue eyes on Chad. “Christ, Chad, didn’t anything good ever happen to you?” Chad paused for a moment, then went on telling his story. Bunny took a last sip of beer, stood up, and walked out without a word.