High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World's Greatest Skyline (27 page)

“Well, it isn’t. It’s twenty-nine feet, ten and a half inches.”

“You measured it?”

“Yeah, we measured it. It’s an inch and a half in compliance. You want to measure yourself, be my guest.”

Mike squinted up at the beam skeptically. He was a heavyset man and no ironworker. He scratched his beard like he was thinking about it.

“Twenty-nine feet, ten and a half inches. All right, then.”

“Every day the safety thing is a headache,” said Joe after Mike had departed. “Everything is changing. The men don’t like it, but that’s the way it is, and they gotta get with it or go.”

The “safety thing” was a new set of revised OSHA regulations known officially as the Subpart R Steel Erection Standard. Subpart R dictated how ironworkers were to rig steel, how they were to land it on the derrick floor, how they were to connect it in the air. Most significantly, as far as the ironworkers were concerned, Subpart R mandated that ironworkers use fall protection whenever they worked a considerable distance above the ground or the floor below. That is, they had to “tie off” by wearing a harness attached by cable to a nearby beam. Most ironworkers would have to tie off when working more than 15 feet above the derrick floor or the ground. Connectors would have to tie off at 30 feet.

Tying off was not a new practice, but contractors had always been pretty lax about enforcing it. That was about to change. Insurance companies would not carry contractors with high accident rates. Even contractors with good safety records would suffer premium boosts if a single employee got injured on one of their jobs. “I tell the guys, don’t think for one second they’re worried about your health,” said Joe Kennedy. “It’s all about dollars and cents.”

The majority of the ironworkers loathed the practice of tying off. This was one of those mysteries that the good people of OSHA simply did not understand. OSHA had probably saved hundreds of ironworkers’ lives and prevented many more injuries since President Nixon signed the agency into law in 1970. Now, with Subpart R, they had crafted and honed a package that would, by their analysis, reduce fatalities from an average of 35 or 40 a year to about 5 a year, while cutting the number of injuries in half. The regulations had been conceived to save ironworkers. But rather than applaud them, what did the ironworkers do?
They got angry.
“It is odd,” Richard Mendelson, area director for OSHA, conceded. “The ironworkers are one of the few trades that argue
against
compliance.”

Obviously, nobody wanted to get hurt or killed, and the majority of the OSHA regulations made good sense to the ironworkers. The phase-in of slip-resistant steel surfaces and the removal of lugs
and other tripping hazards from steel beams were examples of measures the ironworkers backed. They likewise supported laws that forced contractors to hang safety nets under bridges and along the sides of buildings. But tying off was different. Many ironworkers considered the practice an imposition, at best, and very likely counterproductive. Connectors, most audibly, tended to believe it made their work
more
dangerous by restricting movement. Nearly every connector had been in a situation where a quick duck or leap had saved him from a wild piece of steel. Yes, the safety harness might protect them if they were knocked off, but they preferred to avoid getting hit in the first place. “I’ll wear the harness if they make me,” said Jerry Soberanes. “But there’s no way I’m tying it to anything.”

In the end, whether the new rules saved lives or cost lives wasn’t the whole issue to the ironworkers. Every work site would be staffed—it was already happening—with several full-time safety inspectors like Mike, whose entire job was to watch them,
spy
on them, and reprimand them for infractions. For men who were used to doing things their way, autonomously, this was galling. “Fuck the insurance companies,” said a middle-aged veteran plumber-up one afternoon as he sat in his usual lunch spot on the sidewalk. “We’ll get up a few floors, and then we’ll do whatever we want.”

KEITH AND MARVIN

“Yo, get in the truck and back it up, ya bonehead!”

The truck driver, a small bald French Canadian who had driven four hundred miles to deliver a load of steel and get abused by Keith Brown, grinned sheepishly and stepped up into the cab of his truck. On 60th Street, Keith took a last drag of his French Canadian cigarette—a cigarette from a pack, as it happened, provided to him several minutes earlier by the truck driver in the futile hope of placating
Keith—and threw it to the ground, as if the cigarette suddenly disgusted him, as if the ground itself rubbed him the wrong way.

