High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World's Greatest Skyline (24 page)

You don’t have to go into Frank’s to recognize this fact. You could, alternatively, walk up to the cemetery at the top of Colliers Hill, behind the church. Much of the cemetery is overgrown with wildflowers, but if you push them aside you can see the names on the gravestones: Burke, Cole, Conway, Costello, Doyle, Kennedy, Kenny, Lewis, Moore, St. John, Wade. Stop by any steel job in Man
hattan and you will hear these same names today. They belong now to the grandsons and great-grandsons of the earlier Newfoundlander ironworkers. Most of these younger men have never seen Conception Bay, having been born and raised in Park Slope or Bay Ridge or in the suburbs around New York. Once their fathers and grandfathers left Newfoundland, they never really came back. This was just another of Newfoundland’s catches. The island was a kind of paradise. But the only way to live here was to go away.

Conception Harbour, Newfoundland.
(Photo by the author)

JIGGING AND SWILING

John Cabot, the Spanish-born English explorer, was among the first Europeans to see the rocky fogbound island when he sailed across the Atlantic in 1497. He was hoping to find a western route to Asia. What he discovered instead, and promptly claimed for England, was this “newe founde lande.” Though the island looked austere and desolate from his ship, he immediately noted the attraction that would draw people here for the next several centuries. “The sea is swarming with fish,” Cabot reportedly claimed on his return, “which can be taken not only with the net, but in baskets let down with a stone.” The fish were cod, and by the middle of sixteenth century fleets from France, Portugal, and Britain were making frequent summer trips to the Grand Banks near Newfoundland to scoop them up. While the shoals off Newfoundland became the world’s premiere fishery, the island itself served mainly as a convenient place to dry the fish. Nobody seemed to seriously entertain the idea of living there.

The first true immigrants to Newfoundland came from the British Isles near the end of the eighteenth century. Some of them came from rural England, but the great majority came from the southeastern counties of Ireland. They were a seafaring people who probably arrived as crewmen on English fishing vessels, then remained out of some brave and foolish notion they could scrape a living out of these rocky harbors and exquisitely cold waters. They settled the outlying coves around St. John’s, the “outports,” as they are still called, on the Avalon Peninsula. Among these early outports was Cat’s Cove, probably named after a cougar who lived in the area. In 1870, the people of Cat’s Cove changed the name of their small outport to Conception Harbour.

It’s an indication of the hardship these people must have come from that this—this
rock
—seemed to offer something more promising. Farming wasn’t really an option in Newfoundland. The land was too rocky, the soil too shallow, and the growing season too brief to
cultivate anything more elaborate than a vegetable garden. The only way to earn a living here was by fishing.

The cod fishery was summer and autumn work, from June to October. The men would sail out to the Grand Banks in schooners, then lower themselves to the water in small dories, two men per boat, and “jig” for fish with a small lead ball and hook. They would jig until the dory was filled with as much fish as it could hold. Then it was a matter of gingerly making the trip back through the swells to the schooner without sinking—assuming the fishermen could find the schooner. Getting lost in a squall was easy. Fog, too, was a constant danger. Every time a man went out to the Grand Banks, he stood a good chance of never coming home.

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 refrigeration—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.