High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World's Greatest Skyline (12 page)

Just as it looked as if Parks might prevail and take control of the entire international union, his luck turned sour. Buchanan won re
election on the first ballot by a vote of 43 to 40. “I lose,” whispered Parks.

Whatever manic energy had driven him to Kansas City suddenly dissipated. “I’m getting old,” the 40-year-old walking delegate told reporters upon his return to New York. “I’ve had enough of it.” Parks
finally seemed to accept what others had long foreseen: he was beaten. And now, following several false finales, the real one came swiftly. On October 1, in an interview with
Harper’s Weekly
, D.A. Jerome promised to have Parks back in Sing Sing within six weeks. Parks returned to court on a new graft indictment in late October. The jury took 11 minutes to reach a guilty verdict. “Parks received the verdict with an effort to display stolid indifference,” according to the
Times
, “but a tremor ran through his frame and his face was an ashen hue….” The judge sentenced him to two years and three months of hard labor, to commence November 6. The district attorney kept his promise with a few days to spare.

Sam Parks, September 7, 1903, at the head of the Labor Day parade.
(New York Public Library)

The press that had followed Parks everywhere he went for the past five months was there in the smoking car aboard the train to Sing Sing. Parks sat next to a deputy sheriff and lit a cigar. He told the reporters he planned to serve his sentence as a model prisoner and swore that when he came out at the end of his two-plus years he would be done with union politics forever. He took a pull on his cigar. “Boys, I’m up against it. Let me down as easy as you can.”

THE WAGES OF SIN

The official history of the International Association of Bridge, Structural and Ornamental Ironworkers, published on the union’s hundredth birthday in 1996, absolves Sam Parks of his sins. “Whatever might be said of Sam Parks,” it states, “he was a man of his time, who was dedicated to the well-being of his fellow New York Ironworkers. He may have wanted a full wallet for himself, but he wanted his friends to earn sufficient wages to take care of their families adequately.”

That is a bit of a stretch. Parks did increase the wages of New York’s ironworkers for a few years, but on the whole, he probably hurt them more than he helped them. A few weeks after Parks’
return to jail, the
New York Times
estimated that he’d cost the city’s ironworkers about $3 million in lost wages and cost New York’s tradesmen as a whole somewhere between $30 and $50 million. Less quantifiable was the toll his belligerence took on the reputation of the union ironworkers. Employers would have nothing more to do with Parks’ old union, and by late autumn, Local 2 was effectively finished. In January of the following year it officially dissolved and divided into four smaller unions, including Local 40, Manhattan’s current local, and Local 31, the predecessor to Brooklyn’s current Local 361. Despite these changes, relations between ironworkers and employers would remain sour for years to come. It’s a legacy, no doubt, that would have pleased Sam Parks.

On the morning of May 4, 1904, Dora Parks boarded a train at Grand Central Terminal to Ossining, New York. It was a Wednesday, visiting day at Sing Sing, and she never missed an opportunity to see her husband. He had been failing steadily since he entered prison the previous fall and had recently been moved from his cell to the prison hospital. By the time Dora arrived, around noon, he had been dead five hours. She took what was left of his wasted body home with her on the 6:20 to Grand Central. She was a fragile, anxious woman, moved easily to tears by his ordeal. Now that it was over, it must have seemed like more than she could bear. It was: She would be dead, too, within a year.

“What sympathy the news of his death excites belongs wholly to those of his immediate family, who are disgraced by his career, without responsibility for it,” stated an editorial in the
Times
the day after Parks’ death. “The wages of sin are paid in full at last.”

Dora was the Lutheran in the family, and it was a Lutheran funeral she gave her husband. The Reverend Henry Hebler of Zion Lutheran Church—Dora’s church—presided over a small service inside the rooming house into which Dora had recently moved. Then the front door opened and the mourners walked out into the
sunlight and the crowd. Many of Parks’ old friends were there, and so were some of his old enemies, including President Buchanan of the international union. “Good bye, Sam, old boy,” one man murmured as the velvet draped casket passed by. “Bad as you were, you did more for us than any other man.” One estimate put the crowd of onlookers at ten thousand. A photograph in the
New York Herald
shows a crush of people in the street, dozens deep around the casket.