Tying off.
(Photo by Michael Doolittle)

“Hey, moron,” he called to a young apprentice loitering near the back of the truck. “Quit scratching yourself like a retard and stop traffic so this shit-for-brains can back his rig out.” The apprentice ran out into the street, nearly getting clipped by a taxi.

“Now look at this idiot,” muttered Keith. “He’s gonna get himself killed down here on the fuckin’
street
?” He pulled another cigarette out of his pack. He stuck it in his mouth and struck a match.

If there was anyone to light a fire under a slow job it was Keith Brown, the walking boss, recently arrived at Columbus Circle in the August heat, bringing with him his impatience, his shouting and cursing, his disgust for the lazy and the incompetent, for no-good apprentices and French Canadian truck drivers. He split his time between overseeing the raising gangs up top and coordinating the delivery of steel down on the street, stalking back and forth with a cigarette in his mouth and a scowl on his face. Folded lengthwise in his back pocket was a schedule of truck arrivals. Now and then Keith would pull the schedule out, glance at it, and shove it back into his pocket. The secret of the schedule was that it was meaningless. Trucks routinely showed up a day early or a day late. A truck due tomorrow would arrive today and two trucks due today would not arrive at all. It was enough to make a relaxed man crazy, and Keith Brown was far from a relaxed man. He was, as he himself admitted, wired for movement, for combustion. When he removed his hard hat to air his scalp, as he often did, he revealed a small fuzzy bald spot on the crown of his head. It did not look so much like the hair had fallen out. It looked as if it had been singed.

If Keith Brown was a first class ball-buster, he was also, as apprentices and even some truck drivers came to realize, a decent guy—a “real ironworker,” as the journeymen said of him, which is about the highest compliment one ironworker can pay another. None of these tributes made Keith exactly cuddly. And as soon as you dismissed his ranting as humorous—it
was
humorous—he reminded you that, like most humor, his rose out of deep convictions. He really did hate these kids sometimes. “Don’t you fuckin’ ruin my business, you and the rest of you lousy apprentice shits,” he liked to shout at them. “You’re not gonna ruin this business if I can stop it.” In his quieter moments, Keith conceded that it was probably
already too late. “Oh, God, I used to love this business. Now, it’s just a job. I’m just glad I’m on my way out.”

Keith Brown was a Mohawk by blood, a New Yorker by birth and attitude. He spent his early childhood in an apartment on State Street in the old Mohawk neighborhood in Brooklyn, while his father worked on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. The family moved from Brooklyn to the suburbs of New Jersey as soon as the bridge was finished.

As a boy, Keith had only the vaguest sense of what ironworkers did. Sometimes his father came home with broken bones and sometimes he came home drunk—this was the sum total of Keith’s knowledge of his father’s occupation, and neither part held much appeal. “Don’t worry about me drinking,” he assured his mother after taking a sip of beer. “This tastes like shit.” To please his mother, Keith tried college. He lasted three days. “I told you he was a moron,” his father said. “Let’s hope he’s tough.” Keith followed his father into ironwork.

Keith’s father was a hard man. When Keith fell into the hole on one of his first jobs, a drop of about 30 feet that ended, fortunately, in a pile of sand, he wiped the sand from his eyes and looked up to see his father glaring down at him from above. “You no good bastard, get up here!” his father shouted. “You’re embarrassing me.” Then there was that time his father swung a maul at a lintel and missed, landing the blow on Keith’s kneecap. It made a pop so loud men could hear it on the other side of the building. “Ah, get up, you sissy,” scolded his father when Keith fell back in pain. “That didn’t hurt.”

Keith’s father may have shouted louder than some of the ironworkers of his generation, and he may have been tougher on his son, but not by much. A lot of the old timers handled their novice sons much as they handled steel, with force and diligence. They woke them up at four in the morning and got them to the job site an hour
early, because that was the ironworkers’ way. Some made their sons wear connecting belts all day long so they’d get used to the weight of the clanging tools, so they’d turn into good connectors and make their fathers proud. When their sons screwed up, the fathers shouted, and when their sons got hurt, they told them to shake off the pain and get back to work.

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
.’”