High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World's Greatest Skyline (7 page)

When the bridgeman was done thinking of lost tunes and larks, he could further broaden himself with curious facts and helpful bromides:

 

Avoid alcoholic drinks if you want to insure yourself in these torrid days against heat prostration. Alcohol in any form is first a stimulant and then a depressant. It overworks the heart for a time, and then there is languor due to lack of material on which to labor.

 

 

The best way to get out of debt is to pay out.

 

 

The dome of the United States Capitol is 287½ feet high. The weight of the iron alone in the dome of the Capitol is 8,909,200 pounds.

 

 

The Lord made woman—but she made herself into a lady.

 

On the subject of women, George O’Kane, who called himself Doctor O’Kane and frequently wrote to the magazine from New York, believed that bridgemen would be better off if they were more willing to “try the saving grace of matrimony.” Nor would it hurt to dress a little better while they were at it. “There is a large class of bridgemen who work steadily, dress respectably and are a credit to the organization and the community in which they reside,” wrote Dr. O’Kane. Another class, however, dressed and behaved like bums. “We heard some of the latter uncharitably criticizing the former the other day, calling them dudes and other things. We look at the matter differently and think that diamonds never flashed from a fitter repository than a UNION bridgeman’s bosom.”

The promise that bridgemen, even floaters, were capable of cultivation was confirmed in the winter of 1903 when Munch Chunk (whose real name turned out to be William Woodring) wedded a charming young widow at the Little Church Around the Corner, at Fifth Avenue and 29th Street. The service was followed by a lavish champagne reception at the bride and groom’s home at Park Avenue and 112th Street. “All the roughnecks were invited to attend,” reported
The Bridgemen’s Magazine
, “and Mr. and Mrs. Chunk were sorry they had laid in such a large stock of the flowing beverage, as the invited guests did not leave until everything was cleaned up.” That was two days later. Evidently, these roughnecks truly did appreciate the finer things in life.

The start of the twentieth century was a good moment in the history of New York’s ironworkers. The ruinous strikes that would begin in the spring of 1903 were still in the future. Peace reigned. The wage, $4 for an eight-hour day, was a good one at a time when factory workers averaged less than $8.50 per week. True, ironwork tended to be irregular, but for the moment there was more work than there were men to do it. The George A. Fuller Company alone was running about 15 steel jobs in Manhattan in 1901, with several others
soon to break ground. All around the city, derricks were swinging, rivet guns were clattering, and steel frames were rising. On the East River, where the Williamsburg Bridge was about to overtake the Brooklyn Bridge as the longest suspension bridge in the world, bridgemen stood on black-ribbed girders and catcalled down to the hoist operator hundreds of feet below.
“Yeow-yeow-yeow!”
they called, then the operator shouted back “
Hey-y-y!”
and then everybody cried,
“Ho-hoo-ho-hoo,”
and the load started to rise. Meanwhile, work was getting under way on the Manhattan Bridge, another long suspension bridge over the East River, and would soon commence on a great cantilever bridge between Manhattan and Queens. There was so much demand for structural steel work in Manhattan that the steel companies could not keep up with it, and some jobs—the Flatiron among them—temporarily suspended construction while waiting for more steel to arrive.

The basic customs of the work were in place by 1901. The steel was hoisted from the street by wooden derricks that were secured to the top of the building by guy wires. The derricks rose as the buildings rose, but their steam-powered cable drums, and the men who operated these, remained below on the ground. The ironworkers topside communicated with the operator by bell lines that ran to the basement: two yanks meant the operator should pay out the cable and let the load down; four yanks meant he should reel it in, and up. As a load began to rise from the street, a man or several might jump onto it and hitch a ride to the top, one hand fecklessly grasping the cable as the ground receded. A “bullstick” man would pivot the derrick by throwing his weight into a long lever, and the derrick’s boom would swing in over the scantily planked floor.

When it came time to hang steel, the “setters,” as connectors were then called, slipped in the first bolts, then the rivet gang moved in. The “heater” stood over a small coke forge propped on a few pine planks laid across beams. He barbecued a rivet to a white glow, then plucked it from the coals with tongs and flung it, fast and hissing, 20,
30, as far as 50 feet, to wherever the gang happened to be working. His “catcher” snatched the rivet from the air with a funnel-shaped cup, its mouth no wider than a salad plate. The catcher withdrew the still red-hot rivet with his tongs and plugged it into the rivet hole. Now the “bucker-up” held the blunt head of the rivet flush against the column or beam with a steel bar, while the “riveter” stood on the other side of the connection and pressed the barrel of a pneumatic hammer against the shank of the rivet. He pulled the trigger and the piston fibrillated—
br-r-r-r-r-r-r-ip!
—smashing the semi-molten metal into a button flush against the steel. All of this happened with great speed and deafening clamor—heat, toss, insert, smash, then move on across the steel to the next rivet hole. A good gang could do a few hundred rivets a day. A thousand a day was not unheard of.

