High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World's Greatest Skyline (33 page)

“Stop right there!” a cop called as Mickey started to slip under the police tape.

“The president’s here,” said Mickey to the cop. “I’m going to see the president.”

“You can’t get any closer.”

This offended Mickey. “Hey, he’s not just the cops’ and firemen’s president. He happens to be my president, too.”

A big burly cop approached Mickey. He glanced at the nametag above the brim of Mickey’s hard hat. “You wanna see the president, Mickey?”

“Yeah,” said Mickey. “I wanna see the president.”

The big cop grabbed Mickey and pulled him into a bear hug. He held Mickey tight for a second, so close Mickey could feel the cop’s beard scruffing his cheek, then let him go. “All right,” said the cop, “let him in.” Only after Mickey was through on the other side of the tape did he realize he’d just been frisked. “But he did it really nice,” said Mickey later. “It was a class act.”

Mickey, at 5'4", could hardly see a thing over the heads of the firemen. He maneuvered his way into the crowd. A few of the firemen in front of him parted, and there, suddenly, was the president, standing right before him, his hand thrust out. Mickey shook it.

“He says, ‘Mickey, thanks for being here.’ I said, ‘Thank you for coming, Mr. President, I think you needed to see this.’ I didn’t want to take too much of his time, even though I am a pretty good talker. I didn’t want to start crying. I think he was on the brink of crying, to tell you the truth.”

The president’s visit, while welcome, proved a mixed blessing to the workers at Ground Zero. The Secret Service, in an effort to secure the area, refused to allow a new shift of men to enter the site and replace the men already down there. Which meant that every ironworker had to work a double shift of 16 hours in the cold rain. By the end of the day, the men were shivering and exhausted and accident-prone. After Mickey cut a small piece of steel with an acetylene torch, another ironworker picked up the piece and brushed the burnt end of the steel against Mickey’s arm, branding a permanent scar into his bicep. “I could hardly blame the guy,” said Mickey. “Still, I had a word with him about it.”

That night, after 16 hours of work, Mickey was too exhausted to
go anywhere. He fell asleep on a floor between two elevator shafts on the second story of the World Financial Center. The smashed-out windows let a cool breeze flow in from the river, free of the smell of death from the nearby morgue. The next morning he woke up and went back to work, “a bad decision,” in retrospect. He was spent, drained, wasted. He’d had enough. That night, after 10 more hours, he left for good. He made his way back to Columbus Circle, paid his hotel bill, and got his car out of the parking garage on 58th Street where it had been sitting for the last five days. He started for home.

“That was a terrible drive, being in the car alone for one and a half hours. I never felt so lonely in my life. I had never been away from my family for five days.”

He pulled off the highway and drove down the suburban streets, then turned into his neighborhood. American flags flew on every mailbox. He passed the local firehouse, and waved to a fireman he knew. And then he saw the banner at the end of the street. “Thank You, Mickey. God Bless America.” Everybody in the neighborhood had signed it. It took Mickey a second to realize the sign was intended for him. He turned into his driveway and saw a big flag flapping on the front lawn. His wife, Karen, he later learned, had spent the day hunting down the flag. American flags were scarce by the end of the week. She went to the hardware store. The owner told her he was sold out. “Well, you have one in your window,” observed Karen.

“Yes, but that one is for the store.”

“But I need a flag.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t give you that flag.”

“You don’t understand,” she pleaded. “My husband is coming home tonight.”

The owner finally relented. He let her have the flag. “My wife,” said Mickey, “is a very convincing woman.”

The dog ran up to greet Mickey as he stepped out of his car. He walked up to the door and opened it, feeling as if he’d been away for months. His wife hugged him, and then his son flung his arms
around him. “My son is fifteen years old,” said Mickey. “It’s hard to get hugs. But he hugged me.”

