High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World's Greatest Skyline (29 page)

The real action for bridgemen in the 1930s was not in New York, though. It was out west: the Conde B. McCullough Memorial Bridge
over Coos Bay in Oregon; the Lewis and Clark Bridge over the Columbia River, also in Oregon; the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington State; the San Francisco Bay Bridge in California. And, of course, the Golden Gate.

No bridge would ever achieve quite the astonishing leap in scale that Ammann’s George Washington made in 1931, but the Golden Gate was a dramatic follow-up. The total length of this new bridge, end to end, was almost 9,000 feet, with a center clear span of 4,200 feet, 20 percent longer than the G.W.’s. Almost as impressive as its size, at least as far as the ironworkers were concerned, were several safety precautions implemented by its builders during construction. American Bridge Company provided every worker with a leather hard hat, an unprecedented measure at the time. More remarkable, the company strung a cotton fiber safety net under the bridge to catch falling bridgemen. The safety net proved its worth at least 19 times.

While the bridge boom provided jobs to ironworkers, Congress passed two laws that benefited them in other ways. The Davis-Bacon Act of 1931 required contractors on all federally financed construction projects to pay the prevailing wage of the locale where the work occurred. A contractor didn’t have to hire union workers, but he had to pay a union wage to the men he did hire. The Wagner Act, passed by Congress in 1935, guaranteed employees the right to organize into unions and seek collective bargaining with their bosses. For the first time in American history, the law forbade employers from firing an employee simply because he belonged to a labor union.

The Wagner Act had an immediate and salubrious impact. U.S. Steel and Bethlehem Steel, the dual Big Steel nemeses that ironworkers had been fighting since the turn of the century, recognized the ironworkers’ union for the first time in 30 years. Ten years later, a Republican-controlled Congress would water down the Wagner Act with passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, but relations with Big Steel would never return to their poisoned pre-Depression state. Bethlehem and U.S. Steel were now committed to hiring union labor, while
the union, for its part, was content to keep the peace. In New York, the ironworkers would not strike again until 1963. And when they did, the issue would not be one of the old perennials, like money or jurisdiction or power. It would be a safety net under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.

THE LAST GREAT BRIDGE

The Narrows is a mile-wide neck of saltwater joining the Upper Bay of New York Harbor to the Atlantic Ocean. It is the portal to the port of New York. Brooklyn thrusts out into the bay from one side, Staten Island from the other, and between the two washes the sea. The “bridge over the sea,” as the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge has been called, was to be the last link in the interborough highway system that Robert Moses had begun with the Triborough Bridge 25 years earlier. Moses, the master-builder of New York, was back to perform one last monumental act of urban planning. Othmar Ammann was back to engineer one last superlative bridge.

Bridge building had slackened after the Depression, pausing for World War II, then picked up again in the late 1940s. Americans demanded automobiles, and automobiles demanded new highways and tunnels and, of course, bridges. In the five boroughs of New York City alone, ironworkers erected 28 bridges in the 28 years between the completion of the George Washington in 1931 and the start of the Verrazano-Narrows in 1959. Those two bridges, the George Washington and the Verrazano-Narrows, were the bookends of the great American age of bridge building. The George Washington was Othmar Ammann’s first; the Verrazano-Narrows would be his last.

It would also be the last extraordinary bridge built in America. Its full span, anchorage to anchorage, would stretch 6,690 feet. Its clear span, at 4,260 feet, would be the longest in the world, reaching 760 feet farther than the George Washington’s and 60 feet farther than the
Golden Gate’s. So great was the distance between the bridge’s two towers that Ammann took the curvature of the earth into account in his calculations: each of the 690-foot bridge towers would rise straight up from the earth’s surface, but they would be one and five-eighth inches farther apart at their tops than at their foundations.

The towers topped out in the fall of 1962, and spinning began in early spring of the following year. For 6 months, 15 hours a day, 6 days a week, the bicycle wheels raced back and forth over the channel, paying out their wire. The ironworkers split the day into two shifts, one shift spinning by day, the other by night.

Nearly as many people came to watch the work as to do it, for this bridge, unlike the George Washington, had the city’s undivided attention. Every day, between a hundred and two hundred spectators, most of them elderly, retired, and male, gathered on the promontory off Bay Ridge to applaud and second-guess the work. In midtown Manhattan, the construction voyeurs who lined up along the edge of building sites and peeked through the plywood were called “sidewalk superintendents.” Here they were “seaside superintendents.” No plywood blocked their view of the bridge, but since the most interesting work occurred half a mile out to sea and several hundred feet in the air, the experienced ones brought binoculars.

Almost 12,000 tradesmen would work on the bridge before it was done, including concrete masons, electricians, and painters, but it was the ironworkers that the old men came to watch. “Without the structural steel workers,” wrote one reporter who trekked out to Bay Ridge to observe the work, “bridgewatching is like Yankee-watching without Mickey Mantle in the lineup.”

The writer Gay Talese often made the trip from Manhattan. He came to cover the bridge for the
New York Times
and to gather material for a slim book he later published about its construction. In his articles and his book, Talese wrote about Ammann and the politics of the bridge and the anger of the citizens dispossessed by the bridge, but his real interest, like that of the seaside supers, was
the bridgemen. He was especially fascinated by the nomadic, carousing boomers. “They drive into town in big cars, and live in furnished rooms, and drink whiskey with beer chasers, and chase women they will soon forget,” he wrote in his unabashedly romantic portrait. “They are part circus, part gypsy—graceful in the air, restless on the ground.” Talese quoted a Dr. S. Thomas Coppola, who treated many injured bridgemen during the course of the bridge’s construction. “These are the most interesting men I’ve ever met. They’re strong, they can stand all kinds of pain, they’re full of pride, and they live it up.”

