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 capable 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 opera
tor—”
“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.”
“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 iro
n 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.
High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World's Greatest Skyline Page 7