“All along the line of march, the sidewalks were crowded with sightseers, and women and children occupied every window,” reported the
New-York Daily Tribune
in the next day’s edition. At the pier at the foot of East 92nd Street, as police held back the crowd, pallbearers transferred the casket from the hearse onto a ferry, then embarked for the opposite shore of the East River. The funeral party continued on by carriage, reported the
Tribune
, “to Middle Village Lutheran Cemetery, Long Island.”

A year after Parks’ death, a writer named Leroy Scott published a short, melodramatic novel titled
The Walking Delegate
based closely on Parks’ reign in New York. The novel ends with a spirited scene in the ironworkers’ union hall. Parks’ fictional doppelganger, Buck Foley, knows the police are closing in on him and jumps up onto a piano to make a gallant farewell speech. “What’s past—well, youse know. But what I got to say about the future is all on the level. Go in an’ beat the contractors! Youse can beat ’em. An’ beat ’em like hell!” As police escort him away, he turns back to the men with a final wave. “So-long, boys,” he shouts. Suddenly, just when it seems like the jig is up for Buck Foley, his roughneck allies rush the police. In the melee, Buck breaks free, slips away, and vanishes forever.

The story of the real Sam Parks doesn’t end quite so dramatically, but it does end with a mystery. Why isn’t he where he is supposed to be? Where did his body go when it floated away from the crowd on the pier? It’s almost as if Sam Parks, in death, pulled off a final act of defiance and vanished, like Buck Foley, into the night.

H
e stood on a concrete slab near the center of the hole and turned his blue eyes toward the cloudless sky and the 45-ton column slowly drifting across it. Bunny wasn’t the only one looking up. A small crowd of officials from Bovis Lend-Lease, the general contractor, had donned sparkling white hard hats and descended the narrow metal stairs into the gloom of the hole, and they stood near Bunny—but not too near—gazing up at the huge dark chunk of metal hanging from the boom of the kangaroo. Crowds always turn out for the heavy picks, drawn by the ever-miraculous sight of something huge lifted and moved, and perhaps by the remote possibility of witnessing something truly astonishing: a 45-ton spear plummetting from the sky.

The column was among the dozen or so “boomers” that Silvian Marcus and his team of engineers had designed to bear the brunt of the towers’ prodigious dead load (the thousands of tons of steel and concrete and drywall and glass and pipe that would go into
making it), plus its relatively light live load (the hundreds of tons of office workers, hotel guests, apartment dwellers, pets, plants, and attendant vermin that would eventually occupy it) and the variable lateral load (wind), and then transfer all this weight and pressure to the schist bedrock below. Bunny stood on the spot where the bottom of the column would land, marking it with his body and occasionally gesturing to Chett Barker, the signalman. His eyes squinted and blinked. He was tired, operating on two hours of bad sleep snatched in the back seat of a Crown Victoria. His T-shirt bore the logo of a restaurant with a slogan inscribed beneath it: “
JUST EAT ME
.”

It was a Monday morning, mid-April, almost two months since Bunny and Jerry and the rest of the raising gang first arrived at Columbus Circle. All four cranes were up, their cables threaded through the sheaves at the tips of their booms, their drums greased and spinning, and steel was finally starting to rise on the north side of the hole. To the ironworkers, the columns were a hopeful sight. Girders would soon link them, then beams would cross between the girders, then corrugated decking would cover the beams, and then they would be on their way out of the hole, and everybody else—other tradesmen, safety inspectors, contractors—would be below. Which is the way ironworkers like it.

There were about 50 ironworkers at Columbus Circle at the moment. Soon there would be double, then triple that number. The ironworkers were pretty easy to spot among the other tradesmen. They tended to keep to themselves, which made them seem more somber (false) and more arrogant (true). Even when they mingled with the others, they stood out. Their faces were broiled and wind-whipped. Their clothing was rust-stained and tattered, its fabric rubbed away by the rough skin of oxidized steel. On their hands, they wore thick cowhide gloves, gauntlet-cuffed. Most of the other tradesmen wore heavy boots with chunky heels, the better to keep their feet from getting pierced or crunched. Ironworkers preferred
lightweight flat-sole boots, on the theory that heels were prone to catch on flange-edges and could send a man tumbling.