All of this assumed, of course, that nothing went wrong. But things did go wrong. Sometimes the heater threw a wild one. Sometimes the catcher missed and the rivet seared his skin (you knew a catcher by the scars on his forearms) or plummeted through the frame of the building like a meteorite. The gang would shout a warning to those working below and, inevitably, everyone would do the one thing a person should never do when a hot rivet is plummeting toward his head: they looked up.

It did not take a full rivet to injure a man. As the pneumatic guns pounded the rivets into their holes, cinders frequently flaked off and dropped. “I had the strangest experience once,” a young ironworker told
Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly
. “I happened to have my mouth open and the red-hot burr flew right in my throat. It burned the roof of my mouth badly, and then dug into my right cheek somehow. But the doctor at the hospital could never find the bit. They thought it must have worked out in some way and that I must have swallowed it.”

Of greater concern than rivets or cinders was the ever-present danger of falling. There were no safety harnesses, no fall nets, no safety
wires around the perimeter of the working floor in 1901. A law passed 12 years earlier required contractors to spread wooden planking below the men as they worked. This would have done little to keep men from going over the side of the building but it might have protected men from going into the hole on the inside—if, that is, contractors had obeyed it. They did not. As construction photographs of the Flatiron and other steel-frame buildings clearly illustrate, planking was spotty, allowing plenty of man-size gaps between timbers. If a man slipped, he could go many stories before hitting something solid.

The danger was reflected in the carnage. At the start of 1902,
The Bridgemen’s Magazine
noted that Local 2 had buried two men a week for the previous six weeks. Meanwhile, of 1,000 members in Chicago’s Local 1 a year later, 103 were injured, 15 more were permanently disabled, and 18 died: nearly fifteen percent of the union’s members injured or killed in a single year. A few years later, Chicago would record 83 injured, 17 permanently disabled, and 23 dead. Altogether, about two percent of ironworkers died and another two percent were permanently disabled each year in the early twentieth century. In other words, of every 100 men in a local, 40 were likely to be dead or disabled within a decade, 80 within two decades. Not even the luckiest man could hope for a long career on steel. “We do not die,” went an ironworkers’ slogan of the time. “We are killed.”

“We are only too well justified by the facts in making the statement that a man, on the day he starts in the structural iron industry, signs his death warrant,” wrote the president of Local 2, Robert Neidig, in 1903. “It is a sad, gruesome, and only too truthful fact that no ironworker is considered to die a natural death unless he gets killed. One of our members that lives to be old and dies in his bed is looked upon as a curiosity by the vast majority whose crushed and mangled remains are laid beneath the sod before the hand of Time has had a chance to touch one hair with silver.” In February of 1903, Local 2
raised its initiation fee to $100, exactly the amount the union paid out for funeral expenses when a member died. “All we are asking of these candidates,” wrote Neidig, “is to give us enough money for decent interment.”

No workers’ compensation existed in 1901, so if a man died, his widow, if there was one, made do with the $100 from the union and perhaps a small settlement from the builder. As a rule, builders were not generous with settlements, on the grounds that the sort of man who went into ironwork knew what he was getting into so hadn’t much right to complain when he died. “The men are fully aware of the risks they run when they undertake the work,” one builder told the
New York Times
. “If the man has not a cool head and is subject to giddiness in working at dizzy height, he takes an unjustifiable risk in accepting such a job…. It would be a benevolent and philanthropic, no doubt, for employers to provide for families of their workmen who are killed as a result of their own carelessness, but on the other hand I don’t see that it would be just to compel them to make such provisions.”

A great many of the city’s early skyscrapers were built by life insurance companies. Metropolitan Life, New York Life, Manhattan Life, Washington Life—their buildings were among the tallest in the city. Here is one telling irony of the ironworker’s plight: none of these companies would have provided him with life insurance. He was not, actuarially speaking, worth the risk.

