High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World's Greatest Skyline (36 page)

On this sunny but bracing February afternoon, a few triangles of the truss rose already complete along the southern edge of the tower. George’s gang worked on the eastern edge of the tower, lifting steel from the ground and setting it on huge timber skids on the deck, a staging area between earth and air. On the southwestern corner, the other raising gang—Pat Hartley’s gang—was busy setting steel. They had already lowered a hulking diagonal column to the perimeter of the floor and were attaching its base to a lower column. This new col
umn would make up one side of an isosceles triangle in the diagonal zigzag of the truss. In a move that would have made a safety inspector blanch, had there been one up here to observe it, Punchy Jacobs ducked under the safety wire and hung out over the edge of the building, holding on to the diagonal with one hand, banging a bolt through it with the other. As he swung the beater, a strange shrill sound slowly crescendoed over the hum of the crane, something like a gull’s call—the song of vibrating steel. Johnny Diabo stood near Punchy, ready to take the maul when Punchy tired. Johnny’s missing finger had knocked him out of connecting for a while, but now he was at it again. His fingertip—the one that he’d buried in his backyard at Kahnawake—had grown back, good as new. When the bolt was in and the nut tight, Johnny climbed the slanted column to the top, silhouetted against the sun, and unlatched the choker.

The day was perfect for physical labor. For several hours the men worked quietly and intensely, laying in the diagonals. Then it was break time. An apprentice arrived at the top of the ladder with a box of snacks and refreshments. The men sat on columns and beams laid out on the floor and rested, talking quietly. A few of the ironworkers drank tallboys from brown paper bags. They were up high now and there were no safety inspectors to bother them, no contractors to reprimand them—nobody at all watching over them. They were on their own, which was exactly how they liked it.

UNFINISHED BUSINESS

The steel frame of the building officially topped out on February 27. The date reflected the schedules of invited dignitaries more accurately than it reflected the state of the building. The steel frame would not in fact be complete for another few months. The steel portion of the building would not be
truly
complete until more than a year later, when ironworkers returned to crown the building’s
summit in steel. So much for details.

Time Warner Center, winter 2002. On the south tower
(left)
the ironworkers use the kangaroo cranes to set the truss. The steel portion of the north tower
(right)
is complete for the moment. The ironworkers will return a year later to crown the building, at 700 feet, with more steel.
(Photo by the author)

The celebration, held in the steel cage of the jazz center, was a star-studded affair. The mayor gave a speech. Wynton Marsalis played trumpet. In late morning, on cue, the ceremonial beam, American flag and small fir tree attached to its flank, floated by the jazz center on its ascent to the top of the building, and everyone turned to applaud as if it bore some actual significance. A few moments later, out of sight from the crowd, the crane laid the beam on the 22nd floor of the south tower, where it would rest and rust and await removal to its final berth on the 24th floor. For the moment, there was no 24th floor.

In all the many speeches made that morning, no one mentioned
the astonishing decline of AOL Time Warner’s stock over the last year. Attendees politely skipped over the fact that the company had lost about half its value since AOL and Time Warner merged the previous winter, and that the merger, barely a year old, was already looking like a colossal debacle. (The company would eventually concede as much, deleting AOL’s acronym from its name, and from the building once intended to bear it.)

A couple of months after the topping-out party,
The New Yorker
would capture the change that had occurred in the country’s economic mood on the cover of its annual “Money Issue.” Two years earlier, at the height of the Wall Street boom, the cover of the Money Issue had featured an illustration of a money tree, and three men standing under it gathering dollars by the bushel. Getting rich quick with minimal effort—that pretty much captured the mood of the country then. Now the cover showed a very different image: a pair of brawny ironworkers hanging off the edge of a steel skyscraper, one man riding a derrick hook, the other perched on a cantilevered beam, applying a rivet gun to the steel. The image was a surprising choice for the cover of an issue devoted to finance, but of course that was the point: it celebrated the old-fashioned virtue of hard physical work performed for a daily wage; of constructing something solid and real—a steel building—rather than a house of cards. The editors of the magazine seemed to be acknowledging that, as much as the meaning of work had changed over the previous century, there remained a raw physical element in the work of some people, an element, even, of daring and courage, and that these long-neglected virtues were as valuable now as ever.

Mickey Tracy still recalled the topping-out party two years earlier at the Condé Nast Building on Times Square, where
The New Yorker
now published. He remembered how the beautiful magazine people applauded the completion of a building the ironworkers had built, enjoying a ceremony the ironworkers had invented, while the ironworkers themselves were cordoned off, segregated under the watchful
eyes of security guards, almost as if they presented a physical threat to the glossy crowd. “We got fed up,” said Mickey. “Who needs that? So we left.” The party at Time Warner was a far more inclusive affair, another reflection, perhaps, of the ironworkers’ enhanced status after 9/11. Ironworkers were free to mingle as they pleased.

As the men celebrated at Columbus Circle that morning, Brett Conklin sat in his house in Suffern, surfing the doldrums of daytime television and waiting to get better. Almost exactly a year had passed since his fall from the Ernst & Young building on Times Square. Brett was still out of work, still in pain, and still fighting depression brought on by idleness and limited options. Squeezing by on $400 a week in workers’ compensation, he had too little money and too much time. It had devastated him to watch his fellow ironworkers, many of them friends, working at Ground Zero after 9/11 and to be unable to contribute himself. “That sucked,” he said. “To be honest, everything sucks. The biggest thing now is coping with it. It changed the rest of my life—the rest of my life is changed. I don’t know how to look at it anymore.”

