High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World's Greatest Skyline (22 page)

At the top of the Woolworth Building, 1912.
(Brown Brothers)

Fifteen years earlier, the sheer height of the Woolworth Building would have terrified most New Yorkers, but they were accustomed to skyscrapers now. They were assured, furthermore, that the Woolworth Building was the safest building ever made. It was fireproof, its elevators were accident proof. Its steel was stronger, too, for Bethlehem Steel had recently developed a technique of rolling wide-flanged shapes that could handle more stress than earlier shapes. As the brochure informed its readers, “it may be safely stated that a hurricane, blowing at 200 miles per hour, would not damage the framework of this Building in any way. Winds of such velocity are, of course, unknown.”

Not even God Himself, in other words, could blow this thing down.

THE GOLDEN AGE

Near the end of 1923, a Philadelphia trade magazine,
The Building Age,
sent a questionnaire to several hundred American men between the ages of 20 and 26. The goal of the survey was to gauge the young men’s enthusiasm for the building trades. Its results distressed the editors. Only a third of respondents professed any interest in entering the trades, despite the fact that construction paid relatively well. Of the 70 or so who thought they might be willing to give construction a chance, 25 percent preferred bricklaying and 20 percent preferred carpentry. How many wanted to be ironworkers? Exactly 3 percent.

The real wonder, after 20 years of bad press, wasn’t why so few young men wanted to be ironworkers, but rather: who were those 3 percent? What sort of man wanted to risk his life in a job infamous for killing and maiming its practitioners or to join a union infamous for thuggery?

As it turned out, those who took their chances were in for a wonderful ride.

There had been economic booms before, but never one quite like the one that took hold of America in 1923 and lasted seven strange and fabulous years. In the 1920s, America would produce roughly 45 percent of the manufactured goods in the world, the economy would grow an average of 6 percent a year, average incomes would rise over 40 percent, the number of automobiles in the country would approximately quadruple, and the stock market would grow by leaps and bounds.

To those who were living through it, nothing symbolized the economic exuberance of the age more perfectly than the buildings that began to rise from all the loose money and speculative real estate. Skyscrapers climbed up from the ground almost as fast as Model T’s rolled off Henry Ford’s assembly lines. And what Detroit was to the automobile, New York was to the skyscraper. By the end of the decade, half of the country’s 377 skyscrapers—defined as buildings 20 stories or taller—would be in New York City, and nearly half the structural steel in the country would be shipping to New York.

To live in New York in the 1920s was to inhabit a world under feverish overhaul. A constant caravan of trucks carried steel from river barges to construction sites. Plumes of dust released by round-the-clock foundation digging wafted down the avenues, accompanied by the
rat-a-tat-a-tat
of pneumatic rivet guns, “commonly complained of more than any other source of noise,” according to the
Times
in 1928. A promising solution, already in the works, was the “noiseless construction” of electric arc welding pioneered by Westinghouse. For the moment, though, the din of riveting was inescapable.

Equally inescapable was the fact that the Woolworth Building’s reign as the world’s tallest would not survive the boom. The only questions were when it would be surpassed and how high its successors would rise.

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 up 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.