As soon as the scaffolding came off the Flatiron, crowds would gather at the intersection of Broadway and Fifth Avenue, some to admire the new building, others to ridicule its bizarre mile-high pie-slice shape. From certain angles, it would appear as sharp as a blade or as unsupported as a stage flat—a sheer wall with nothing behind but air. Sightseers would gather to watch it topple in the wind, but they would be disappointed, for the building would turn out to be every bit as strong as its promotional literature had promised. The
wind would not bother the building nearly so much as the building would bother the wind, causing powerful and perilous downdrafts. A boy would be blown off the curb into Broadway and killed by a cab. Women who walked near the building would risk immodesty as drafts lifted their petticoats, revealing a glimpse of Victorian knee.

Among those drawn to the base of the new building would be a young and soon to be celebrated photographer named Alfred Stieglitz, whose moody, snow-swept photographs would help establish the Flatiron as the most recognizable building in the country. In 1904, he would write about the Flatiron in a letter to his father: “It appeared to be moving toward me like the bow of a monster ocean steamer—a picture of a new America still in the making.”

And what of the man in that earlier photograph—the nameless man on the 15th floor with his back to the camera? Impossible to say. But if this building was an ocean liner, then he’d ride it into the future. If this was the new America in the making, he’d be among those making it. Because the new America was going to be made of steel.

The Flatiron, still in the making, 1902.
(Brown Brothers)

T
wo weeks after they arrived at Columbus Circle to build the Time Warner Center—two weeks after Brett Conklin’s fall 17 blocks to the south—the raising gang was high over the hole, enjoying a mid-morning coffee break on the machine deck of crane number 2. Last night a dusting of snow had fallen over the city, but the sun had come out strong and the sky was brilliantly blue and the snow was mostly gone. The men sat on the deck, smoking and gazing out at the multi-million-dollar view of Central Park. When their cigarettes burnt down, they flicked them over the edge and the butts fluttered 110 feet to the mud at the bottom of the hole.

Since that gray February day they first came—it was early March now—the men had been setting up kangaroo cranes. This was the first step in any major steel job in New York; until there were cranes, there could be no steel, and there would be no cranes until the raising gang assembled them, piece by piece, like giant Christmas toys. The gang had already completed crane number 1, to the east. Crane
number 2 was well on its way, soon to be joined by number 3 and number 4, which would serve the southern tower of the building. For the next month, a temporary crawler crane in the hole would feed the raising gang prefabricated components of the cranes and the men would bolt these into place: box-shaped sections of the tower, one stacked upon the other like milk crates; then the rubella, a turntable-like collar on which the crane would pivot, or “slew”; then the machine deck, the drums and engine, the operator’s cabin, the mast, and finally, the lacy 180-foot-long boom.

The cranes were called kangaroos not because they resembled the eponymous marsupial, but because they were first manufactured in Australia. If they resembled any living thing, it was the ornithological species that shared their name:
cranes
. They rose on a single spindly leg, absurdly top-heavy, graceful and agile but also slightly ludicrous. What kept them from keeling over were the four 12-ton counterweights that hung from a rack under their rumps. As the crane’s boom reached out and dipped to take a load, the counterweights, in a small miracle of weight distribution, slid in the opposite direction. As the boom lifted and strained under the load, they slid further out; as it rose, pulling the center of gravity toward the crane, the counterweights moved back home.

Before that miracle could occur, though, the raising gang would have to install the counterweights. At a nod from their foreman, the men slowly stood, their break ended. The connectors, Jerry Soberanes and Keith McComber—the blue-eyed Indian the others called Bunny—slithered through the hollow center of the rubella, then ducked under the machine deck and wriggled between the diagonals of the latticed tower. They hung onto the outside of the tower, a hundred feet over the hole, and waited. A moment later, the first of the counterweights swept in on the boom of the crawler crane. Along the bottom of the counterweight, welded to it, ran a slender horizontal terrace of grilled wire, just wide enough to accommodate a man’s boot. The counterweight was still a yard off the stern when
Jerry stepped across the open air and onto its terrace. The counterweight, with Jerry aboard and clinging to it, swung gently away from the tower, then gently back. Now it was Bunny’s turn: he reached a foot out over the gap and stepped on beside Jerry. They stood there on the narrow ledge a hundred feet over the hole, swaying in the breeze.

A few minutes before noon, the raising gang started down a narrow metal ladder through the interior of the crane’s tower. When they reached the bottom, they stepped out onto the mud, a treacherous topography of half-frozen divots and crags concealed under a few inches of boot-sucking paste. Bunny and Jerry led the way to the dirt ramp at the southwest corner of the hole. Like most connectors, they were fit and agile and didn’t have much trouble high-stepping through the mud. Their wrenches and connecting bars clanged in the scabbards of their connecting belts, and with a little imagination—a pointed helmet instead of a hard hat, a long yellow beard instead of a clean-shaven face, a rocky beach instead of mud—they might have been Viking warriors arriving home after a season of berserking. They had the weary look of men returning from difficult work.