He was due to go in for surgery in March to repair his foot. He would have to learn to walk all over again but at the least the pain in his ankle would diminish—that was the hope, anyway. He’d already had one surgery, but it hadn’t relieved the pain. The new surgery meant he would certainly never work on steel again. The nerves would be severed, the bones fused so his foot would have no lateral give to it anymore. He would lie in bed for two weeks with his foot elevated, then wear a cast for twelve weeks. It would take three to five years for him to learn to walk properly again. After his foot was repaired, he would probably go in for another surgery to repair the crushed vertebrae in his back.

Brett looked forward to enjoying a normal life someday, to getting married and starting a family. “I just gotta get through this first. My girlfriend’s pressuring me now. She’s like, ‘Come on, come on,
let’s get engaged,’ and I’m like, ‘I can’t afford to buy you a wedding ring—I can’t afford
nothin’
right now.’” He planned to start school again in the fall and complete his credits toward a college degree. “I might go into some kind of computer business. I don’t know yet. Maybe marketing, something like that. I don’t know if I’m a sit-behind-the-desk type of guy. I really don’t know yet.” For all the grief ironwork had brought him, he missed it terribly. “It was the best. There was nothing better.”

Earlier that winter, an all-steel skyscraper had started to rise on Times Square, directly across Seventh Avenue from the now completed Ernst & Young building, where Brett had fallen a year earlier. This new building was going to closely mimic the Ernst & Young building, not only in appearance but also in use. It was to be corporate headquarters for Arthur Andersen, the
other
major accounting firm in New York. (A few months later Arthur Andersen, derailed by its involvement in the Enron scandal, would drop out as anchor tenant of the building.)

The new skyscraper had gotten off to a good start, and by early spring the raising gangs had climbed their way out of the hole and up to the fifth floor. As the building rose, the men in the raising gang on the south side could not help noticing the young women working in the offices across 41st Street. The women were employees of Liz Claiborne, the apparel company. Sealed behind plate glass, they were fetching, fashionable, and perfectly unattainable.

When poets court women, they use a pen and parchment; when ironworkers court women, they make do with a can of spray paint and a rusty beam. “
GOOD MORNING, GIRLS. YOU LOOK GREAT
,” one of the men wrote in orange paint on the web of a beam. Then, a few days later: “
HI, PRETTY LADY
.” The young women across the street pretended to be oblivious to the ironworkers’ missives but the ironworkers were used to that.

One of the men working in the raising gang on the southern side
of the building was Jeff Martin. That was his real name, though few of the men working alongside him knew it. Everybody called him by his nickname, J. Kid. He was in his early 40s and still unmarried, a man’s man. His two great loves were riding motorcycles and hunting. He’d been to Ground Zero in the early days after the attack and had worked hard alongside the other ironworkers. He was one of those rare men everybody liked.

J. Kid fell from a column on the southern edge of the building early on a Wednesday morning in May. He was coming down off the top of the column, having gone up to remove a hoisting hitch. He wasn’t doing anything daring or careless. On the contrary, he’d gone out of his way to take precautions, climbing a ladder rather than scaling the column or jumping a ride on the crane hook, as he might have done in the old days. The accident occurred when he was trying to set his feet back down on the top rung of the ladder. Somehow the ladder kicked out from under him, and he lost it and fell. He glanced off the edge of the floor, then slipped out under the safety wires and dropped more than 50 feet to the street corner below.

Over the next few days, his fellow ironworkers put together a makeshift memorial at the corner of 41st and Seventh, where J. Kid died. Somebody nailed together a wooden cross. Scattered around the base of the cross were mementos of J. Kid’s life: a set of deer antlers, a cap, a pocketknife. A turquoise bracelet. A bouquet of flowers lay there on the ground as well. They had been sent over by the women across the street.

“
GIRLS AT LIZ C
.,” somebody wrote on a south-facing beam a few days later, “
THANKS FOR YOUR KINDNESS
.”

J. Kid was the first of several construction fatalities on New York skyscrapers that year. A few weeks after his death, a young Newfoundlander was fatally injured while jumping a kangaroo crane in Brooklyn. Two elevator workers would plunge to their deaths on Madison Avenue. Another young man, working as a surveyor for a steel erection company, would also die before the
year was out.

It was an odd coincidence that 2002, the first year of OSHA’s Subpart R (which had gone into effect in January), would turn out to be the most lethal year in recent memory for high-steel construction workers in New York. You couldn’t blame OSHA, though. There were always a lot of accidents when a construction boom was on. Accidents happened. There was only so much that OSHA could do about it.

“Nobody wants their kid to do this,” said Joe Gaffney, the man whose mother had watched him through binoculars when he worked at Ernst & Young—and whose father had briefly interrupted his career of crime to work on the World Trade Center. Joe loved ironwork but he appreciated its risks keenly. “You need to have a little fear. A little fear’s a good thing or you stop being careful. If you’re not aware of what you’re doing, you’re gonna wind up in the hole. You don’t get a second chance.”

In September of 2002, a few days before the anniversary of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, Joe Gaffney would fall from the 22nd to the 20th floor of a skyscraper on Madison Avenue—the same building where the elevator workers had died a couple of weeks earlier. He would fracture his spine and spend a few days in the hospital in critical condition. His was one of those accidents that some men fear more than death, the sort of accident that puts a man in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. But Joe was lucky. His spine was fractured but not broken. He would heal. He got a second chance after all.