High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World's Greatest Skyline (34 page)

“Buffy was scared shitless,” said Jerry. “I’ve never seen a man move faster in my life.”

“I was scared,” agreed Buffy. “It was pretty funny.”

“I’d definitely be dead,” said David Levy, who had the distinction of being one of a handful of Jewish ironworkers in New York and whose nickname was simply Jew.

“So, if somebody shouted,
‘Watch out, Jew!’—”

“—I wouldn’t move.” He shrugged. “I’d be like
, What the fuck is wrong with you? Don’t bother me, asshole. That’s the problem with getting old in this business. It takes more to scare you.”

JACK GOES BACK

Jack Doyle stepped out of a cab on the corner of Broadway and Liberty Street. It was a damp morning in mid-November. He wore a trenchcoat and pressed suit pants and a pair of two-tone leather bucks. The rain had ended, but the streets remained slick and the air misty and chilly, causing Jack’s hip to ache a little. Favoring it, he approached the police barricade. He fished into his coat pocket for his pass, which he flashed before the police officer standing beside the barricade.

“Wrong pass,” said the cop. “Brown was last week. This week is orange.”

“Orange?”

“Yeah. They changed it.”

“Is that right? Well, this is the one they gave me.”

One of the ironworkers’ foremen walked up to greet Jack, then had a quiet word with the cop. The cop finally relented: Jack was free to pass. Thirty-four years after the morning he first arrived in 1968, a catty young connector from Conception Bay, Jack Doyle walked down Liberty Street, back to where his journey to the top began.

All told, Jack had spent seven years of his life down here on the 16 acres of the World Trade Center. After topping out the north tower in 1970, he’d gone on to push a rig at 3 World Trade—the 22-story Marriott Hotel—then later became walking boss at 7 World Trade, a 47-story office building erected in the late 1980s. He’d worked in one capacity or another on every one of the seven buildings in the World Trade Center complex. And every one of them was gone now.

“Hey there, Jack.” Several ironworkers greeted him as he walked west on Liberty Street. “Jack Doyle! Hello!”

Ironwork had been good to Jack. Other than a few missing fingers, he’d gotten through his years on the steel without much damage. He and his wife had raised a family of three kids in the house on Staten Island he bought back in 1970, while pushing his rig on Tower One. He’d sent the kids to good colleges and seen his son, Kevin, make Law Review at Seton Hall. He’d worked his way up through the ranks from pusher to walking boss, from walking boss to superintendent, and now, at the age of 58, he was president and business agent of Local 40 of the ironworkers union, which made him one of the top building trade executives in the city.

Jack approached the eastern edge of the site and looked out over the wreckage. Just two months had passed since the attacks, but already an astonishing 56,000 tons of debris had been trucked away, and the pile had been transformed into a pit. The pit still smoldered, exhaling a vapor of carbon monoxide, benzene, propylene, and several other possible carcinogens, but other than the odor, which was off-putting, Ground Zero seemed well controlled. The frenetic
urgency that had characterized it for many weeks was gone, replaced by a trimmer and more efficient operation. From 300 ironworkers a few weeks earlier, the number had dropped to about 180.

Danny Robbins, a broad-shouldered, blond-haired ironworker, joined Jack at the edge of the pit. “Housewreckers still talking about taking down the Customs House with a wrecking ball.”

“Smash it down? Sounds like a mess.” They started walking north on Church Street, skirting the edge of the pit.

“Yeah, then our guys have to go in there and crawl all over it and burn it out and get hurt. It’s stupid. We oughta go in there with a crane and take it apart.”

“That makes more sense,” agreed Jack. “I’ll have a word.”

“That’d be great.”

They turned west, onto Vesey Street, and passed the blackened and gutted Customs House. This had recently been a busy paved street cast in perpetual shade by the tall buildings surrounding it. Now it was a swath of sloppy mud, as empty as a country lane. A dirt field spread to the west and north, where pickups and SUVs were haphazardly parked. Jack stopped walking.

“That was 7 World Trade. That was a forty-seven-story skyscraper. I can’t get over that. Look at that, it’s a parking lot.”

He stood there for a moment, gazing across the expanse of mud. 7 World Trade had never achieved quite the renown of the Twin Towers, but the job of building it was one that ironworkers talked about for years afterward. It was a big, complex job that involved hoisting and joining enormous members of steel, and a lot of men got badly hurt on it. One of the worst accidents befell a good friend of Jack’s, Pat Kennedy, who lost his leg under a grillage of steel one morning while the building was still in the hole.

Danny Robbins led the way over rough ground, over beams and rebar. They came around the edge of the Customs House. The mud was thick and sloppy here. Jack, still catty after all the years, stepped lightly between patches of hard pan. A rim of mud formed at the
soles of his bucks but he didn’t seem to notice or care. Straight ahead, two men stood in ankle-deep sludge, shoveling around the edges of a recumbent column. One of the pair was a white-haired man who looked to be a few years older than Jack. The other was a young man with a couple days’ growth of beard. This was Mike Emerson.

“Hey, if it ain’t Jack Doyle!” called the older man.

“What is this?” called Jack, grinning. “Since when do ironworkers carry shovels?”

“They’ve turned us into laborers here,” said Mike Emerson with a laugh. “We’re digging it out so we can get a chain under it.”

Mike Emerson had been down here every day since he first arrived with his brothers on the morning of September 12. He’d worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week—a pace he would maintain for 10 months, straight through to end of the cleanup. Many tough ironworkers had spent a few weeks down here and called it quits, understandably finding the grimness of the site, the dead bodies, and foul smoke too much to bear. But others got energized by it. They found it weirdly sustaining. Mike Emerson, after his initial panic attack on the pile that first Wednesday, turned out to be one of these, much to his own surprise. “I found I had a knack for this kind of work,” is how he put it. “The rugged work. Being in that environment. The burning, being out there in that big cloud of smoke and cutting pieces, hooking them up—it just came natural to me.”

