High Steel

Jim Rasenberger

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061746758
• Topic: Architettura
• Subtopic: Storia dell'architettura

A powerful first-hand account of the many generations and ethnic groups of men who have built America's skyscrapers.

From the early days of steel construction in Chicago, through the great boom years of New York city ironwork, and up through the present, High Steel follows the trajectory of careers inextricably linked to both great accomplishment and catastrophic disaster.

The personal stories reveal the lives of ironworkers and the dangers they face as they walk across the windswept, swaying summits of tomorrow's skyscrapers, balanced on steel girders sometimes only six inches wide. Rasenberger explores both the greatest accomplishments of ironwork—the vaulting bridges and towers that define America's skyline—and the deadliest disasters, such as the Quebec Bridge Collapse of 1907, when 75 ironworkers, including 33 Mohawk Indians, fell to their deaths. High Steel is an accessible, thrilling, and vertiginous portrait of the lives of some of our most brave yet unrecognized men.

PART I

The Hole

In Brueghel’s “Icarus,” for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

—W. H. AUDEN

ONE

Some Luck

Brett Conklin was one of the lucky ones.

Of the 1,000 or so structural ironworkers who worked in New York City in the winter of 2001, most, like Brett, lived somewhere else. They lived at the far reaches of the city’s suburbs, in Connecticut or New Jersey towns where a man making a good middle-class income could afford a patch of decent real estate. Or they lived in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, by the anchorage of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, where several hundred Mohawk Indians boarded during the week, four or five to a house. A few Newfoundlanders still held claim to the old neighborhood around 9th Street in Brooklyn, while another clan—the Newfies of Lindenhurst—maintained a well-kempt enclave on Long Island. One man lived on a farm in the Berkshires that winter, waking in the middle of the night to begin his star-lit drive to the city. Two men drove all the way from Wilmington, Delaware, to Times Square every morning, then back again every afternoon.

Wherever an ironworker lived, chances were he came into Manhattan by one of its tunnels or bridges. The difference was enormous. A tunnel was dank, gloomy, infested. Entering New York by tunnel was like sneaking into a palace through the cellar door: it lacked dignity. The proper way for an ironworker to enter the city was by bridge, swooshing over water, steel vibrating beneath him and gathering in the sky before him. The ironworker entering the city by bridge enjoyed a peculiar kind of pride. His work—or the work of his father or grandfather, of the generations of ironworkers that preceded him—lay before him and under him and vaulted over him. Every bridge and building represented a catalogue of friendships, marriages, births, falls, cripplings, and, in some cases, deaths. The relationship between an ironworker and the city’s steel structures was intensely personal.

On the morning of February 20, 2001, as on most mornings, Brett Conklin had the good fortune to enter the city over one of the most spectacular bridges of them all, the George Washington, a 4,760-foot suspended span crossing the Hudson River between Fort Lee, New Jersey, and northern Manhattan. Shortly before dawn, his commuter bus, which he’d boarded 40 miles to the west, slowed for the toll, then shifted up and started across the bridge, and Brett could look up to see the two lacy steel towers, each taller than a 50-story skyscraper, and the four suspension cables draped between them, each weighing about 7,000 tons and still bejeweled, in the wintry gloom, with luminous green electric bulbs. Downriver a violet fog hovered over the tops of the buildings. Dawn was breaking. The newspaper forecast mild temperatures, rising to a high in the low 50s, mostly cloudy with a chance of dim sunshine. There was no mention of rain in the forecast.

Half an hour after crossing the bridge, Brett emerged from the Port Authority Bus Terminal and strode across Eighth Avenue. He was a striking man, six feet four inches tall, large-boned and well built, but with a soft, boyish face. Brett had recently moved in with his girlfriend but he spent a good deal of time at his parents’ house, eating his mother’s cooking, watching sports on television with his father and younger brother. He was, at 28, still very close to his family and proud of it. When his mother expressed reservations about his decision to go into ironwork six years earlier, he’d listened carefully, weighed her words, then made his own decision. Respectful but headstrong—that was Brett.

