High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World's Greatest Skyline

by Jim Rasenberger

  Caughnawaga Lacrosse Team, August 1907.

  (Courtesy of Kanien’kehaka Raotitiohkwa Cultural Center)

  Strikes and occasional deaths were to be expected on a bridge. More uncommon and disturbing was the condition of the structure itself. The first indication of a problem had arisen as far back as June, when a few of the chord pieces on the anchor arm failed to line up as they were meant to. This had not alarmed anyone much—even now, it’s a rare bridge or building in which all the pieces fit perfectly—and the problem was fixed and work continued. But now, in August, it was becoming clear that the problems on the bridge went well beyond the usual fabrication errors. The bridgemen and on-site engineers began to notice ominous bends in the metal, particularly in two sections of the bottom chords of the anchor arm—the steel pieces that were meant to transfer most of the bridge’s compressive weight to the stone pier. The bends were severe enough to require jacks to straighten them out before the steel could be riveted. When field engineers reported these bends to Cooper in New York, he was more quizzical than alarmed. “It is a mystery to me,” Cooper wrote to Phoenix Bridge on August 9, “how both of these webs happened to be bent at one point and why it was not discovered sooner.” A few days later, inspectors on the bridge discovered more bending, and the mystery deepened. Still, no one seemed unduly concerned.

  The obvious explanation to the men in charge, including Cooper and John Deans, chief engineer of Phoenix Bridge, was that the steel had received some sort of blow. Deans thought it must have been damaged at the bridge shop or dropped in the steelyard. Cooper wondered if it had been hit by another piece of steel during erection. He asked his inspector, a young Princeton graduate named John McClure, to investigate.

  Only McClure, performing more or less the same function on the Quebec Bridge that Cooper had performed years earlier on the Eads Bridge, seemed clear-eyed enough to recognize what was happening, even if he didn’t quite grasp its significance. On August 12, he wrote to Cooper: “One thing I am reasonably sure of, and that is that the bend has occurred since the chord has been under stress, and was not present when the chords were placed.” To accept McClure’s premise was to accept the inconceivable: that the great bridge was buckling before their eyes; that seven years of work and millions of dollars had gone into building a bridge that could not hold itself up; that Theodore Cooper himself had overseen and approved a design that was profoundly flawed; and that this bridge, which was meant to be the greatest in the world, was doomed.

  Part of the grim fascination that comes in reading the letters and telegrams sent between the principals in these last days of August is in watching otherwise intelligent and accomplished people try to explain away the obvious. The chief engineer of the Phoenix Bridge Company, John Deans, continued to insist that the bends had occurred before the steel was erected, and maintained this position even as McClure’s measurement on the bridge proved conclusively the steel was bending after erection.

  The Sunday before the collapse, a cold front moved into Quebec, pushing the hot summer air away and pulling in rain and wind and cool autumnal temperatures behind it. Monday and Tuesday the rain continued and only a few men worked on the bridge. McClure visited the bridge Tuesday and discovered alarming new evidence that steel in the bridge was failing: a piece in the anchor arm had bent an inch and a half since his last measurement less than a week earlier. McClure and several other engineers huddled over the chord and discussed what to do about it. The 38-year-old erection foreman, Ben Yenser, was sufficiently concerned to announce his intention to call his men off the bridge.

  On Wednesday, August 28, the wind continued to blow but the sun came out and the men reported for work as usual. Mysteriously, Yenser had changed his mind overnight and decided to keep the men on the bridge after all. It was an odd decision, given Yenser’s reputation for caution, and because of it Yenser is often given the rap for putting his men at risk. But Yenser was no engineer. He certainly would not have resumed work without tacit approval, if not outright pressure, from his own bosses. In fact, such pressure seems to have been applied by E. A. Hoare, chief engineer of the Quebec Bridge Company, who admitted as much in a letter he sent to Cooper that same afternoon. “I requested him to continue,” wrote Hoare, “as the moral effect of holding up the work would be very bad on all concerned and might also stop the work for this season on account of losing men.” The bridge was already undermanned. Hoare and others worried that halting work now, and thereby admitting concerns about the bridge, would send more men packing. With cold weather approaching, and the rush to complete the south arm before winter, this was a costly prospect. In a second letter, sent immediately after the disaster, Hoare would revise his account, suggesting that Yenser had made the decision to continue work entirely on his own. Blaming Yenser would be convenient, since the foreman would no longer be alive to defend himself.

  In the end, whether it was Yenser or Hoare or anybody else who made the decision, the only person whose opinion really mattered was Theodore Cooper’s, and he was 440 miles away in New York City. “It was clear that on that day,” an inquiry into the bridge collapse later concluded, “the greatest bridge in the world was being built without there being a single man within reach who by experience, knowledge and ability was competent to deal with the crisis.”

