High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World's Greatest Skyline (9 page)

Concrete has many advantages over steel as a structural material. For one thing, it significantly lowers the distance between floors, so that a 70-story concrete building will be shorter, much shorter, than a 70-story steel building. Floors in concrete buildings are six-inch thick slabs laid flat on concrete pillars. Even after wiring and ceiling fixtures are added to the bottom of the slab, and after floorboards or carpet are added to the top, the total space between ceiling and floor will be eight or nine inches. Steel beams, flange to flange, are generally eight or nine inches deep by themselves. On top of these come corrugated sheets filled with cement, and below go ceilings.
Altogether, the space between a ceiling and the floor above is about 15 inches on a steel-frame building, or seven inches more than it would be for concrete. A small difference in itself, perhaps, but multiplied by 70 stories this comes to about 40 feet. That’s 40 fewer feet of façade to cover the perimeter of the building; 40 fewer feet of wires and pipes running inside the building; 40 fewer feet to brace against wind pressure; several million fewer dollars spent on construction.

There are other advantages to concrete. It goes up faster than steel, typically three floors a week compared with steel’s pace of one or two floors. And during construction, it’s easier to manipulate—to mold, to modify—than steel. A single imperfectly fabricated piece of steel can turn into a contractor’s nightmare, holding up the building’s erection as ironworkers burn or pummel it into place. No such problems arise with concrete. It is cast on site in plywood forms. Mistakes can be fixed with a hammer, a sheet of wood, a few nails.

No wonder concrete has taken such a large bite out of the construction market in recent decades. Until the middle of the twentieth century, tall buildings in America, office and residential both, were inevitably steel. Concrete structures seldom exceeded 20 stories until 1960. By the mid-1970s, though, the architect John Portman, among others, was designing huge opulent reinforced concrete hotels in places like Las Vegas and Miami. And by the 1980s, any large residential building or hotel built in America was likely to be concrete.

Given all of concrete’s splendors, wasn’t steel doomed? Seinuk frowned. “Of course not. That is silly—silly talk. There are buildings that want to be concrete and you have to do them in concrete, and there are buildings that want to be steel. If you try to do a building that wants to be steel in concrete, it’s going to be very foolish.”

Steel buildings are more difficult to build than concrete buildings, but, once completed, they are far more pliable. They are easier to renovate, an important advantage in buildings that will see many
tenants with different space requirements over the course of their lives—office buildings, for instance. Bashing a hole through a floor or trying to move a column is an expensive and elaborate procedure in a concrete building but is easily achieved in a steel building. Also, steel is better suited to longer spans, the kind of long spans you are likely to encounter in office building lobbies and television studios. And because steel, at 50,000 PSI, is still much stronger than concrete, steel columns and beams take up less space than concrete structural members.

“The building always tells you what it wants to be,” said Seinuk. “Whoever designs the building trying to tell the building what it wants to be is going to have a very expensive design.” The Time Warner building, then, would be concrete where it wanted to be concrete and steel where it wanted to be steel. And where it wanted to be steel was on the bottom.

Determining precisely how the steel would be arranged was a task that fell to Mr. Seinuk’s partner and second-in-command, Silvian Marcus. Like Seinuk, Marcus was a Jewish émigré from a communist regime, in Marcus’s case Soviet-dominated Romania. Also, like Seinuk, he had been at the firm for a long time, almost 30 years. Otherwise the two men could not have been more different. Whereas Seinuk was trim, elegant, and reserved, Marcus was rumpled and sleepy-eyed. He gave the impression of a large but kindly bear awakened from a nap: a grumpy mensch. When the phone rang, he picked it up, closed his eyes and held the receiver an inch or two from his ear, as if he knew it could only transmit a headache. Suddenly, his eyes would widen and twinkle, and he’d break out in delighted laughter, tickled by something. In the spring of 2001, nothing tickled Silvian Marcus more—or caused him more headaches—than his design for the Time Warner Center.