With his long stride, Brett covered the distance to the building on Times Square in a matter of minutes. He slipped into it through a side entrance on 41st Street. The building had reached 32 floors, just six floors shy of topping out. Upon completion, it would become the headquarters of Ernst & Young, the accounting firm, and take its place among five other skyscrapers to leap up in Times Square during the last two years, and among dozens to appear in Manhattan over the last five or six years. Like every other tall office building in New York, it would be supported almost entirely by structural steel.

Brett was lucky to be an ironworker in New York during one of the greatest construction booms in the city’s history. The boom had been going strong since the mid-90s. Over the last few months, the stock market had shown signs of contraction, but nobody was too worried about that, not yet. Enough new office space had been conceived in the bull market to keep ironworkers in pay for years. Local 40’s shape hall on West 15th Street, where union ironworkers went when they needed work, was as quiet as a tomb. If a man showed up, he was sent right back out that same morning. Virtually anyone with a book—that is, membership in the local—who was healthy and wanted the work could have it. Even members of out-of-town locals who drove into town to partake of the bounty—“boomers,” they were called—went out the same day on a permit.

A fine bounty it was, too. $33.45 an hour, plus a generous benefits package, made New York’s wage the highest an ironworker could earn in North America. In good times, a capable hand could work virtually nonstop, turning that $35 an hour into $1,400 a week, and turning that $1,400 a week into $65,000 or $70,000 a year. At 28, with a girlfriend but still no family to support and no college loans to amortize, this was a considerable sum of money. Indeed, Brett was doing better than most of his old high school friends who had college diplomas and white-collar jobs. What’s more, the work he did was a good deal more exciting—more satisfying—than anything one of them was likely to find hunched over a computer in a fluorescent-lit cubicle inside one of these skyscrapers that Brett and his fellow ironworkers built. Sometimes on weekend nights Brett would come into the city with his old high school friends and point out buildings he’d worked on. “We’d see the steel and the rigs and the kangaroo cranes, and I was always, like, look at that, see, that’s what I do. I was always real proud of being an ironworker. That’s one of the things about it. It makes you proud.”

Brett stopped briefly at the shanty, a small plywood cabin that squatted on the concrete floor of the building’s basement. Inside, wooden benches ran along the walls and bare light bulbs dangled from the ceiling. On one of the plywood walls somebody had used a piece of chalk to draw an enormous pair of woman’s breasts, probably to add some cheer, but there wasn’t anything too cheery about a pair of disembodied breasts. Brett grabbed his gray hooded sweatshirt from a hook on the wall, then gathered his hard hat and a wide leather belt from the other hook.

Back upstairs, lines had already formed at the two construction elevators—“man-hoists,” as ironworkers call them—that ran along the north side of the building. The wait presented an opportunity for a hundred ironworkers to huddle together and stamp their feet and stay warm by hurling insults at each other. Ironworker banter was relentless, and the men with the sharpest tongues dominated the lines for the hoist.

“Jesus, you look like shit, Johnny.”

“I feel like shit. Last night was a tough one.”

“But you always look like shit, Johnny. What happened to your eye, anyway? Your wife do that?”

“Naw, it was your wife. She likes it rough.”

The accordion door screeched open and 20 men crushed in. The cage shot up the outside of the building, rattling like a can of nails. Fogged Plexiglas covered the metal grilling, a favor not to the ironworkers, who weren’t likely to care, but to the other tradesmen and the dozens of other possibly acrophobic surveyors and inspectors and financiers who might visit the site of a building under construction. Accelerating upwards at the edge of a building in an open cage held to a building by a thin monorail was not an experience for the faint of heart.

