High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World's Greatest Skyline (35 page)

“Keith, I’m your friend.”

“Bullshit.”
Smack
. Keith hit him.

“Keith, come on—”

Smack.
Keith hit him again. “Don’t you ever fucking raise your voice to me again.”

“Jesus, Keith—”
Smack.

At this point, two ironworkers grabbed Keith and pulled him away from the project manager. “If it weren’t for them, I’d throw you off the side of the building,” shouted Keith at the project manager as the two men restrained him. “You should send these guys Christmas cards.”

The ironworkers who gathered in the Coliseum that evening generally agreed that while perhaps Keith Brown had acted rashly in slugging the project manager, he had also been within his rights. “It’s
one thing when one ironworker shouts at another. That’s in the family. But this guy, he’s not an ironworker.”

“I’ll tell you this,” added another man, “he sure as hell shouted at the
wrong
ironworker.”

The details of the fight having been duly parsed, and the chances of Keith Brown getting fired fairly weighed (the betting was that he would be, but the betting would turn out to be wrong), attention turned to more important matters, like the $500 pool of cash raised among the four raising gangs and the four crane operators. Each Wednesday the men put in a certain stake, usually $10 apiece, bumped up to $20 this week in honor of the holidays, then played for it with the poker hand in the serial numbers on their paychecks.

“I plan on taking it,” said David “Chappie” Charles, slumped over the bar, his eyes crinkled into a smile. “I’m just saying it’s mine.”

“No, I believe this one is mine,” said Frank Kirby, looking deadly serious.

While the men discussed their respective chances of getting lucky, Christmas lights flickered in the window and on the wall behind the bar, over a glittering array of bottles. John the bartender cracked open beers five or six at a time. Down near the jukebox the free buffet steamed in stainless steel troughs, and several ironworkers grazed over the buffalo wings and baked ziti. The place was crowded, and the beer and the food cast a warm glow over the men. In another hour or so, the young professionals of the Upper West Side would start to arrive and there would be an awkward overlap of clientele—the pivotal half hour or so when John had to be on his toes to break anything up before it started. For the moment, though, the bar belonged to the 30 or so ironworkers who were there, and the atmosphere was convivial but subdued. Johnny Diabo and his connecting partner, Paul “Punchy” Jacobs, were sitting at a table together, and so were Matt and Jerry, talking about what ironworkers always talk about at bars: ironwork. From across the bar came Joe Emerson’s booming voice, shouting something at Matt—“Yo,
NBC”—which was Joe’s nickname for Matt. It meant Nothing But Connect, and it was Joe’s way of ribbing Matt for his vow that, henceforth, he planned to do “nothing but connect.” Matt responded by giving Joe the finger. Kevin Scally glanced at his watch. He’d gotten married in October and had a wife waiting for him back home. Somebody handed him a new beer and suggested to Kevin that he might as well put any ideas of leaving out of his mind.

Mickey Tracy was still there, too. It was time for him to start his long journey home to Connecticut, where his wife and son would be waiting for him. He took a sip of Heineken and scratched his jaw. “You know, I’ve been thinking,” he said. “I’ve had a good life. ironwork has been good to me. You’re part of something bigger. You changed the skyline. I’m 5'4", but I stand tall, understand? You can’t take that away from me, baby. This business gave me a great life.”

“So would you like your son to be an ironworker?”

“My son,” said Mickey, “is going to be a lawyer.”

O
n a cold and gray November afternoon in 1951, John McMahon, a young ironworker for American Bridge Company, stood over the Monongahela River near Pittsburgh, deep in the heart of Big Steel country. He was working in a gang of bridgemen rehabilitating an old steel bridge that crossed the river between U.S. Steel’s blast furnaces on one side and its open-hearth furnaces on the other. Half a century later, McMahon still recalls the moment his 20-year-old self grasped the enormity of Big Steel. “It was the day before Thanksgiving and I was packing up to go home, standing up on top of the truss, and I was looking down the river and I said, ‘Good God Almighty, this is some outfit I’m working for.’ Everything we used belonged to them. The rivets and the paints, and everything you could see—the barges, the trains, the factories—and every stack had smoke pouring out of it and all hell was breaking loose, and there was fifty or sixty thousand people working in there and it was just a-goin’ Jesse, twenty-four hours a day seven days a week. And I thought, ‘Hell, we’ll never run out of work.’