This was the most complicated building Marcus had ever engineered. As Marcus was fond of pointing out, it really wasn’t one
building but half a dozen different buildings pressed together, each having a different function and different structural requirements. The most obvious distinction, of course, fell between the parts of the building that were steel and those that were concrete. The towers, which contained the hotel and the condominiums, would be made of concrete. (They would be topped by a steel crown, so ironworkers would, in the end, have the last word on the building.) Beneath the towers, steel would rise only as high as the 23rd floor. But those 23 floors would consume almost twice the amount of steel required by a typical steel-frame skyscraper, and its arrangement would be at least twice as complex.

The difficulties began with the columns. The function of columns is to transfer the load, or weight of the building, to the ground. In most buildings, this is accomplished by vertical columns running in a straight line from the top of the building to the bottom. The path of transference is clear and well marked. Not so in the Time Warner Center.

“Because of the way the building functions, a column cannot go straight,” said Marcus. “He has to move and change places every few floors. After he finishes his function on a particular floor, then he’s going to a different usage, where the column layout doesn’t fit him anymore. So we have inclined columns, hanging columns, columns that terminate all of a sudden. This makes the building totally different than a conventional building.” The shopping arcade needed one column layout, the offices another. The television studios for CNN required very long spans, 40 to 65 feet, uninterrupted—and unsupported—by columns. Amidst all of the canted columns and strangely transferred loads, just a dozen columns would run straight up from the bottom of the building. Marcus called these columns “boomers.” They were enormous, between 30 and 45 tons apiece, and very important. It was their job to support the enormous trusses that would top the steel section of each tower.

The trusses were the most audacious part of Marcus’s design.
They would support not only the concrete columns rising up from them, but also a number of steel columns, called “hangers,” hanging down from them. The trusses would serve, too, as the central system of wind-bracing for the concrete towers, acting like huge outriggers to prevent them from swaying. No one, as far as Marcus knew, had ever asked quite so much of a truss before.

No one had ever asked quite so much of a steel fabricator either. In a conventional wedding-cake or glass-box skyscraper, where floors replicate each other as they go up, many pieces of steel are the same, so that a beam on the fifth floor is interchangeable with a beam on the ninth floor. That would not be the case in this building. Nearly every piece of steel, all 18,000 of them, would be unique. The steel design alone would generate about 26,000 shop drawings to specify the shape of each piece of steel, about four times the usual number of shop drawings for a skyscraper. The drawings took up so much space that Cantor Seinuk had rented a room in Long Island City to store them all.

Why so much complexity? The short answer is economics and computers. Building owners wanted flexible, multi-use, tenant-pleasing spaces, and they wanted to build them as cheaply as possible. This is how they made their profits. Architects and engineers naturally wanted to satisfy their clients. Computers helped them do this by allowing them to measure loads and strains before any material was raised. They gave engineers freedom to experiment and innovate in ways that would have been inconceivable back in the 1920s. But if computers were facilitators to innovative engineers, they were also enablers to capricious and needy clients. The more complicated a building could be, the more complicated, inevitably, it
would
be.

Trying to keep track of all 18,000 pieces of steel, to make sure that each piece did what it was supposed to do, was enough to keep Marcus awake at night. Everything had been thoroughly considered and calculated, run through the computers and simulators, double-and triple-checked by hand. But only one test really counts for a
design that has not been tried before, and that test must wait until the building begins to rise: Will it work? Will it function? Will it stand? These questions were not academic. Three weeks earlier, a steel truss had collapsed during the construction of a convention center in Washington, D.C. The accident occurred at 11:30 at night. Twelve hours earlier, or twelve hours later, it would have killed dozens of ironworkers.

A structural engineer is an odd creature who must temper the hubris of a Master Builder (how would he or she dare build without it?) with the self-doubt of a neurotic. Lying in bed at night and brooding over grim hypotheticals—
what if we got it wrong? what have we failed to consider?—
is what drives engineers to design sound buildings. The moment an engineer stops doubting the design, he or she puts the structure, and human lives, at risk.

Marcus was confident his building would function exactly as he meant it to, but he also knew he carried an enormous burden of responsibility to the men who would erect it and the tenants who would someday inhabit it. “It’s a pressure that you go to sleep with and you wake up with,” he explained. “It’s not the life of one person, but of so many people. Take a doctor, a surgeon, a very responsible position. But if he makes a mistake, he kills one person. If I make a mistake, or one of my assistants or colleagues makes a mistake that it’s my responsibility to be sure he will not make, then my life ends with a question mark.