There was a great deal of hugging of ironworkers in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Ironworkers, like firemen and policemen and other rescue workers, found themselves thrust into the role of heroes, a role they had not played convincingly since the glory days of the late 1920s and early 1930s. The word “heroes” was devalued by overuse after 9/11, but the ironworkers really were heroes of a sort. For no pay (in those early days) and at no benefit to themselves, they risked their lives to help in a very fundamental way. All those qualities that had seemed odious about “hard hats” in 1970—the unreformed maleness, the brawny toughness, the jingoism—were recast overnight as courage, valor, and patriotism. “The men who normally power this city, the lawyers, brokers, financiers, are useless,” wrote a New York corespondent for the
Washington Post
that Friday. “The term ‘laborers’ has earned a new respectability among their fellow citizens…. And no one is calling them Larry Lunchpail and Joe Six-pack either.”

At the end of every shift, crowds of well-wishers stood along the West Side Highway or at the police barricades and applauded the men as they drove out from Ground Zero in trucks. “All those people out in front when you go past the barricades,” said Kevin Scally. “That’s why you go back. That’s the best feeling I’ve probably ever had in my life.” The Mohawk ironworkers who arrived home at Kahnawake that weekend were hailed as local heroes. As they gathered that Friday night at the Legion hall and the Knights of Columbus and at the bar of Old Malone’s Restaurant, people crowded around to hear their stories of Ground Zero. “Even the French are treating us like heroes,” said Chad Snow, who went home that weekend after a few days on the pile. “And the French hate us.”

In the weeks to come, ironworkers would be lauded almost con
tinuously in the press. People who had no idea what an ironworker was or did before September 11, were suddenly aware of these men in hard hats doing extraordinary things at Ground Zero. On September 25, two Local 40 ironworkers, James Beckett and Mike Grottle, would ring the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange, a sure indication of ironworkers’ new status. Meanwhile, signs of appreciation began appearing in windows near construction sites around the city, including a very large one in a window across from the Time Warner Center: “
THANK YOU, IRONWORKERS
!” Kevin Scally predicted that all this gratitude and adulation would not last. “We’ll be popular for a while,” he said without rancor. “And then we’re gonna disappear.”

MONDAY REVISITED

That first Monday back at Columbus Circle sucked. It sucked even more than Mondays usually sucked, and no amount of good press could cure that. The men returned to Columbus Circle drained and distracted, many suffering hacking coughs brought on by the smoke at Ground Zero. For the Mohawks, the Sunday night good-byes had been even more difficult than usual. New York had never seemed so dangerous and so far from home.

Many of the ironworkers had broken down over the preceding weekend. The stress and the sadness they’d managed to keep at bay throughout the week let loose in torrents and nightmares. It hit Kevin Scally the night before, Sunday night, after he came back from working on the pile all weekend. Joe Emerson was driving home on the Long Island Expressway when tears began to stream from his eyes. Nearly every ironworker who had spent any time at Ground Zero broke down that weekend. “I think it was knowing that I wasn’t going back,” said Kevin. “I just lost it.”

As it turned out, Kevin and Joe were not done yet. Monday evening they got a call from the hall asking them to return to
Ground Zero that night. This would entail putting in a full shift overnight—having already worked a full day—then going straight to work at Columbus Circle the next morning to put in another full shift. They both accepted without hesitation. “You hate it when you’re there,” Kevin explained, “but you hate it more when you’re not.”

What pulled the ironworkers at the Time Warner Center out of their collective funk was the work. Almost immediately the job hit a new stride. Those four days the building stood stock-still had given the steel fabricators a chance to produce a backlog of shapes for the first time. After a miserly midsummer trickle of five or six trucks of steel per day, trucks now began arriving at a rate of 15 or 17 per day. To make up for lost time, Bovis decided to bump the ironworkers up to 10-hour days.

In September, two kangaroo cranes, working in tandem, lifted 10 parallel, 92-foot headers over the courtyard to form a portico over the main entrance. Jerry and Matt on one side, Kevin and Joe on the other, the connectors bolted the headers in, then walked out onto the steel to join them crosswise with narrow beams. The headers were about a foot and a half wide, veritable turnpikes, and a safety crew had already hung a net about 30 feet below them. But net or no net, going out onto a strip of steel 70 feet over the ground and 45 feet from the nearest structure was dizzying. The strange part wasn’t looking down—looking down was nothing—but rather standing out in the middle of the header and looking straight up at the sky as a load of beams floated in from above. “That was a little hairy,” allowed Jerry.