“Now it’s all gone. And I’m still here. It’s all barren ground,
they’ve torn it all down. They got waterfront property for sale.”

No one in the middle of the twentieth century could reasonably have predicted the precipitous decline of American steel over the latter half of the century. The view that John McMahon took in from that truss over the Monongahela was one most Americans shared of the steel industry in 1951. It was a vast and inviolably American enterprise. Since its founding in 1901, U.S. Steel Corporation had controlled 30 percent of the world steel market, while the American steel industry as a whole had claimed as much as 60 percent of the world market. This advantage remained unchallenged through the first half of the twentieth century. Coming out of the war at mid-century—around the same time that John McMahon was marveling from the bridge over the Monongahela—the United States still produced half the raw steel in the world. In 1953, U.S. Steel would have its biggest year ever, producing 35.8 million tons of product. The company would never match that number again.

The seeds of Big Steel’s demise were sown in its success. Postwar profits were so generous that Big Steel lapsed into complacency. The genius and drive that allowed Andrew Carnegie to anticipate the future was sorely lacking in the modern steel executives. They kept making steel almost exactly as they’d been making it the previous 50 years, in antiquated open-hearth furnaces. Postwar Europe and Japan, meanwhile, were rebuilding with new technology, most significantly the BOF (Basic Oxygen Furnace) that would make steel production more efficient and less expensive, and that would shortly help those countries take a huge bite out of America’s share of the world steel market.

The decline was swift. In 1960, America produced just 25 percent of the world’s steel—a 50 percent loss of market share in 10 years. By 1970, as Jack Doyle was topping out Tower One of the World Trade Center (to which Big Steel contributed not an ingot), the number had fallen to 20 percent, and by the mid-eighties it was just over 10 percent, where it has been parked, with slight variation, ever since.

At the start of the twenty-first century America produced less steel than China, Japan, or the European Union. U.S. Steel Corporation—known now as USX—produced a tiny fraction of the world’s raw steel, and none of it was structural. Bethlehem Steel, whose wide flange H-columns had had a profound impact on the construction of early skyscrapers, was also out of the structural steel business and filing for bankruptcy. American Bridge Company, once the most formidable steel erection company in the world, still existed, but barely. McClintic-Marshall and Post & McCord were gone entirely.

The largest American producer of structural shapes at the start of the new century was Nucor Corporation, which made its steel from recycled scrap, including junked auto bodies, old refrigerators, and demolished steel-frame buildings. The scrap steel was melted down in electric arc furnaces, recast, then sent back out into the world as new shapes and products. The 192,000 tons of steel that had once supported the World Trade Center were destined for just such a fate. If the towers’ steel would not end up in one of Nucor’s electric arc furnaces—most of it had been shipped to steel manufacturers overseas—the result would be the same: melted, recast, reincarnated. Some of the new steel would probably return to these shores and find its way into a skyscraper of the future. This assumed, of course, that skyscrapers of the future were going to be made of steel and not, for instance, of reinforced concrete. Once this would have been a safe assumption. No longer. The demise of the American steel skyscraper was already well under way before September 11, 2001. The fall of the Twin Towers was bound to hasten it.