They walked shoulder to shoulder, side by side, matching strides. Bunny and Jerry had never connected together before this job but already they’d acquired the complementary rhythm of old partners. This would stand them in good stead. Over the next several months, nearly every move one of them made would depend on the timing and skill of the other. So, sometimes, would his life. Connectors routinely step out onto beams held aloft by a bolt on one end and the tapered end of their partner’s spud wrench on the other. They make the step based on nothing but a slight nod from the partner’s head, the nod that says:
It’s in the hole, trust me.
Trust is everything.

For some reason, connecting, like love, tends to attract opposites.
Bunny and Jerry’s differences began with their backgrounds. Like many of the Mohawks, Bunny was a fourth-generation ironworker on both sides of his family. Ironwork ran deep in his blood. His father was an ironworker. His brother had been an ironworker, too, until a few years ago when his leg got caught and mangled under the counterweight of a crane. Bunny’s cousins were ironworkers. His wife’s family, too—they were all ironworkers.

Bunny had intended to become an ironworker since he was a boy. More precisely, he’d intended to become a connector. He remembered the respect people accorded his uncles, Robert and Gerald McComber, who connected together for many years. “I’d always heard stories about them, how good a name they had,” he said. “It gave me a goal. I wanted to live up to the name.” At 18, Bunny purchased a union book from the Montreal local and started booming down to New York as a journeyman. A few years later, he transferred into No. 361, the Brooklyn local to which most of the Kahnawake Mohawks belonged. He was connecting by the time he was 21. Now he was 31, an old hand. To his colleagues, Bunny gave off an air of cocky assurance. He was known as a talker, a boaster, a swaggerer, a young man who thought he knew pretty much all there was to know about ironwork. Which was a pretty fair description of most connectors.

Not, though, of Jerry Soberanes. Jerry had a wry smile but didn’t say much, at least not when he first met you. His trajectory into ironwork had been more like Brett Conklin’s than Bunny’s. A friend’s father was an ironworker and steered him into it. A daredevil kind of kid, Jerry had started connecting soon after he finished his apprenticeship. Now, at 31, he cruised the steel with the unflappable cool of an airline pilot in a storm. A fallen beam, a surprise gust, a near miss—nothing much got a rise out of Jerry. He’d smile and shrug and keep working, and wouldn’t mention it unless somebody asked. Then he’d say, “That? Nah, that wasn’t too bad. Coulda been worse.”

Trekking through the mud behind Bunny and Jerry were Matt
Kugler, the tagline man, and John White, the hooker-on. Matt, at 29, was the youngest of the gang. His father had been an ironworker, which was reason enough for Matt to try something different. He served three years in the Marines, then realized he wanted to do what the old man did after all. He still looked like a marine. He had the broad square shoulders, the ramrod bearing, the crewcut, the biceps, the tattoos. Before this job was over, some of the ironworkers would nickname him Rambo. It wasn’t just the way he looked; it was his attitude about ironwork. He was so gung-ho you weren’t sure sometimes if he was kidding. “Let’s go build this thing,” he’d announce. “I’d like to build this thing myself. Christ, give me a chance, I’ll build the whole goddam thing, I swear it!”

John White was the least likely man to be in a raising gang. He was an apprentice, and it is rare for an apprentice to gain admittance to a raising gang. But John White was not your average apprentice. He was 35, which made him the second oldest man in the gang. Until a few years earlier, he’d built racecars for a living. He’d never met an ironworker and had only the vaguest inkling of what one did when he took the apprenticeship test on a whim. He passed with flying colors, enrolled, and two years later he’d worked his way, against all odds, into a raising gang. He loved the work and planned never to leave it.

The fifth man down, Chett Barker, didn’t even bother trying to keep up with the other four. He was 55 years old and, like most ironworkers over 50, even those who have never been seriously injured, he was hobbled. Most of his joints were arthritic. His legs bowed slightly, an orthopedic anomaly common to veteran ironworkers whose knees have grown to accommodate the steel flanges that so often come between them. His face was youthful but shot through with blasted capillaries from days spent straining in wind and cold and sun. Chett’s career had begun with his apprenticeship 37 years earlier on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, the last great bridge job in New York—and 60 feet longer, Chett liked to point out, than the
Golden Gate. “People should know that,” said Chett, “because it’s the goddamned truth.”

