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

by Jim Rasenberger

  As an apprentice in those days, you worked hard and did what you were told and hoped no one noticed your mistakes. Keith was so scared of getting shouted at by his father or one of the other older men that he never found time to worry about the height or the danger. In the meantime, the boy who hated the taste of beer had begun to drink it with a convert’s passion.

  It was drinking that brought him one afternoon in 1982 to a bar near a job site in Parsippany, New Jersey. Keith was an experienced connector by now and was looking for a partner. There at the bar among the other ironworkers sat a quiet young Mohawk with black hair and olive skin, named Marvin Davis. Marvin was not from Kahnawake but from Six Nations, an Iroquois reservation in northwest New York. He’d just spent a few years in San Antonio, Texas, working on office buildings, and had recently boomed up east in search of better wages. The fact that Marvin was a fellow Mohawk was enough to recommend him to Keith. He asked Marvin if he felt like going connecting. Marvin said he did. And so began an extraordinary partnership and friendship that would still be intact 20 years later.

  Their shared Mohawk heritage aside, Keith and Marvin were about as different as two men could be. Whereas Keith was verbose and volatile, Marvin was quiet and even-keeled. “By the way, Marvin,” Keith would announce to his friend at the end of a workday, “I just quit for us.” Marvin was the peacemaker, smoothing things over with foremen or supers whom Keith had told off. Sometimes, too, Marvin was there to break up fights between Keith and his father.

  One thing both men had in common: they liked to work hard. “It wasn’t just show up and go to work,” said Marvin. “We’re both guys who wanted to go to work. We looked forward to it.”

  When Keith and Marvin met, Keith was still working out of No. 711, the Canadian local through which many Kahnawake Mohawks came into ironwork. One day he got a call from the business agent of Local 40 in New York inviting him to join, a high honor. “This may sound funny,” Keith told the business agent, “but can my partner come in? No disrespect, but if he doesn’t come in, I don’t want to come in.” The business agent consented.

  After that it was understood that when Keith Brown and Marvin Davis showed up at the shape hall for work, they went out together. “They don’t want both of us,” said Keith, “they don’t get either of us.” In the meantime, Marvin had moved into a house less than a mile away from Keith’s in New Jersey. Both men were married to pretty, young Mohawk women and their wives hit it off, and so did their children. Meanwhile, on the steel, Keith and Marvin developed into a superb connecting team. It wasn’t just that they liked and trusted each other, it was also a physical chemistry. “Some guys will fight each other on how to make a piece,” said Marvin. “Me and him, we just moved forward. It got to the point where we didn’t have to look at each other. We knew each other’s moves.”

  Between moves, they drank. Sometimes they drank all day. They started the morning with a shared six-pack on the way to work, then split a few more six-packs at coffee breaks and lunch. After work, they really started in, making a tour of the usual ironworkers’ haunts, ending the night at a place in the Port Authority Bus Terminal. By the time they got home, they were often too drunk to remember the alibis they’d contrived for their wives. The next morning, they would start all over again with a six-pack just to straighten out from the night before. They drank extravagantly, but never so much they couldn’t do the work. Officially, on-the-job drinking was strictly prohibited; tacitly, it was tolerated. “Back then, they’d just say, ‘Keep drinking and keep working,’” said Marvin. “As long as you were doing your job, it was, ‘Here, have some more. If that’s what makes you go, go.’”

  There were days Keith Brown drank two cases of beer between morning and night. The boy who hated the taste of beer had grown up to be a full-blown alcoholic.

  One day, Marvin announced he’d decided to stop drinking. He wanted nothing more to do with alcohol. “I was getting sick and tired of it,” said Marvin. “You get to that point in your life—you gotta grow up sooner or later.” Keith kept at it for another year after Marvin stopped, but the pleasure went out of it.

  That was the year Keith’s father died. It was also the year he and his wife separated. His life had reached a crossroads and he knew it. He was sitting in his house one night, drunk, halfway through a can of beer. He realized that if he wanted custody of his children—and he did—it was now or never. “I said to myself, you gotta make a decision. You’re either going to give them away, cause you can’t raise no kids drinking, or you put it down and never touch it again.” And that was the end of it. Once he made the decision, he never went back.