Why did the towers fall? Journalists, engineers, politicians, and the bereaved families of victims began asking the question almost immediately after the collapse. No fewer than three major studies—two federal, one private—have been devoted to answering it. It’s tempting to dismiss all of this inquiry as speculation into the obvious. Any seven-year-old knows why the towers fell: because planes
traveling over 500 miles per hour and loaded with 10,000 gallons of jet fuel slammed into them. The very question—why did they fall?—assumes the towers could have done otherwise, that somehow they
failed
when they fell. But as one of those federal studies (commissioned by FEMA) declared in its final report, “The structural damage sustained by each of the two buildings as a result of the terrorist attacks was massive. The fact that the structures were able to sustain this level of damage and remain standing for an extended period of time is remarkable and is the reason that most building occupants were able to evacuate safely.”

The exact sequence of events that led to the collapse of the towers will probably remain a mystery, since much of the forensic evidence turned to dust in the collapse. From such evidence as exists, though, most engineers agree that the initial impact of the planes, destructive as it was, had little, if anything, to do with the towers’ collapse. The buildings absorbed the force of the planes quite easily. The structure was so strong that, by one estimate, columns as close as 20 feet to the impact zone barely registered the strain.

It was not the initial impact that brought the buildings down but the fire that came afterwards. First fed by the conflagration of jet fuel, then by ignited paper, carpet, and furniture, the fire weakened the steel and made it unable to support the building. Steel doesn’t melt until temperatures reach about 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit—the temperature at which it is smelted—but it softens and distends at much lower temperatures, around 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit. The temperatures in the Twin Towers in their last hours were far higher than that, perhaps as high as 2,000 degrees in some areas. New York City fire code requires contractors to spray steel components with a thin coat of fireproof material, but apparently this material chipped off the steel when the planes hit the buildings, leaving the metal bare and vulnerable.

The most vulnerable steel of all happened to be in the floor trusses. Those trusses, 60 feet long in most cases, spanned the gap between the core of the building and the exterior columns. They not
only carried the weight of the floors, but also provided the all-important lateral support between the perimeter and the core. They kept the perimeter walls from caving and buckling. A study by FEMA surmises that as the trusses heated up, they began to “lose rigidity and sag into catenary action”—they began, in other words, to droop. As they drooped, they lost their function as lateral braces for the columns. The angle brackets that held them to the columns, relatively small pieces of steel, probably sheared. The floors broke free of the columns and began to cascade, in a vertical domino effect, one on top of the other, the weight of the higher floors tearing through the lower floors. The columns, lacking lateral support, buckled and followed the floors to the ground.

The theory of the falling trusses has been disputed in a study commissioned by Larry A. Silverstein, leaseholder of the World Trade Center. This study suggests that it was not the floor trusses but the towers’ columns that gave way under the intense heat. If so, the towers behaved much as any other steel building would have behaved under similar circumstances and were not uniquely vulnerable. This conclusion happens to benefit Silverstein, for the more like other buildings the Twin Towers behaved, the less liable Silverstein will be to legal claims made by victims’ families. In the end, whatever the reason for the towers’ collapse, one thing seems certain: it was a body blow to the reputation of steel.

A few weeks after the disaster, in a television interview, Barbara Walters asked Donald Trump what lessons builders of the future might learn from the Trade Center. “More concrete,” said Trump. Concrete would not have melted as the steel did; it is more heat resistant than steel. Trump’s view was echoed widely in the months after the attack. “It’s better to build in reinforced concrete,” Dr. Mir M. Ali, a professor of architecture at the University of Illinois, told the
New York Times
. “If there is an impact, crash, or explosion, it can absorb the energy better. That makes the building less vulnerable.” The technology of concrete had improved greatly in recent years,
said Dr. Mir, and an all-concrete structure would have lasted longer than a steel structure. “The trend is toward more concrete.”

Charles Thorton, founding partner of Thorton-Tomasetti Group, perhaps the most prestigious structural engineering firm in the world, soon added his voice to this consensus. He suggested that his Petronas Towers in Malaysia, now the tallest buildings in the world, could have withstood the attack better than the Twin Towers, in part because they were made mostly of reinforced concrete.