And sometimes, of course, they died. The first man to die on the Verrazano-Narrows fell off an approach ramp and landed on the road below. The second fell inside the Brooklyn tower. The third and last was a soft-spoken 19-year-old named Gerard McKee. He was 200 pounds and well over 6 feet tall, a gentle giant who came from a large family of ironworkers in Red Hook, Brooklyn. He fell on a gloomy Wednesday morning in October of 1963, while attaching suspender cables that would hang down from the cables and hold the road deck. His partner, another young ironworker named Edward Iannielli, heard a shout and turned to see McKee grasping the edge of the catwalk by his fingers, dangling 350 feet over the water. Before Iannielli or anyone else could save him, McKee lost his grip and fell. He was an excellent swimmer, a former Coney Island lifeguard who’d amused himself as a boy by swimming across New York Harbor from Red Hook to the Statue of Liberty. If anyone could have survived a plunge into the Narrows, it was Gerard McKee. But no one could.

Gerard McKee’s death triggered an ironworkers’ strike, led by Jim Cole, Local 40’s Newfoundlander business agent. The ironworkers refused to go back to work until American Bridge agreed to stretch nets under the bridge, just as the company had done 30 years earlier under the Golden Gate. Four days later, American Bridge conceded.

Robert Moses neglected to include ironworkers in the opening
ceremonies for the bridge on November 21, 1964, just as he had neglected to include them in the groundbreaking ceremony and the ceremony to mark the commencement of the wire spinning. He did remember to include Othmar Ammann, the bridge’s engineer, referring to him in a speech as “one of the significant great men of our time.” Unfortunately, he neglected to mention Ammann by name, so when a small old man stood up and lifted his hat, most people in the audience probably had no idea who he was. Ammann died a year later at the age of 86.

As for the other old men, the seaside supers, they had to find something else to do with their free time now. The show was over. They had witnessed the end of an era. Rivets were on the way out, to
be replaced by high-strength bolts and welding. The rivet gangs would soon be a memory. So, too, would be the sight of the steel wires traveling back and forth across water, because no new suspension bridge would go up in New York again, not in what was left of their lifetimes anyway, and probably not in their children’s or grandchildren’s lifetimes either. The last great bridge was done. The attention of the city, and of the ironworkers, turned north across the bay to a 16-acre patch of soft ground in lower Manhattan, where two towers were about to rise higher than any structure yet built by man.

Spinning the first cables on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. This view is from the top of the Brooklyn tower, 690 feet above water.
(courtesy of MTA Bridges and Tunnels, Special Archives)

SQUARE ONE

Early on a bright morning in September of 1968, a young ironworker named Jack Doyle descended a long dirt ramp into the huge square hole at the bottom of the city. He was 24 years old. He spoke with a Newfoundlander’s brogue and walked with a slight limp, the result of a blow he’d taken to his hip while playing hockey in Conception Bay. The doctor had advised him to seek a sedentary occupation. Instead, Jack Doyle had followed his father and uncles and brothers into ironwork, becoming, of all things, a connector. “Guys would see me up there limping and get worried,” he recalled years later. “Well, not to blow my own horn, but I walked steel with the best of them. I was pretty catty.”

He was catty—a Newfoundlander term for surefooted—but he was blessed with an equally indispensable ironworkers’ talent for luck. He’d fallen three times and gotten away without a scratch. The first time, in Canada, he landed in a snowbank. The second time, in Detroit, he managed to grab a brace on the way down and sustained minor injuries. The third time, just a few months behind him now, he nearly died. He fell just one floor but landed on a table where carpenters were cutting sheets of plywood with a large circular saw. He missed the blade, and bisection, by inches.

Jack arrived at the foundation of the World Trade Center directly from the shape hall. He’d known about these new buildings for years. He’d read a magazine article about the Trade Center back in Canada, how the towers were going to be the tallest in the world, and the idea of working on them had thrilled him even then. And now here he was, 6 stories below ground, in the largest hole ever dug in New York City, a vast basin wide enough to accommodate 16 football fields. Most of the grillages—the pedestals of steel beams that would transfer the weight of columns to the concrete footings—had already been set. A few huge columns rose from the ground at the northwest corner of the hole, the first inklings of the north tower.

Jack had been moving around almost continuously since leaving home five years earlier. He’d worked on skyscrapers in Toronto, then boomed to Detroit for a while, then Philadelphia. He’d been back to Newfoundland, too, where he’d met a girl from the town next to his and gotten himself engaged.

Coming to this hole at the bottom of Manhattan was like coming home. Two of his brothers, Norm and George, were there. His first cousin, Leo Doyle, was superintendent in those early days, and Dick Brady, his fiancée’s brother, was there, too, pushing a rig. There were dozens of young men he recognized from the head of the bay, like Joe Lewis and Willie Quinlan and Billy Moore. As he stood there in the cool dampness, he knew he’d arrived exactly where he wanted to be. “I knew when I went down there that morning that I was staying,” he said. “I wanted to see the top of it.”

In the fall of 1968, as Jack Doyle and his fellow ironworkers were climbing their way out of the ground, the tallest building in the world was the Empire State Building. The second tallest was the Chrysler Building. Both of these buildings were nearly 40 years old.

Hundreds of new skyscrapers had been constructed since the end of World War II, some of them distinguished works of architecture, but the new skyscrapers had little in common with the skyscrapers of
the 1920s. Where those had been clad in stone and thick with steel, the new ones were lightly framed and dressed in glass. Where the old skyscrapers had risen in ever ascendant step-backs toward a cupola or a peak, shaped like wedding cakes and rocket ships, the modernist buildings tended to be sheer-walled rectangles, perfect “glass boxes,” as they were often called. Where the old buildings had been decorative and brash, the new buildings were steadfastly austere.