  Keith and Marvin connected together for another eight years. Their last connecting job was a huge Midtown office building for Bear Stearns, the New York financial concern. It was 1998 and they were both on the cusp of forty, generally the age a connector starts thinking about moving on to less strenuous labor. One afternoon the superintendent approached Keith and asked him if he wanted to take over as walking boss. Keith knew that accepting the promotion would mean severing his partnership with Marvin, perhaps forever. Before giving the super an answer, he went to Marvin and spoke to him. “If you don’t want me to take it, I won’t,” he said. “It’s your call.” Marvin told him to take it. He told Keith he was going to see the job to the end, and then he, too, was going to hang up his connecting belt.

  Three years later, in the late summer of 2001, Keith Brown and Marvin Davis were still together, still partners, and still went everywhere together. They were both walking bosses on the Time Warner Center, sharing the building between them. Keith commanded the first phase of erection, the raising gangs, the rigs, the bolter-ups, and the steel deliveries. Marvin took care of the follow-up, the detail crews, the welders. They didn’t see as much of each other as they used to. They no longer commuted to and from work together, as they had for years, because Keith had recently started seeing a woman who lived in the East Village. Most afternoons, though, they met up for lunch, usually at a Greek deli on 58th Street where everyone knew them.

  “How are my friends today?” the counterman bellowed as they straddled a couple of stools one afternoon.

  “Happy as a bowl of fuckin’ sunshine,” mumbled Keith. “Lemme have a cup of coffee. What are you having, Marv?”

  Marvin ordered a grilled cheese. At 43, Marvin was a year older than Keith but looked a couple years younger, his features softer, less weathered. He was still the quiet one, the calmer one, still married to the same woman, still living in the same house.

  Both men appeared fairly exhausted as they sat at the counter. Keith’s stomach was bothering him this afternoon, squelching his appetite. The stress of management was more difficult than the bodily wear and tear of connecting. It was also, both agreed, less satisfying. Instead of building all day, they were digging through an avalanche of logistics and paperwork—and rules. They both appreciated the irony that they, who had broken all the rules, now found themselves in a position where part of their job was to enforce them.

  “That’s hard for me,” said Keith. “Who am I to tell somebody he can’t drink? For me to say no drinking, they just look at me and say, ‘Yeah, right, who are you bullshittin’?’ But I have to do it. And they all know where it’s going.”

  Where it was going was toward a more bureaucratic kind of steel erection driven not by the quest for speed but by the fear of liability, by the proliferation of rules and regulations. Every small change, the sort of thing ironworkers used to take care of by themselves with a torch and beater, now had to be signed off on by an engineer. Every move the ironworkers made was scrutinized by someone else. Every walk across a beam was nit-picked by a site safety manager. “Now insurance companies are coming looking at the way we’ve done it for a hundred years and wondering how the hell they let this go on.”

  Keith didn’t miss the drinking but he missed the old days. He missed his father, too, tough as the old man had been. Keith understood now how alike they we
re, just as his mother had always told him. He also understood now that there was a strange kind of caring behind the shouting. His father had wanted his son to become a good ironworker. And Keith had become one. “If he hadn’t busted my balls, I wouldn’t have worked so hard. That’s one thing I give him credit for. Much as these kids hate me, I see ’em standing still, I yell at ’em. I’m probably the worst of them around, but I’m not half as bad as the old-timers. Christ, I used to want to kill those old bastards. I’m sure these kids feel the same about me. But someday they’ll look back, they’ll understand what I was shouting about.”

  Keith drank from his third cup of coffee. “There’re a lot of mornings I’d like to say fuck being walking boss and put on my belt and go connecting again.”

  Marvin nodded.

  “These are all good raising gangs on this job,” said Keith. “Frankly, though, I think Marv and I would kick any of their asses.”

  Marvin smiled.

  “If our bodies could take it, me and Marvin would go out right now.”

