“It will take 11 seconds to hit the ground”: The daredevils who built the Empire State Building | Build

pA man stands on a steel cable a quarter mile above Manhattan, wearing weather-beaten work clothes, and reaches out to fasten a bolt. Below, though you dare not look down, lies the Hudson River, the sprawling landscape of New York City and the United States itself, stretching to the distant horizon. If it fell from this rare spot, it would take about 11 seconds to reach Earth.

Photographer Lewis Hine captured The Sky Boy, as it became known, and it epitomizes the daring and energy of the men who built the Empire State Building, then the tallest building in the world at 102 stories and 1,250 feet (381 m) high. Like astronauts, they were going places where no human had gone before, to test the limits of human endurance, and to give physical form to the ideals of American capability, “a land that reaches for the sky and its feet on the ground,” according to John Jacob Raskob, then one of the richest men in the country, who helped finance the building.

Known for his sympathetic studies of workers, artisans, and immigrants, Hine was assigned to document the development of the Empire State Building during the rapid 13-month construction period from 1930 to 1931. Along with formal photographs of individual workers, he recorded men energetically doing their jobs: digging foundations, wrestling pipes and cables, laying bricks, and navigating steep steel girders as the massive skyscraper took shape above Manhattan.

Today, visitors to the Empire State can take selfies with bronze sculptures of ancient construction colleagues, complete with an innovative soundscape of “ironworkers and masons shouting over the din of machinery, moving steel beams into position, and throwing hot nails into place.” This true feat of construction has long since been transformed into another visitor experience.

History treasures the ambitious and wealthy men who were tasked with building the Empire State, including Alfred Smith, former governor of New York and Democratic presidential nominee. It also credits its architects, Messrs. Sharif, Lamb and Harmon, who adopted a distinctive Art Deco style, with prefabricated parts designed to be precisely replicated in quantity and then brought to site and assembled in a manner similar to an automobile assembly line.

However, the men who assembled those parts – 3,000 workers toil at the site every day – are largely unknown and unknown. Even The Sky Boy—despite his romantic allure, “thriving like Lindbergh in ecstatic isolation,” as one commentator enthused—remains anonymous. The man in the trousers was just part of a gang of structural ironworkers, who hoisted the steel frame of the building, leading the way to the top while the other tradesmen – carpenters, glaziers, tilers and masons – followed in their wake.

A close-knit brotherhood of Scandinavians, Irish Americans, and Kahnawà:ke Mohawks, the ironworkers called themselves “the Roughs,” the undisputed kings of structural daring. As New York Times writer C. J. Burr put it at the time, they spent their days “wandering on the thin edge of nothingness.”

By fleshing out the men behind the legend, a new book, Men at Work, sheds light on the lives and opinions of a small portion of this forgotten workforce. “My father’s office was in the Empire State Building, so I grew up visiting there,” says author Glenn Kurtz. Because he was familiar with Hine’s photographs, he was also intrigued by a small plaque in the corner of the stately main lobby, bearing the names of 32 men selected to receive “Craftsmanship Awards” for their work in the building.

“Hine’s photographs play an important role in the mythology surrounding not only the Empire State Building, but 1930s America in general,” says Kurtz. “I was amazed to learn that no one had ever inquired about the men in the photo.”

Highlighting them was no easy task. Often, construction workers led an itinerant life, escaping “rough official attention.” Employment records from that era have rarely been preserved, and the private lives of ordinary people remain largely undocumented. This made it difficult to properly record the number of people who died during the construction of the building. Although the official number is five, Kurtz believes that at least eight people died: seven construction workers (one of whom was ruled a suicide) and one bystander, Elizabeth Egger, who was injured by a falling plank.

Delving into census data, immigration and guild records, contemporary newspaper accounts and the personal recollections of their descendants, Kurtz illuminates Hine’s images in new ways, evoking backstories of men who, as he puts it, “hitherto have been used only as embodiments of generalities and abstract ideals.”

Take Victor “Frenchie” Gosselin, whose specialized skill was that of a “conductor,” grabbing a suspended beam and moving it into place to be bolted to the building’s steel frame. A rare combination of personal detail and exhilarating imagery elevated Jocelyn beyond the usual anonymity of the “demon cowboy in the sky.” Hine shot him carelessly walking on a ball while wearing shorts and work boots, similar to Miley Cyrus, an image that appeared on a US Postal Service stamp in 2013.

Kurtz explains the course of Gosselin’s life and his sudden death at the age of 46 in a car accident, leaving a widow and two young sons. “The distinction between the man Victor Josselin and the character in Hine’s iconic photograph does not make him any less heroic,” he argues. “Instead, it allows us to see the picture more fully, rooting Jocelyn’s true heroism in a real life, tragically short and mostly unknown, rather than in fiction.”

There are other dates that are no less important. Vladimir Kozlov, born in Russia, worked throughout the 1930s as secretary of the Union of Home Wreckers, and was active in obtaining protection for workers in this extremely risky profession. Or Matthew McKean, the carpenter who emigrated from Scotland and left behind his wife and two children. Or terrazzo craftsman Ferruccio Marioto, who at the time of his employment with the Empire State had only spent two years in the United States. Like many workers, he died relatively young, just before his 64th birthday, possibly of mesothelioma related to asbestos exposure.

Kurtz saves his most controversial guess for last: that the unknown Skyboy was a man named Dick McCarthy, a second-generation American, the grandson of Irish immigrants, who lived in Brooklyn, and died in 1983. Although Hine left no clues in his notes, comparisons between photos of McCarthy and Skyboy suggest a puzzling physical resemblance.

“Given the international fame of this photo, it’s surprising that we don’t know the man’s name,” Kurtz says. “Using him as a symbol almost precludes caring about him as a real person. We may never know the truth, but I can say I have 50% confidence in my intuition.”

Narratives of architecture tend to ignore the human cost of construction. History is made by the few, not the many. “The lives and experiences of actual workers are marginalized,” says Kurtz. “They are too ‘ordinary’ to be considered interesting. However, their skills, their training, and the specific conditions of their workplaces are all of profound importance to architectural history. They are the way in which every building is built.”