The work had taken a toll on his personal life. A week before the terrorist attacks, Mike’s wife had given birth to a baby girl. Mike had barely seen the baby, or his wife, since the birth. He left home at 5 in the morning and returned at 10 in the evening. Nearly all of his waking hours were spent at Ground Zero or on the train commuting between there and his house 50 miles north of the city. He knew that he could quit at any time. And yet, for reasons he didn’t quite understand himself, he also knew he had to keep going. “I gotta say, my wife, she’s a tough girl. There were guys I worked with, their wives
just couldn’t take it. Mine never complained. She knew it was where I wanted to be. It was like I had a drive. Once I started there, I was hell-bent. It was just something I had to do.” Sitting on the train after a long shift, Mike would close his eyes and count his blessings. He felt like the luckiest man in the world to be returning home to his family. But then, next morning, he’d wake up feeling an urgent need to get back to Ground Zero. As of mid-November, he’d yet to take a single day off since the attack. And when he finally did take one off—Christmas Day—he’d feel restless and guilty being home. “I thought a lot about all the kids that were left behind. ’Cause I used to see them down there, the families. Sometimes they’d come down. You knew how many lives were just friggin’ wrecked.”

In the early weeks, after most of the ironworkers had gone back to their regular jobs, and long after they really had any good reason to hope, Mike and the other rescuers at Ground Zero searched for the living. “We really all believed that there were people down there in air pockets, hanging on, waiting for us to uncover a hole. I’d been in that building nine million times. I knew there was a lot of underground, all these different levels. You really logically thought somebody could have made it out alive. But then, after two or three weeks, we were like
Man, I can’t believe we didn’t find anyone alive.”

Now it was about finding the dead. Before 9/11, Mike had seen guys get badly hurt on jobs, but he had never seen a dead body. In the months since, he’d seen a great many of them in various states of disorder. The discovery of a corpse had become a familiar, even welcome, occurrence. It meant that a grieving family would have a body to bury; a sort of closure, if not exactly peace.

The work had become a regular job in many respects, albeit a regular job unlike any other on earth. It continued to be enormously dangerous. Ironworkers still pulled out cherry-red beams, the steel so fragile it could snap as they lifted it. Many of the men at Ground Zero had suffered minor injuries. As of early November, there had been 34 broken bones, 441 lacerations, more than 1,000 eye injuries,
and hundreds of burns and sprains and smashed fingers. And plenty of dangerous work remained, for the further they dug, the more unstable the steel would be.

But for all the danger, those who had the knack for the work enjoyed a deep satisfaction in accomplishing it. You knew you were doing something important. And you were treated like an important person. The perks included round-the-clock free food and coffee, warm shelter in which to rest, and a constant stream of celebrity visitors who came to gawk. Ground Zero was hallowed ground but it was also—this being New York—
exclusive
ground, and the blue police barricades were the velvet ropes of the moment. Susan Sarandon and Brooke Shields and Jack Nicholson and Miss USA and Derek Jeter—they all came to see the disaster and to ogle the heroes. For the ironworkers, this was an unfamiliar though not unpleasant sensation: being the object of a star’s gaze.

Jack Doyle walked onward, greeting ironworkers. No one seemed particularly surprised to see him out here in the mud. A man brought over a photograph of the World Trade Center and asked Jack to sign it. As Jack handed the photograph back, a puff of black smoke drew his attention back to the pile. The firemen turned their hose on the smoke. “Something just caught fire out there,” said Jack. He squinted at the pile for a moment, then his eyes drifted to a husk of columns still standing near the Customs House. These columns were almost 10 stories high and had once belonged to the lower floors of Tower One. They were all that remained of it now. In a few weeks, they would come down, too, and nothing would be left. The columns had formed the northeast corner of the building, where Jack had pushed his rig 33 years earlier.

“Every piece of that steel I know,” Jack said now. “I touched it all with these hands. And look, it’s still standing.” He smiled. “I’d say we did a pretty good job.”

Mike Emerson in front of the remains of the north tower.
(Courtesy of Mike Emerson)

CHRISTMAS

On the Wednesday before Christmas, Keith Brown rang in the holidays by slugging the project manager for ADF. The chance of Keith Brown, the walking boss, hauling off and taking a swing at somebody had always seemed high, and ever higher as the work at Time Warner Center sped up and Keith’s impatience and irritability waxed accordingly. But still—
the project manager?
The man was ostensibly Keith’s boss, several ranks above him. Nobody slugs the project manager.

The fight was on everybody’s lips at the Coliseum that evening. Some of the ironworkers had overheard the two men arguing over an open frequency two-way radio shortly before the fight. They heard the project manager yell at Keith, upset that certain pieces of steel had not yet been bolted up on the 12th floor. They heard Keith yell back, suggesting that the project manager refrain from shouting. They heard the project manager shout again, something to the effect of
This work is fucked up and you better get the fuck up here and get it done right.
In retrospect, the project manager probably wished he’d chosen his words more carefully.

“Sure,” Keith responded into the two-way. “You stay there. I’ll be right up.”

The radio went silent. Everybody waited, including, to his credit, the project manager. Several minutes passed, as Keith rode the elevator, then climbed to the 12th floor on ladders. When he stepped out onto the derrick floor, he saw the project manager waiting for him. The conversation went something like this:

“Keith, listen—”

“Shut the fuck up—”