A more fundamental question to come out of 9/11 was whether very tall buildings were still viable structures. Who wants to work or live in a potential terrorist target? A
USA Today
Gallup poll taken soon after the attack found that while 70 percent of Americans still favored construction of skyscrapers, 35 percent admitted they were less likely to enter one. A 900-foot skyscraper planned in downtown New York was quickly scrapped, as were Donald Trump’s plans to build the world’s tallest building in Chicago. If very tall buildings were to remain a part of the urban landscape, they would exist under different circumstances, composed, probably, of different ingredients. The symbolic power of the skyscraper—the Great American Steel Skyscraper, anyway—was defunct.

WINTER

This was not good news for American structural ironworkers. Certainly not for New York’s ironworkers, for whom steel-frame skyscrapers were the bread and butter of their trade. It was true that, in the short term, the events of 9/11 had put ironworkers in the spotlight as they had not been for 70 years. This had no real practical benefit, but it felt good. It was also true that the rebuilding of the now barren 16-acre site would probably provide a great deal of work over the next several years. But whatever replaced the World Trade
Center would probably contain less structural steel (and more reinforced concrete) than what had been there.

If ironworkers at Time Warner Center spent a lot of time fretting about the future of their trade, they did it privately and quietly. There wasn’t much opportunity for fretting that winter in any case. The days at Columbus Circle were long and busy, as the steel, oblivious to its own newfound frailty, continued to rise. The building stepped in at the eighth floor, narrowing considerably, so the floors required less steel and went up faster. By the start of January, the south side of the building had reached the 20th floor. It was up to the 26th floor by the middle of the month.

The higher the building rose, the colder the weather up top. The wind whipped in from the river and the ironworkers could do little to stay warm but keep moving. There were days the temperature dipped into the low 20s and the wind chill dropped into the teens and the steel felt like ice. At lunch, some men took refuge in the Coliseum or at the tables in the back of the Rich and Famous Deli on 60th Street, but many didn’t even bother trying to warm up. What was the point? They ate their lunch sitting on the sidewalk, watching the pedestrians scurry by.

Then the temperature rose above freezing and winter rain came, days of it, a steady, damp-nose, flu-inflicting rain. The ironworkers reported for work at the usual time, hung around the cold shanty to see what the weather would do, then Joe Kennedy came out of his trailer and dismissed them.

Rain days were a mixed blessing to the ironworkers. They were holidays—sort of. Exactly how much of a holiday depended on a man’s pay scale. Foremen worked on straight time and got paid no matter what the weather did, so rain, from their point of view, was all good. Connectors usually made a deal for one paid rain day per week, so they didn’t mind the occasional soak either. The rest of the ironworkers had to make do with an hour of “show up pay” they got for showing up on time and waiting around while the bosses lis
tened to the weather report and decided what to do.

A day of rain now and then was a respite; a week of it began to feel like unemployment. The men went back home or dispersed to one of the established rain-day watering holes, like Smith’s on Eighth Avenue and 44th Street. The Mohawks usually returned to Bay Ridge and took refuge in the Snook Inn, a spacious and handsome tavern on Fourth Avenue, or the cozier confines of the Killarney on Fifth. Most of the men who boarded in Bay Ridge had never seen their home-away-from-home except in the dark or in the rain. If it wasn’t night or wet, they were likely to be working, or up north in Kahnawake.

A Friday afternoon in early February found the raising gangs on the south tower erecting the trusses under a dazzle of false spring. Most of the truss pieces had been fabricated in an old steel mill near Montreal (directly across the St. Lawrence River from Kahnawake, as it happened) but looked as if they came straight out of the Mesozoic. They were gargantuan and ugly, sprouting fins and ridges and tusks. Once they were bolted together on the 18th floor of the north tower and the 23rd floor on the south tower, the truss pieces would top-out the steel frames and serve as foundations from which the concrete towers would rise, transferring the towers’ weight to the foundation through the enormous steel “boomer” columns. Other than the boomers, these truss pieces were the largest steel components in the building.