And then there were the hard hats. The other trades wore bright, clean, bulb-shape hard hats. Ironworkers’ hard hats were generally battered and brown. Many were encircled by wide brims, as on a pith helmet, and nearly all were covered with fading decals publicizing the ironworkers’ interests and affiliations—jobs they’d worked on, bars they frequented, sports teams they favored. The hard hats of the Mohawks featured a round decal showing the sharp profile of a man surrounded by bright yellow rays of the sun: the Iroquois warrior symbol.

A number of these warrior symbols were conspicuous on the hard hats of the ironworkers standing in the hole near Bunny that Monday morning in April. Of the 50 ironworkers on site, a third were men from Kahnawake, the Mohawk reservation near Montreal that had been supplying New York with ironworkers for nearly 100 years. This group included a second raising gang that had arrived a few weeks earlier. Because it was Monday, they were all, like Bunny, operating on two or three hours of bad sleep.

For the Mohawks, Mondays began late on Sundays, just before midnight, when the ironworkers kissed their wives good-bye, looked in one last time on their sleeping children, and stepped out into the dark. In twos and threes, they loaded into cars and drove out through the quiet streets. A loose convoy of big American sedans—“boomers,” as some of the men called them—accelerated down the two-lane stretch of Old Malone’s Highway, then sped south, the lights of Montreal fading behind them. They hit the U.S. border around 12:30. The night-shift patrol knew the Mohawks by sight, knew they did not carry passports, and knew they didn’t need them.
“Onen,”
some of the border guards would call to them as they waved the men through. It was the Mohawk word for good-bye.

They stopped once or twice along Interstate 87 to change drivers. The pockets of their jackets bulged with sandwiches their wives had
prepared for them earlier in the night, and somewhere along the way they pulled them out and ate them, quietly munching in the dark. They tried to sleep, but it was a dank, restless sleep of cheeks pressed against windows and necks cranked at odd angles—the kind of sleep it’s almost better to do without. By dawn, they were awake at the George Washington Bridge. By 6:15 they were at the job site, stretching out their cricks, looking around for a pay phone to call home and wake up their wives and children, already missing them with a peculiar mix of exhaustion and loneliness. Then they grabbed a cup of coffee and headed for the shanty to get ready for work—for the five long days until Friday night, when they’d pile back into their cars and drive home to Kahnawake for the weekend.

It must have been a Mohawk who nicknamed the 12-pound maul ironworkers occasionally haul out: it’s called a “monday.” A few dozen swings of a monday could make your muscles scream with exhaustion. The only thing more excruciating than swinging a 12-pound maul was swinging a 12-pound maul on a Monday morning after two hours of bad sleep in the back seat of a Crown Victoria. Mondays sucked.

Bunny stuck out his hand, palm down, and fluttered it. The column slowly descended. When it was a yard or so above his head, he stepped aside, then turned back to grab its flank. Jerry grabbed the other side. Together, pushing and pulling at the steel, they guided the column down onto the footing, matching the eight holes of its base plate with the eight holes of the billet plate on the ground. The moment the plates were flush and the holes clear through, they screwed in the foot-long pins that anchored the column to the concrete footing below. Then Bunny grabbed hold of a flange, dug his toes in, and started to climb.

BEATING THE WOW

The frame of a steel building is made of two basic structural components:
columns
, the vertical pillars that bear the building’s weight and transfer it to bedrock, and
beams
, the horizontal supports that link the columns and carry the floors of the building. Cross-sectionally—that is, from the perspective of somebody looking straight down their shafts—most columns and beams resemble a three-dimensional uppercase
I
. They are comprised of two parallel plates called “flanges” (the horizontal lines of the
I
) conjoined by a perpendicular plate called the “web” (the vertical line).

Plenty of other steel structural shapes have been tried over the years—the rounded pipe of the old Phoenix column, for instance, as well as various T’s and L’s—but the dual-flange/single-web form of the
I
is by far the most common. There are many good reasons for this, the most important being the high strength-to-material ratio the arrangement provides. The
I
-shape puts the most steel exactly where the piece needs to be strongest. Step onto a beam, the greatest stress will be on the top of the beam, which will squeeze together under your weight (compression) and at the bottom of the beam, which will pull apart under your weight (tension). The center of the beam will experience very little stress. Most of the steel, then, is concentrated on the top and bottom of the beam in the form of flanges, while little is wasted on its center.

