High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World's Greatest Skyline (8 page)

“We hope.”

“They hope. Or I might just tell Tommy to knock ’em off the side, depending on how they’re treatin’ me. Their lives are in my hands.” Nobody laughed at this. It was true. “And then it goes around all over again. Like a wheel.”

“Wow. That’s deep,” said Matt. He chuckled. “Like a wheel. I gotta think about that one.”

“Let me tell you something,” said Chett. “Most of these guys I don’t know. George I know, he was on a gang with me once, but most of these guys, like Bunny—I never met Bunny before. But I’ve worked with a lot of raising gangs, and you know something?”

Chett paused. He took a sip. The other men waited for the punch
line. Chett put his beer down. “These guys are good,” he said simply. “This is a good gang.”

How good was mostly theoretical at this point. The truth was they wouldn’t really know until they started setting steel. Putting up tower cranes was interesting and challenging, but it wasn’t what raising gangs are about, which is setting steel. Then a good raising gang starts to move like a wheel, like clockwork, like a machine—like a well-oiled cliché. The hooker-on finds dead center with exactly the right choker, not an eighth of an inch too thick or too thin. The boom of the crane dips and lifts, the choker pulls snug over the flanges, the piece jumps up, the tag-line man bears down and it levels off into a smooth, easy rise. It swings a hundred feet overhead, then starts down again, dipping right into the gap between the columns. The holes practically align themselves.
Zing—
the first connector makes his hole with a connecting bar.
Zing
—the second man makes his hole. In go the bolts; a few flicks of the wrist and they’re tight. “Hot Wrench,” they call a connector who’s in a groove like this; he’s moving so fast, goes the joke, that sparks are leaping off the metal, his spud wrench is conducting heat, he is
on fire.

It made no sense, really, to be in a raising gang. Every union ironworker officially earned the same wage. When times were good, like now, men in raising gangs took in a little extra under the table—contractors were willing to pay it to secure good gangs—but the money hardly justified the additional danger and hard work. Men who chose to be in the raising gang chose it because there was no other life, because they thrived on the hard work, the pace, the thrill, and the competition.

Raising gangs, and the men who joined them, were naturally competitive. Contractors used this disposition to their advantage. In the old days, they’d put an Indian gang on one derrick and a gang of Newfoundlanders on the other, just to promote a little fighting spirit. It made the men work harder and the building went up faster. Again, this made no real sense from the ironworker’s point of view—the
faster the building went up, the sooner the ironworker was out of a job. But they did it anyway. It was more important to be good than to be employed.

“Who’s gonna set the first two floors, who’s gonna be first to jump their rig, who’s gonna be last? Everything’s speed, timing, speed, timing,” Bunny explained. “There’s ways you do things that’ll save you seconds, and at the end of the day, it’ll end up being minutes, maybe half an hour. Then you’ll be ahead of the game the next morning. You’re constantly trying to save time and bank time.” One of the attractions of this job at Columbus Circle was the promise of four raising gangs instead of the usual two. “When we get four cranes going, oh, God, that’s gonna be a blast,” said Bunny. “That’s when we’ll know if we’ve got a good gang that can work together.”

Working well together wasn’t just a matter of speed. It was also a matter of trust. Each man here would at some point hold one of the other four men’s lives in his hands. Everyone knew it. If John calculated the tolerance of the choker incorrectly and the cable snapped, somebody might die. If Matt lost control of a piece of steel, somebody might die. If Chett failed to stop the crane from booming up, or down, or if Bunny or Jerry made one of the countless small mistakes that connectors occasionally make—there were so many ways for these men to injure each other. Trust was everything. Trust was why raising gangs were often made up of brothers and cousins and old friends. Trust is what brought George, Jerry, and Matt into this gang. They’d grown up together; they knew and liked each other. Trust was what Bunny didn’t quite feel at the start of this job, having never connected on an all-white gang before. When you were with your own people, your kinsmen, you naturally tended to feel the trust. When you were with people you hardly knew, it came harder. Trust, and the need to feel it, partly explained what these five men were doing in the Coliseum at quarter past noon on a Tuesday, and why ironworkers, on the whole, spent a good deal of time drinking
together in bars. They were building the camaraderie they needed to do their job.