  “Our bodies can’t take it,” said Marvin. “That’s the problem.”

  “We abused them too long.”

  “Yeah, we did.”

  “But we had a hell of a good time while we were doin’ it.”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Marvin. “We had fun.”

  Keith glanced at his watch. It was 12:30. He poured the rest of the coffee down his throat and stood. “Come on, Marv. Time to go shout at the morons.”

  BEAUTIFUL DAYS

  The heat lifted over the long Labor Day weekend, and the days that followed were bright and dry and cloudless, a string of September jewels. While most New Yorkers’ experience of this perfect weather was muted by sealed office windows and recirculated air, the ironworkers enjoyed every moment firsthand, appreciating it as only people who work outdoors in murderous heat and frigid cold truly can. Adding to their pleasure was the fact that steel suddenly began to appear in abundance, as if freighted down the Hudson Valley on the same Canadian front that brought in the cool dry air. ADF had subcontracted out some of its work to other steel fabricators, and the company’s other big job in New York, the Random House building on 56th Street, was complete, freeing up its own mills. A steady stream of trucks arrived at Columbus Circle. Keith Brown had his hands full, cursing the inept drivers and apprentices, grinding burnt-down cigarettes into the pavement.

  The fourth raising gang arrived on the Tuesday after Labor Day. This gang was led by a foreman named Danny Doyle and included Mike Emerson—brother of Joe and Tommy Emerson—and a pair of Mohawk connectors, Johnny Diabo and Paul “Punchy” Jacobs. On that first week in September, all four cranes, at last, were running, and all four raising gangs were setting steel, enormous hunks of it jutting out at odd angles to satisfy the complex load distributions of Silvian Marcus’ design. On Friday, September 7, Tommy Emerson’s gang jumped the northeast crane, lifting it several hundred feet over the derrick floor. Then everybody went home to enjoy one last perfect weekend.

  TEN

  The Towers

  The towers rose to a height of 604 feet apiece, taller than all but the tallest skyscrapers. From a distance, they appeared slender, even willowy, but that was an illusion. Their combined 40,000 tons of steel made them stronger than any building. They had to be stronger. Unlike a skyscraper, which supported merely itself and its relatively weightless human burden, these two towers would soon support a third huge thing between them: a 3,500-foot bridge span. This was, in 1929, twice as long as any clear span in the world. “The bridge, in all of its proportions, so completely transcends any bridge ever constructed,” reported one of the engineers, “that it is difficult to grasp a sense of its magnitude.” Eventually, the great suspension bridge, commissioned by the Port Authority of New York and designed by engineer Othmar Ammann, would be given a name worthy of itself—the George Washington—but in the early summer of 1929 it still had no official name. Nor was it officially a bridge. The towers were nearly complete but they remained unattached twins, separated at birth by the Hudson River, one rising from the banks of northern Manhattan, the other from the shallows beneath the New Jersey palisades.

  If you were a self-respecting bridgeman active between the years 1928 and 1931, this was where you wanted to be: on the banks of the lower Hudson or somewhere over the water between. They came from all around the country to raise the bridge and made up one of the most expert and experienced crews of bridgemen ever assembled in one place, having honed their skills on recently built spans like the Delaware River Bridge at Philadelphia and the Ambassador Bridge over the Detroit River. While the slack-jawed public gathered at the base of the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building to marvel at the ironworkers, these bridgemen, miles from the thick of the city, toiled away unobserved and uncelebrated. But they believed they were up to something far more daring and spectacular than the domesticated “beam jumpers” and “housesmiths,” as they dismissed their downtown brethren. These bridgemen were cocky and blithe even by the usual standards of ironworkers, paying “no attention whatever to the line where planks end and the extremely hollow variety of space over the Hudson River begins,” according to one reporter who made a trip uptown. Near the base of the Manhattan tower, the bridge company posted a notice on the wall of a construction shack:

  The towers of the George Washington Bridge under construction, as seen from the Manhattan shore.