Another advantage of
I
-shapes: they’re easy to join to each other, much easier, say, than rounded tubes. The multiple flat faces press flush against each other and give engineers options when they’re trying to figure out how to assemble the thousands of members of steel that go into buildings.

One consideration that did
not
determine the evolution of
I
-shapes is how ironworkers would climb them and walk them. This part ironworkers figured out for themselves.

Climbing a column is about as close as most people can get to
scaling a sheer wall. The common method calls for an ironworker to approach the column from the outside of one of its flanges and hook his fingers around its edges—the flange is between an inch and two inches thick—then place the bottoms of his feet against the inside wall of the
opposite
flange. Now he’s hanging there, pressing with his feet, pulling with his arms. If it looks uncomfortable, that’s because it is. He starts to climb. His left foot rises and his right hand rises; then his right foot rises and his left hand rises. From this position, he scoots up, his hips swinging side to side. His arms and feet appear to take the weight, but in fact most of the weight is on the backs of his calves. His foot makes a lever, pressing his calf into the inside of the near flange. Using this method, a good climber hardly needs his arms. At any point he could let go and hold himself to the column with his lower legs.

There are other, less conventional ways to climb. Some ironworkers press their knees and shins against the outside of the same flange they’re grasping with their hands, and then shinny up it. This looks a bit like a baby crawling up a wall. A few connectors prefer this method, though it’s difficult to say why, as it has a tendency to shred the skin off a man’s shins. In both cases, the trick isn’t strength—many a musclebound hulk has tried and failed to climb a column—but weight distribution, finding the right balance between the push of the legs and the pull of the arms.

Ironworkers, particularly connectors, fly up and down columns all day. They speak of climbing thirty-foot columns as if it were no more difficult or dangerous than, say, walking up a flight of stairs. In fact, climbing columns is very difficult and very dangerous. Descending a column is slightly less difficult but slightly more dangerous. The position is the same, with the ironworker’s hands cupping the near flange and his feet pressed against the inside wall of the far flange, but now instead of using his feet to climb, he uses the rubber soles of his boots as brakes to slow his descent. It’s a controlled fall.

Joe Emerson, a connector at Time Warner Center, climbing a column.
(Photo by Michael Doolittle)

On a breezy afternoon early in May, Bunny and Jerry finally climbed above the rim of the hole. The rest of the gang stood on the corrugated derrick floor 30 feet below. Columns and beams lay on the floor in more or less the same configuration they would later assume in the frame. Earlier in the morning, the gang had “shaken out” the steel, arranging it on the derrick floor so as to make setting as efficient as possible. As Jerry and Bunny hoisted themselves up to perch on their respective columns, they could see the other raising gang to the west, shaking out their own loads of steel on the deck. David “Chappie” Charles, the foreman of that gang, was shouting something at Chad Snow, the connector, and Chad was shouting back at Chappie, and everybody was laughing.

Bunny envied the men in Chappie’s gang a little. It was easier working with other Mohawks. You knew each other from home; you knew how the other men worked, and you knew their quirks of personality and wasted little time in cultural translation. But it was also true, as Chad Snow once remarked, that you pushed yourself harder when you worked with other Mohawks. In a Mohawk gang, your pride was on the line; you cared what your fellow Mohawks thought of you in a way that you did not of non-Indians. “They’re not expecting you to be the best you can be,” said Chad of the latter. “You can float a little. But if you work with guys from home, everybody expects you to be the best. You want to make them proud.”

There was no time for Bunny to consider such distinctions at the moment. He knelt on the top of his column and looked down. Below, Matt Kugler and John White were preparing the beam. Matt hooked his tag line into a bolthole at one end. Standing a few feet back, John scanned the length of the beam, eyeballing its center and estimating the gauge he’d need for his choker. A choker is a wire cable with an eye on each end. It wraps around the steel like a noose, one eye slipping through the other, the open eye then looping onto the crane hook. Of the two sins a hooker-on must never commit, the
first is hooking the steel off center, in which case the piece will rise lopsided and might slip out of its noose. The second is using the wrong gauge of choker. Too thin, the choker will snap. Too thick, the noose won’t close tightly around the steel. This was a fairly heavy beam, so John grabbed a ?" choker, then leaned over the center of the beam and looped the cable around it. He pushed the one eye through the other, and pulled hard. The noose tightened. John slipped the open eye over the hook of the crane and nodded to Chett.