The hoist stopped with an abrupt clunk on the 27th floor. This was as high as it went. The operator yanked open the gate, and Brett and the others filed out and walked across the metal deck to the ladders. They started up the steep rungs, a coil of men stretching out, then bunching together, then stretching out again. The higher they climbed, the shorter the coil, as men dropped out along the way. At the 28th floor, the welders peeled off, then the detail men turned away at the 29th. Brett kept climbing.

From the moment he steps up onto the corrugated metal deck, a visitor unaccustomed to the summit of a modern skyscraper-in-progress is likely to find the surroundings unsettling. This is especially true if he happens to be among the 23 percent of Americans who described themselves in a 1999 Harris Poll as “very afraid” of heights. The clinical term is acrophobia. In the hierarchy of American fears, according to the poll, only ophidiophobia—fear of snakes—ranks higher.

The novice visitor’s first shock, beyond the inescapable fact of height, will be the slap of wind on his cheeks; no matter how tranquil the morning below, the air, lacking obstacles to drag down its velocity, blows hard at the top of a skyscraper. More disconcerting is the absence of walls and ceiling. Without these bearings, the novice’s brain balks, shooting an urgent message to nerve receptors in his extremities. The gist of the message is: DON’T MOVE! But even as his legs refuse to move, he notices that they are in fact moving—or rather, the building itself is moving. Tall buildings sway slightly, and the stronger the wind, the more they sway. It’s called deflection. The Empire State Building, extremely rigid by today’s standards, deflects a couple of inches off its vertical axis in wind. Newer, lighter buildings deflect a good deal more than that, up to two feet off their vertical axes on upper floors. The height of the building, in feet, divided by 500 provides a good estimate of how far a modern building deflects at its top in peak winds. (A 750-foot building, then, deflects up to a foot and a half.) A certain amount of deflection is perfectly natural, even beneficial, for a tall building; better for a structure to bend like green wood than to snap like dry timber. Some buildings, though, over-deflect, a condition which can cause structural problems. In rare cases, it stresses joints and, over time, sheers bolts and welds. More likely, over-deflection will simply cause leaks in windows and disrupt elevator service by pushing elevator shafts out of plumb.

Over-deflection isn’t primarily a structural concern; it’s a human concern. If a building moves too much in the wind, people on upper floors start to feel dizzy and nauseated. The issue isn’t how far the building sways in any direction or even how fast it sways—it’s how quickly it accelerates. Just as in a car or on a train, humans feel movement inside a building when the building is speeding up or slowing down; it’s acceleration that makes people’s stomachs turn. By the time most buildings are ready for occupancy, they’ve accumulated so much bulk from their frames and walls and floors that they are fairly rigid. What deflection remains in buildings is then hidden by the walls and ceiling that surround the inhabitant and remove any visual and aural clues of movement. They fool the brain into a pleasant perception of stillness.

No such luck at the top of a skyscraper under construction. Rigid-making walls and floors are still many months away. So are ceilings. The building moves all too obviously and the sky gapes all too endlessly, and it all takes some getting used to.

When the novice finally works up his courage and manages a few tentative steps across the derrick floor, he will find it hard going. The term derrick floor, by which ironworkers refer to the ever-rising top floor of a skyscraper under construction, is a misnomer. For one thing, in this age of tower cranes, derricks are all but extinct. For another, the derrick floor isn’t really a floor at all, but wide-wale corrugated steel decking. The troughs are ankle deep, perfect for receiving and molding the concrete that will eventually be poured into them but treacherous to walk on. To make matters worse, the decking is usually littered with debris—discarded bolts, scraps of wire, soda cans, chains. A first timer’s instinct is to shuffle along slowly with eyes cast down, until suddenly he feels a shadow pass over and looks up to see a 15-ton girder swooping not 10 feet above him on the hook of a tower crane. Dark brown columns stick up from the deck like trees scorched by fire. Grids of beams link some of the columns, and men walk on the beams, while other men straddle them, working at the joints with torque wrenches and four-pound mauls called “beaters.” The jarring sound of beaters whacking bolt heads—chung! chung! chung!—rings out over the steady blanketing hum of the crane engines. A pigeon alights, flaps its wings once or twice, then takes off again. Even pigeons seem to find the environment inhospitable.