“I pray, although I am not a religious man, for everything to be O.K.,” said Marcus. “Because there are so many things, so many complicated things. We check and re-check. But we also need to be lucky.”

I’m a peaceful, law-abiding, simple citizen—that’s Sam Parks. I’ve been played for a rowdy, but the tag don’t fit and I don’t pose for that picture. Of course, if there’s a fight, I don’t run away. No man has got any business in the labor movement that gets cold feet as soon as there’s a scrap.

—S
AM
P
ARKS

…the shameful truth must be confessed that relief can come only from the capture and impounding of Sam Parks as one would a mad dog.

—H
ENRY
H
ARRISON
L
EWIS
Harper’s Weekly
, October 17, 1903

L
utheran All-Faiths Cemetery lies on a bluff in Middle Village, Queens, about four miles east of Manhattan. The cemetery grounds cover 225 acres and contain the remains of roughly half a
million dead. A hundred years ago, the cemetery was surrounded by open farmland. Today, shopping outlets and gas stations encroach at every end and jets from the nearby airports roar overhead. Still, it is a pleasant, almost pastoral place, wooded with elms and oaks and cedars of Lebanon, smelling of cut grass and damp earth. Here, among the Teutonic names—the Grimms and Geissenhainers and Knolls and Schoensiegals—an Irish-born ironworker named Sam Parks lies in eternal rest.

Or maybe he doesn’t.

“There is no one named Sam Parks in our files.” The woman behind the desk of the cemetery office declares this with a finality that brooks little discussion. She has been to the files—twice—and she is certain that no Parks, Sam or otherwise, was buried in Lutheran All-Faiths Cemetery. Not in 1904; not in any years around it. “If he was here, we’d have a record. And there is no record.
Who
did you say he was?”

Sam Parks was an ironworker who rose to become one of the most powerful, beloved, and reviled figures in New York City at the start of the twentieth century. He was a union walking delegate for Ironworkers Local 2 who managed in a few years to take control of the entire building industry in New York City and dictate its operation. With a few choice words—
Hit the bricks, boys!
—he could shut down construction in the city, putting tens of thousands of men out of work and bleeding millions of dollars of capital from the booming building industry. Hundreds of newspaper articles were devoted to him during his brief reign, along with feature articles in many of the leading magazines of his time. The fierce attention continued unchecked through his death in the spring of 1904, when 1,500 mourners marched in his funeral procession and 10,000 spectators crowded the streets to glimpse his hearse. The procession wended a circuitous route around the Upper East Side of Manhattan, arriving at a pier at the foot of East 92nd Street. From here, Parks’ casket was ferried across the East River, then taken by carriage to Middle Vil
lage, and there interred—according to the newspapers—in Lutheran Cemetery.

Then the articles ceased. Sam Parks promptly vanished into an oblivion so thorough that not even his grave—not even a
record
of his grave—survives.

WAR

Samuel J. Parks was born in County Down, Ireland, in the early 1860s. Around the age of 10, he emigrated to Canada, and by 14 he was working in the northern forests as a lumberman. He crossed the border into the United States and worked variously as a river-driver, a coal-heaver, and a sailor on the Great Lakes. He also spent time in western railroad camps. It was here, probably, that he first acquired the trade of bridge work. He later worked as a bridgeman in Wisconsin, where he earned a reputation as a riveter of Bunyanesque prowess. It was said that Sam Parks could drive more rivets per hour than any bridgeman alive.

Sometime in the early 1890s, Parks moved to Chicago. He went to work on the skyscrapers that were rising from the prairie city, but by the time he left a few years later, he’d gained something more important to him than employment: an education in union politics. Chicago was the labor capital of America, boasting more unions, and more powerful unions, than anywhere in the country. The only way to deal with employers, the labor bosses of Chicago believed, was to be stronger than they were. Parks learned this lesson well.