Chett lurched slowly through the mud. As a young man, after his apprenticeship on the Verrazano, he had served a tour on the front lines in Vietnam with the First Air Cavalry. Between the war and work, he had seen more than his share of death and injury. His own father, a bridgeman, fell badly three times, nearly dying the third time. Chett, at 55, could hardly walk, but things, he knew, could be worse.

Chett was still only halfway to the ramp when Bunny and Jerry climbed out over the rim of the hole onto the street and stamped their boots. An attractive young woman stood near the gate, waiting to cross the street. Bunny took a step toward her and lifted his arm. When she saw the hard hat, she scowled, but then she saw the smile, the dazzling blue eyes, and accepted the proffered arm. Bunny escorted her to the opposite sidewalk, tipping the brim of his hat as they parted. As the woman walked off, Matt, who’d never met Bunny until two weeks ago, chuckled. “Bunny,” he said to no one in particular. “What a fuckin’ piece of work.”

The men had been coming to the Coliseum Bar and Grill for lunch since that day Bunny purchased his shamrock two weeks earlier. The bartender had already committed their tastes to memory, and now, as they filed in and straddled stools along the bar, their beer bottles were open and down on cardboard coasters before their elbows touched wood. Chett shuffled in and sat down next to Bunny. The bartender set him up with a shot and a chaser.

The Coliseum was narrow and low-ceilinged, down a few steps from the sidewalk. This was a bar entirely lacking attitude or gimmick: no light-stained wood or fancy sconces, no amber beers from the Pacific Northwest. What it did have were shamrocks two months of the year and Christmas lights year round, two televisions, one jukebox, an oak bar worn smooth by decades of touch, and a capa
ble Irish bartender named John. In all likelihood, the Coliseum was doomed to the same fate as its demolished namesake across the street. Rents in the neighborhood were already skyrocketing in anticipation of the $1.7 billion Time Warner Center. It was difficult to see how a no-nonsense watering hole like this one fit into the new picture. For the moment, though, the Coliseum had hit upon a piece of luck: ironworkers.

It’s arguable whether bars were good for ironworkers, but there was no doubt that ironworkers were good for bars. At every job site, the same thing happened: a certain bar was anointed, then colonized. From the bar’s usual noontime clientele of two or three old men sipping alone, the population of the place suddenly swelled, at 12:05
P.M.
, to dozens of ironworkers, laughing and swearing and bellying up, drinking one, two, maybe a third for the road—and then, suddenly, 20 minutes later, they were gone and the two or three old men were sitting there in the quiet under a haze of smoke. Those were a lucrative 20 minutes.

For the moment, the men of the raising gang and the three old men at the bar were pretty much it. A young family of tourists—dad, mom, adolescent son—quietly ate hamburgers over at one of the vinyl-covered tables by the wall, having somehow chosen the Coliseum, of all places in Manhattan, for lunch. The boy glanced over at the raising gang. His mother spoke quietly to him and he turned back to his food.

“A raising gang is like a wheel,” Chett was saying as he sipped his beer. “You got five men, six if you count the operator—”

“Seven if you count George—”

“Why would anyone count George?”

George was the foreman of the gang. The men called him King George. He’d grown up in the same New Jersey town as Matt and Jerry. They were old friends. But George was their foreman—their
pusher
. “We grew up with the guy,” said Matt. “You’d think he’d let us go five minutes early for lunch. No way. He’s by the book.” George
also happened to be younger than any of them, even younger than Matt, and happened to be married, by all accounts, to a beautiful woman. So he deserved what he got when he wasn’t around to defend himself.

“—six guys, three of them up in the sky, three down on the floor, and the boom keeps moving. I’m talking to the operator—”

“Tommy—”

“A
wheel
?” This was Matt, grinning. “What the fuck is Chett saying down there—?”

“So I’m talking to Tommy on the phones,” continued Chett, “he’s way up in the operator’s cab. He booms down to where the steel is shook out and lowers the hook. John wraps the choker around the piece we’re lifting. I tell Tommy,
‘Boom up,’
he booms up, and Matt bears down on the tag line so it don’t hit nothing on the way up. It’s got to come up level and straight, ’cause if it doesn’t it could snag up on something and pop the choker—”

“—Somebody gets hurt.”

“Somebody
definitely
gets hurt. So it goes up straight, then I tell Tommy to swing over to where Bunny and Jerry are waiting, then ‘Boom down, boom down,’ and I bring it right into their hands, on a dime.”