The raising gangs turned their attention to the jazz center at the end of the month. The jazz center was a proscenium-style auditorium that would roost in the middle of the Time Warner building, between the haunches of the two towers. When complete, it would be one of the premium music venues in the city, acoustically, ergonomically, and visually. But the pleasures of the future jazz fans would
come at the cost of great effort and peril to the ironworkers. The steel in the jazz center was light but it was also extremely narrow, some beams barely wider than a man’s boot. It wowed and wiggled underfoot as the men set it. The connectors spent days walking around on this steel, often 60 feet over the floor, a trial of focus and nerves for the most hardened ironworker.

One day in November, Jerry and Matt set a couple of cantilevered beams at the southeastern corner of the building, where it tapered into a sharp prow. The first beam stuck out 15 feet from the body of the building, parallel to 58th Street. Matt stepped onto it and walked halfway across it to where the crane hook attached to the choker. Seventy feet below to his right a cement truck idled on 58th Street, waiting for the light to change. Matt unbuckled the choker, slung it over the hook, made a cutting motion with his hands, and the crane hook shot off.

Once the hook cleared, Matt walked on to the far (unsupported) end of the beam, where he stepped down onto the lower flange and sat. He pulled out a pack of Marlboros and tried to light one. The wind blew out the first match, but the second took, and Matt perched at the end of the beam, looking out over Central Park, holding smoke in his lungs.

Jerry, meanwhile, had crossed a short beam that lay perpendicular to Matt’s. He stood and waited for the next piece of steel that would complete the prow—the third leg of the triangle. Matt exhaled, then turned and called to Jerry.
What?
Matt pointed at his bolt bag. Jerry reached into his own bolt bag, pulled out a bolt, and tossed it underhand to Matt, who swiped it from the air with one hand. (Had he missed, the bolt would have sailed out over 58th Street, a lethal missile, and probably taken out a windshield—or worse.) He dropped the bolt into his bolt bag, then got back up on his feet. The third leg was descending. Both men stood on the steel, looking up, waiting for it. Neither was tied off.

As the pace of the job increased, little accidents and near calamities began to accumulate. A beam rolled over the foot of a tagline man. A young African-American apprentice fell off a ladder and injured his back. In mid-October, Johnny Diabo, one of the connectors recently arrived from the Random House building, caught the tip of a finger between two pieces of steel and snipped it off. “It’s funny,” said Johnny as he regarded his damaged hand. “Just a couple weeks ago a few of us were sitting in a bar and saying how none of us had ever lost any fingers or toes.” Johnny took the fingertip home with him to Kahnawake that weekend and buried it in his backyard—an old Mohawk custom, he said—then returned to work on Monday, the finger bandaged in gauze and black tape.

On a very windy afternoon in early November, Tommy, the operator of crane No. 3—Matt and Jerry’s crane—was lifting a beam off the derrick floor when an updraft got under his 180-foot boom and pushed it skyward. Jerry lunged and grabbed the tagline hanging off the beam. He quickly wrapped it around a column, trying to prevent the boom from riding any higher. For a moment, this arrested the upward thrust of the boom, but then the tagline snapped and the boom shot off. Everybody who saw this understood what would happen the instant the gust let up: the boom would fall, and the beam dangling under it would hammer down onto the building. More precisely, it would hammer down onto the head of an unsuspecting young ironworker from Buffalo, New York, who sat on the steel frame directly under it, obliviously bolting up.

“Buffy—watch out!”

Buffy, as the young man was known to his fellow ironworkers, did not look up to see what was the matter. He heard his nickname, discerned the urgency behind it, and leaped as if significant voltage had been applied to his backside. He leaped the way people leap in cartoons, flying over the beam to a column and grabbing hold of it.
SLAM!
The beam cracked onto the very spot where Buffy had been
sitting an instant earlier. The collision made a loud noise and sent vibrations whipping through the frame of the building.

Later, as a number of ironworkers unwound at Smith’s Bar on Eighth Avenue, they agreed that if Buffy hadn’t been so young and so scared, he’d be dead now. “If it had been an older guy, he’d just sit there,” said David Levy, a bolter-up in his early 40s who had watched the event unfold. “I probably would have just sat there on my ass.”