“The consumption of alcohol is an intentionally enacted ritual, which reinforces an occupational community’s basic assumptions and strengthens members’ communal bonds,” wrote the sociologist William Sonnenstuhl in his 1996 study of “occupational drinking cultures.” As defined by Sonnenstuhl, an occupational drinking culture is a closely knit group of men brought together by work that is physically demanding and dangerous, such as longshoremen, coal miners, and railworkers. Sonnenstuhl focused on tunnel workers—sandhogs—but his conclusions apply equally to ironworkers. Both trades are dangerous and both put great value on feelings of kinship among members. And both have tended to consume great quantities of alcohol. “The drinking rituals,” concluded Sonnenstuhl, “underscored the duties they owed to one another.”

“This is a good gang,” said Chett one last time. He drained his beer and paid up. “I need some time to get back.” A few minutes later, at 12:29, the others set their bottles on the bar and hopped off their stools. They filed out into the sunlight.

“Let’s build this thing,” said Matt.

THE BUILDING

The building they meant to build was a Siamese twin, joined-at-the hip structure. It was huge and mind boggling, if not downright schizophrenic. I’m an office building! I’m a hotel! I’m an apartment building! I’m a Center for the Performing Arts!
I’m the Center of Everything!

First and foremost, the building would serve as corporate headquarters of Time Warner—or AOL Time Warner, as the company called itself back then. Including offices and studios for various branches of the entertainment and news divisions, the company
would occupy about 854,000 square feet of space, most of this on the lowest 10 floors of the building. The merger of AOL and Time Warner in January of 2000 had spawned the largest media company in the world, instantly worth 342 billion dollars. These conjoined towers would represent more than office space: they would represent corporate dominance. That was the idea, anyway, back in that heady time, before the conglomerate foundered and jettisoned AOL from its name.

For the moment, the business of AOL Time Warner—communications—was the red-hot center of the American economy, very much as steel had been a hundred years earlier. “Global media,” said Gerald Levin, then CEO of Time Warner, “will be and is fast becoming the predominant business force of the twenty-first century.” AOL Time Warner, much like that corporate behemoth of a century earlier, U.S. Steel, aspired to vertical integration of its industry, only now the plan had a new name: “synergy.” Instead of iron ore, the raw material would be human ideas. Rather than manufacture and ship steel ingots, the new company would produce and distribute “content” in the form of images, words, and sounds. But the goal was the same: to control the product from one end to the other.

The parallels between Big Steel and Big Communications went only so far. Steel, for one thing, was manifestly physical. You could see steel rising, you could actually watch it transform real space from your vantage on an actual street corner. You could, if you got close enough, reach out and touch its rough skin. The business of AOL Time Warner, by contrast, was largely invisible. Ghostly integers whipped through fibers and cables. Apart from the glow of television sets and computer monitors and glossy magazines, there wasn’t much that was tangible about it.

The world had become a far more conceptual place than it had been a hundred years earlier. As a result, it demanded a better-educated worker. In 1901, fewer than 13 percent of Americans graduated from
high school, while only one in 50 graduated from college. Seventy percent of the workforce was devoted to manual labor. A century later, the numbers told a very different story. Almost 90 percent of young Americans were high school graduates, and a quarter were college graduates. The majority of the workforce, nearly 60 percent, was engaged in occupations that required little, if any, physical exertion.

For all these changes, the Time Warner Center would be built much as the Flatiron had been built a hundred years earlier. There would be differences—bolts instead of rivets, kangaroo cranes instead of derricks—but still the work would involve men braving heights to join steel. The white-collar college-educated workforce that would eventually sit in the building’s climate-controlled, ergonomically correct workstations while sipping lattes from the place across the street—the place that may once have been the Coliseum Bar and Grill—would owe its habitat to ironworkers whose education had ended, in most cases, with high school graduation.