  (Port Authority of New York and New Jersey)

  IT IS ABSOLUTELY FORBIDDEN FOR PASSENGERS TO RIDE ON TOP OF ELEVATOR OR TO SLIDE DOWN ELEVATOR CABLES.

  The notice said a lot about the sort of men who worked on the bridge. An Indian had already died on the Jersey tower while attempting to jump onto a moving elevator cab. Other bridgemen were known to dispense with elevator cabs altogether and slide down the elevators’ guide beams. “You can get quite a speed coming down five hundred feet on one of them,” said H. G. Reynolds, foreman of the New York tower.

  McClintic-Marshall Company ran the erection of both towers, but each side of the Hudson was a separate and distinct field operation. Bill Fortune was foreman on the New Jersey tower. Fortune was a Southern gentleman who favored tailored tweeds and polished shoes and played golf at Englewood Country Club on his days off. On the Manhattan side, it was Reynolds, a sharp-tongued Virginian born on a tobacco farm 65 years earlier. Reynolds was a self-proclaimed roughneck who had been working on bridges since he was 15. He had no use for golf or any other recreation. All he cared about was building bridge towers. Tall and lean, with steel-gray hair and bushy gray eyebrows, he even looked like a bridge tower. He was said to possess a fine sense of humor, but at work he was a “driver,” a demanding boss who favored the stick over the carrot. “I’ll reach right out and break my wrist on your thick head!” he was overheard shouting at a tagline man who was doing a poor job of steering a column.

  The “Jerseymen” began their tower in mid-May of 1928. The New Yorkers began theirs in mid-July. “Give me the steel and I’ll catch up and pass ’em,” Reynolds promised his bosses at McClintic-Marshall. Impossible, they told him. Watch me, he responded. The rivalry was friendly but intense. Men would cut lunch early to gain a jump on the other tower. They hustled five days a week, eight in the morning until five in the evening, and half a day on Saturday. Erection on both towers paused for lack of steel in the winter of 1929, then resumed in March. By early summer, the New York tower had pulled ahead of the Jersey tower. “You couldn’t call it a rivalry,” Reynolds boasted afterward in the best ironworking tradition. “It was a walk away for our side.”

  The towers were complete. The time had now come to join them and make a bridge.

  SPINNING

  Suspension bridges are made by drawing many thousands of thin steel wires, each about the diameter of a pencil, back and forth between the banks of a river in a process called “spinning.” The wires are slung over the tops of the towers, secured in the “anchorages” on either side, then bunched together into
the cables that eventually hold up the road deck. Altogether, 107,000 miles of such wire would go into the four cables of the George Washington Bridge before spinning was complete. This was wire enough to reach halfway to the moon—or, as it happened, to New Jersey and back about 50,000 times.

  In early July of 1929, a barge towed a wrist-thick steel rope over the Hudson from New Jersey to New York. Cranes mounted on each tower hoisted the dripping steel rope out of the water and slung it over the tops of the towers. The rope now swooped sharply from the Jersey shore, crested over the 604-foot tower, sloped down 275 feet into a drooping catenary, soared up again to the tip of the Manhattan tower, then plunged down to the Manhattan anchorage. With that first long cursive M, the towers were joined. The bridge was truly a bridge.

  The function of this first steel rope, and several dozen that soon followed, was to support the two 22-foot-wide catwalks the bridgemen would use to make the rest of the bridge. These ropes were only a temporary stage, but upon them was played the most spellbinding performance of the bridge’s construction. It commenced when a handful of bridgemen ventured onto them in an open craft of wood and metal called a “carriage.” They traveled along in fits and starts, laying prefabricated floor sections of steel and wood cross-wise on the rope. The work got interesting when several of the men stepped out of the carriage and slid along the ropes, hundreds of feet over the river, hanging almost literally by the seat of their pants. A glimpse of this astonishing feat is included in a scratchy 12-minute film shot by the Port Authority during the construction of the bridge. A man sits on one of the ropes sidesaddle, scooting down its steep slope, using his hand to pull himself along. His feet are hooked under a parallel rope to keep him from falling backwards. Below is a sheer drop of four or five hundred feet.