The contempt that labor unions and employers felt for each other in late-nineteenth-century America is difficult to appreciate today. Labor and capital were engaged in a sustained class war, and “war” was no metaphor. On one side of the divide, riotous workers armed with fists and cudgels and dynamite fought for better working conditions, better pay, and shorter hours. On the other side, businessmen
who controlled America’s largest assets—railroads, oil wells, coal fields, and, of course, steel plants—did everything in their power to stamp out agitation that might diminish profits and productivity.

The employers had the upper hand in most disputes. They were often supported by local and federal government, which supplied them with police or military protection. In the courts, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, intended by Congress to limit corporate monopolies, was more often applied against unions. Even lacking government help, employers, particularly large corporations, were better positioned to wage war than workers. They had the financial resources to survive long strikes, and they had a pool of hundreds of thousands of immigrants arriving in the country every year from whom they could draw fresh workers to replace strikers. Many businesses hired small armies of Pinkerton “detectives” to provide additional protection against proletarian incursions.

Nowhere was the deck more unevenly stacked against workers than in the steel industry. The kind of corporation that Andrew Carnegie and his fellow steel magnates envisioned controlled every aspect of production and distribution, much of this carried out by subsidiaries. The concept of total control was called “vertical integration,” and the steel-frame skyscraper was its soaring triumph. From the raw iron ore deposits of the Mesabi Range in northeastern Minnesota, Big Steel’s reach extended to the coalmines that supplied the coke needed to fuel the furnaces that converted the iron ore into steel. It included the plants along the Monongahela River near Pittsburgh, where the ore was melted down, swept clean of slag, and molded into steel ingots. It included, too, the plants where the steel was fabricated—soldered, hole-punched, riveted—and many of the rail lines that ran between its various components. Finally, it extended to the building contractors and ironworkers who erected the steel columns and beams that had begun their journeys as bits of earth.

Ideally, the workers would fall in with the program as easily as
the ore gave itself up from the ground. In the words of Frederick Taylor, the renowned efficiency expert who spent much of his career in the steel industry, the perfect laborer was “merely a man more or less the type of the ox, heavy both mentally and physically”—all the better to behave exactly as told, and to do so without complaint.

Much to the dismay of employers, workers refused to play their assigned role. They wanted to earn more money while working fewer hours, in better conditions. When, in the summer of 1892, Carnegie’s second-in-command, Henry Clay Frick, told unskilled workers at a plant in Homestead, Pennsylvania, that he intended to
lower
their already meager wages, they responded in an altogether un-oxlike manner. They struck.

Frick immediately fired all 3,800, then surrounded the plant with a barbed wire–trimmed fence and shipped in 300 armed Pinkertons to protect strikebreakers. As the Pinkertons arrived by barge on the night of July 5, 1892, gunfire broke out between guards and strikers. Nine workers and seven guards were killed, and 163 more seriously injured, before the skirmish ended. Six days later, the governor of Pennsylvania came to Frick’s aid, placing Homestead under martial law and effectively terminating the strike. Frick reduced the mill wage by half and brought in replacements.

“Our victory now complete and most gratifying,” Frick cabled Carnegie, who had removed himself to his estate in Scotland. “We had to teach our employees a lesson and we have taught them one they will never forget.”

He was right. There would be no more union activity at Homestead for another 44 years. An executive at U.S. Steel, which took over the Homestead plant in 1901, later expressed management policy even more bluntly than Frick: “I have always had one rule: if a workman sticks up his head, hit it.”

The steelworkers had been subdued. The ironworkers were another story—a story in which Sam Parks would play a large role. Sam Parks had his own policy: he hit back.

Sam Parks.
(Courtesy of Wirtz Labor Library, U.S. Department of Labor)

SAM I AM

In a 1902 photograph his power is evident. His face is sharp-boned, his hair slicked back, his moustache dark and thick beneath his prow nose. His expression is flat but his eyes glimmer with intensity. As you stare at them, they stare right back, seeming to take your measure and find you lacking. Even those who despised Parks acknowledged the remarkable force of his character. “In many ways he is a leader of men,” said New York District Attorney William Jerome, the man who would devote himself to putting Parks in jail. “He has per
sonal magnetism and the power to convince others that his word is law. He has physical bravery, daring, and a dashing style of leadership. He is a brute, his language is foul, and the man is personally offensive to decent people, but his shrewdness is beyond question.”