And yet, it is breathtaking. The air is literally fresher, as gravity tends to keep heavy particles of pollution close to the ground. Some days the sky is a wide swath of blue and the top of the building could be hundreds of miles from the city, an alpine ridge populated by a strange breed of mountain men. Across the chasms, distant figures stand or sit in offices, but they look more like plastic dolls in a playhouse than real people. They do not seem to move much. Every now and then one of them turns and looks out vacantly at the ironworkers for a few moments, then turns away.

By 7:20 Brett was on the steel, climbing above the 32nd floor. The sun was making a lackluster effort to rise. The cranes hummed and the sound of steel meeting steel rang through the damp air. From where he stood, Brett could see most of the men up top. They were a fair sample of New York’s ironworkers in the winter of 2001. On the derrick floor stood Joe Lewis, a stocky man with a heavy brogue. Joe was born and raised along the coast of Conception Bay in Newfoundland, a small speck on the map that had produced an extraordinary number of New York City ironworkers over the years. Joe’s three sons were ironworkers and his brothers were ironworkers. His father had been one, too, until the work killed him.

On the other side of the building stood John Collins, a brash 40-year-old from a legendary family of New York ironworkers. His grandfather had worked on the Empire State Building; his father and seven uncles had worked on most of the big buildings of the last 40 years. John’s father had recently passed away, but an 82-year-old uncle still worked iron in the summers.

J. R. Phillips and his cousin Jeff Phillips straddled the steel a few yards from John Collins. Both were fourth-generation Mohawk ironworkers on both sides of their families. Like their fathers and grandfathers, they made a weekly commute down to the city from a small reservation just north of the Canadian border, spent their days on the steel, their nights in Bay Ridge, then drove home to Canada every Friday afternoon.

Hanging off the side of building on a small wooden platform called a “float” was Joe Gaffney, a sandy-haired man of Irish and Norwegian extraction whose brothers and uncle were ironworkers. In the winter of 2001, Joe Gaffney’s mother happened to be employed in an office on Sixth Avenue that gave her a perfect view of the Ernst & Young building. She kept a pair of binoculars in her desk and would occasionally check up on Joe, then immediately regret having done so. The sight of her son perched on a thin plank of plywood lashed to side of the building 300 feet above the ground—it was really more than a mother could bear.

Now and then, the superintendent of the job, Frank Lane, would climb up to the top and have a look around. Frank—one of the two men who drove in to Times Square from Wilmington, Delaware, every morning—was young for a superintendent, still in his early 40s. With long sideburns, a wad of tobacco tucked inside his cheek, and bulging biceps, Frank looked tough even for an ironworker. In fact, as superintendents go, he was a decent sort. Most of the ironworkers actually admitted to liking him.

Nearly everybody up here had some deep familial connection to ironwork, which made Brett an exception. There were no ironworkers in Brett’s family. Once you were an ironworker, though, you were family. “We might get into it sometimes at a bar or something, but the next morning it’s all forgotten,” said Brett. “We look out for each other. You have to. Especially the guys in your gang.”

THE RAISING GANG

The gang is the essential unit of ironwork. The men are deployed in half a dozen different types of gangs, the task of each described fairly precisely by its name. Bolting-up gangs drive and tighten the bolts that hold pieces of steel together. The plumbing-up gang—there is usually one per job—traverse the beams, measuring and adjusting columns to ensure that they are perfectly vertical, or plumb. Decking gangs spread corrugated sheet-metal deck over completed rectangles, or bays, of steel made by the floor beams. Once a floor is set, other gangs follow to further secure it. This includes the welders, a few detail gangs, and the safety gang. The job of this last ...