It was a nice irony, except that it wasn’t completely true. The ironworkers, as it turned out, wouldn’t actually build all of the Time Warner Center. They would not even build half of it. Most of the building was not going to be steel. It was going to be that other material, despised and reviled by all self-respecting structural ironworkers:
concrete.
The ironworkers would only go as high as the 23rd floor on the north tower and the 24th floor on the south tower, and then—
concrete.
Here was the largest steel job New York had seen in years and it wasn’t even a steel job. If there was any dark lining in the silver cloud in the great boom of 2001, this was it:
concrete!

The New York offices of the Cantor Seinuk Group, structural engineers for the Time Warner Center, were located on the third floor of a 17-story building on the east side of midtown Manhattan. The building was typical of the steel-frame, wedding cake–shaped towers of the 1920s. It rose eight stories, then “stepped back,” ascending in ever-smaller boxes. It was a functional building if not an especially imagi
native one, a straightforward steel-frame high-rise conforming to New York City zoning laws and building codes of its time. The skeleton design was so simple a first year engineering student could probably pull it off.

The firm’s offices were plainly tailored, lacking the architectural flourishes one might expect to find in, say, an architect’s office. As a rule, engineers don’t like to spend more money than is strictly necessary; miserliness is practically part of the job description. Over the receptionist’s desk hung the one decorative extravagance in the lobby, a four-by-six-foot collage displaying Cantor Seinuk’s many projects, including a stadium in Phoenix, a high-rise in Israel, a riverfront complex in London, and dozens of skyscrapers in New York.

On a stormy March morning two days after the raising gang convened in the Coliseum Bar and Grill, Ysrael Seinuk, the leading partner of Cantor Seinuk (Cantor having departed some years earlier) stood by a round table in his office, looking crisp, trim, and a good 10 years younger than his 69 years. Outside, the rain stopped and started again, washing dirt over the windows. Pedestrians hurried along on the street. The wind turned umbrellas inside out. It was on days like this that the works of engineers were tested.

“If we had used steel instead of concrete, that building would have been another forty feet higher,” said Seinuk, speaking in a clipped Cuban accent and gesturing through the window to the top of the Trump World Tower, the firm’s latest achievement. “Those forty feet would have been nothing but a big sail on a day like this.”

He was pointing to the top of a new building looming to the east, a brown glass sliver. As architecture, the building was perhaps of dubious distinction, but as engineering it was noteworthy. Seventy-two stories tall and just 25 yards wide at the northern and southern walls, the building’s height-to-width ratio placed it among the slenderest high-rises in the world. And it was made of reinforced concrete.

By conventional definition, a skyscraper is a tall building supported by a steel frame. “By skyscraper is meant a building that
exceeds in height the practical limit of solid masonry construction,” is how a 1939 report on the origins of the skyscraper put it. “The absolute and first essential in the structural creation of a skyscraper is the metal (ferrous) skeleton.” But looking up through Seinuk’s window at the glass façade soaring into the fog, there was no denying that the building was a skyscraper, even if it was made primarily of concrete.

Ysrael Seinuk understood the potential of concrete as well as any engineer in New York. He attributed this to his Cuban education. In the early 1960s, when Seinuk, a Jew, immigrated here to escape the grip of Fidel Castro, America was still a country built largely of steel, and steel is what American engineers knew best. At the same time, Seinuk and his fellow Cubans, having no steel industry to speak of, were making a virtue of necessity and learning to stretch concrete to its limits. “In Cuba we were using eight-thousand PSI concrete; here they weren’t using anything over four thousand,” said Seinuk, referring to the pounds-per-square-inch standard of measuring concrete’s strength. “We had completed in Cuba three hundred thirty-three–foot post-tension single span bridges. And the largest in the United States was a hundred feet.”

All this had changed over the last 40 years. American concrete was now as strong as any in the world. The concrete in the new Trump building was 12,000 PSI, and 16,000 PSI concrete was at hand.