Parks had arrived in New York in 1895 at the invitation of the George A. Fuller Company, the builders of the Flatiron. He had worked for Fuller in Chicago, and when the company opened an office in New York, it asked Parks to come east and work as a foreman. The exact nature of Parks’ relationship with Fuller would later become a subject of speculation. For the moment, Parks was simply another ironworker, albeit a gifted one.

William Starrett, of the legendary Starrett family of builders, recalled working with Parks in New York in the 1890s. Starrett was a young man at the time, recently embarked on a lustrous career that would lead, in time, to the Empire State Building, and he had been given his first opportunity to supervise a steel erection job. Steel was starting to rise from the hole, but young Starrett, anxious and inexperienced, still had no foreman to run his riveting gangs. Just then, “a long, lanky Englishman tapped me on the shoulder,” Starrett recalled years later in his memoir (apparently confusing Parks’ Irish brogue for an English accent). “It was Sam Parks, that debonair Robin Hood of the building industry…. Sam produced a pair of overalls, and within an hour his bellowing voice resounded in that deep excavation, and I knew that I had a leader.”

Parks didn’t do much in the way of hands-on ironwork after the Starrett job. He’d found his true calling in the work of the union. Just before Parks’ arrival in New York, structural ironworkers had reorganized into the Housesmiths’ and Bridgemen’s Society. Its members were still bloodied by the strike they’d lost a few years earlier. And they were still making between $1.75 and $2.50 for a 10-hour day while their Chicago counterparts were making $4. Parks was their man.

Within three months of his arrival in New York, Parks managed
to get himself elected as walking delegate. The job of walking delegate, common to trade unions at the end of the nineteenth century, was to patrol the job on behalf of the union; to ensure that the men were being treated fairly and that no scabs were sneaking onto union jobs; to find work for the idle; and to provide a decent burial for the dead. In theory, it was useful and reasonable to have such men to act as watchdogs and facilitators. In practice, the position was a breeding ground for the kind of corruption in which Parks would soon come to specialize.

Parks at once dedicated himself to “organizing” Local 2. Another walking delegate, named Ely, later described Parks’ remarkable efficacy in the early days of his tenure: “I was organizing on the East Side, but I could make no headway at all. I met Parks who had just started in to organize the West Side and he offered to change places with me. I agreed, and in about six weeks he had the entire East Side organized. Every Friday over three hundred dollars was coming in at the meetings of the union for initiation fees. I met with as little success on the West Side as on the East Side, and Parks changed off with me again. In six or seven weeks, he had the West Side as thoroughly organized as the East Side. How he did it, I don’t know.”

How he did it, according to Parks’ own account, was with his fists: “In organizing men in New York I talked with them at first nice and pleasant, explaining how they could be better off in a union. Bosses began to learn that I was about and pretty busy; and they had men stationed around to ‘do’ me. But they could not keep me off a job. I sneaked up ladders and elevator shafts, stole up on beams, waited for the men on cellar doors where they ate their dinner. Some did not believe that unions would be good for them; and I gave them a belt on the jaw. That changed their minds.”

Parks once claimed to have gotten into as many as 20 fistfights in a single day’s work. “I like a fight,” he said. “It’s nothing after you’ve risked your life bridge-riveting at three dollars a day.”

Parks soon surrounded himself with an entourage of like-
minded lackeys. His group called itself, with grim irony, “the entertainment committee” and convened at a saloon near the union hall, on the northeast corner of Third Avenue and 59th Street. Owned by a man named Bernard Lynch, the saloon served as unofficial headquarters of the Parks faction in the union. And to ensure that their faction was the
only
faction, they used the back room of Lynch’s saloon to “entertain” men who hadn’t gotten the full thread of Parks’ argument. If a man had the temerity to stand up at a union meeting and question one of Parks’ proclamations, they might just attack him on the spot. The union meetings at Maennerchor Hall on East 56th Street frequently degenerated into brawls. One method of intimidation favored by the entertainment committee was to knock a man down, then stand on his face. Eye gouging and rib cracking were also in bounds. In one instance, members of the committee allegedly ripped the flesh off the face of a recalcitrant unionist, scarring him for life.