  On Wednesday afternoon, 29 hours before the fall, McClure boarded a train from Quebec City to New York to consult with Cooper in person. By now, every man on the bridge knew that something was wrong. That evening after work, a number of the bridgemen paid a visit to the lower chord. The group included a Detroit native named D. B. Haley who was serving as president of the local bridgemen’s union in Quebec. Haley was no engineer, either, but it was obvious to him, and to every other bridgeman gathered around, what was happening. “The inside web was bending toward Montreal and the outside was bending toward Quebec,” he told investigators later, “showing that there was too much compression put on and it would not stand the strain and it was giving.”

  That night half a dozen of the Indians talked about the bridge at the house where they boarded. A white bridgeman named John Splicer was present and later recalled the conversation. “They said there was a place in that chord, I do not know whereabouts, where it was bent, and they were trying to jack it together, and they could not jack the plates together and riveted up the way it was….” Splicer was so shaken by the conversation he decided not to report to work the following morning.

  Thursday, August 29, was a blustery day, fair skies, in the mid-60s. Before work began, a few men gathered again around the bent chord to have another look. They were thoroughly apprehensive by now. “By God,” Delphis Lajeunesse told himself, “I am going home before some accident.” But he stayed, as did most of the men. Apparently, for all their fears, they still trusted the bridge, and the engineers, with their lives.

  A bridgeman named Theodore Lachapelle decided to quit for the day around nine that morning, just two hours after starting time. He quit not for reasons of apprehension or prophecy, but simply because, as he later explained, “a man feels like work one day, and he does not another day.” At 2 P.M., a 26-year-old riveter named Dominick McComber, one of the Mohawk lacrosse players, got into an argument with his foreman and stalked off the bridge.

  John McClure, in the meantime, had reached New York. He was there to greet Theodore Cooper as the engineer arrived at his office on lower Broadway that morning. McClure’s report caused Cooper concern, though apparently not enough for him to demand an immediate cessation of work. Instead, Cooper sent a telegram to John Deans at Phoenix Bridge Company in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania. “Add no more load to bridge until due consideration of facts.” Later, Cooper and the press would make much of this telegram, as if its prompt delivery to the bridge might have prevented the tragedy. Cooper told the New York Times that the telegram ordered “the man in charge of the work there to get off the bridge at once and stay off it until it could be examined.” In fact, the telegram said nothin
g of the sort.

  After leaving Cooper, McClure boarded a train and followed the telegram to Phoenixville, where the bridge company had its headquarters. He went to consult in person with Deans and Peter Szlapka, the chief design engineer. Back in Quebec, around the same time that McClure was arriving at the Phoenixville depot, a Mohawk riveting foreman named Alex Beauvais noticed that rivets were starting to shear on the lower chord. Ingwall Hall, working atop the traveler, noticed that the cantilever had become “springy,” bouncing slightly whenever a load of steel landed on it. “It would jar enough so you would notice it good and plain and you would feel afraid.”

  McClure reached Deans’ office at Phoenix Bridge Company around 5:15. Deans had gotten Cooper’s telegram but had not acted on it, apparently considering it less than urgent. McClure sat down with Deans and Szlapka and they briefly discussed the situation. At 5:30, they decided the best course of action was to await new information from the bridge site and resume their discussion in the morning. As they were standing to leave the meeting—at 5:31 P.M., just half an hour before quitting time in Quebec—the bridge, 500 miles to the north, finally did what it had been threatening to do for weeks.

  Eighty-six men were on the south arm when a loud “grinding sound” shot out from the bridge. The 19,000 tons of structural steel toppled slowly at first, then the cantilever tower kicked out from the stone pier and it fell fast. A few of the men near shore had enough time to make a mad dash and save themselves. Men farther out over the river had no such option. Eugene Lajeunesse, who always worked side by side with his brother, Delphis, was standing on the south arm above the pier, waiting for his brother to lower a bucket of bolts, when the collapse began. “I made a jump and I went down and I do not know anything about it…. I said, ‘I am finished’; that is all. I did not see anything.”

  Ingwall Hall, another survivor, rode the big traveler crane 300 feet to the water. “Well, I could feel it start to go down and it was going down so fast you got tears in your eyes and you could hardly realize anything beside you.”

  “It left me, sir,” Oscar Lebarge later testified. “I was in space, in the air. It traveled a great deal quicker than I did.”

  D. B. Haley, the local union president, had a similar experience: “I was at the extreme end of it and the first I knew I caught myself going through the air. I realized that the iron fell very much faster than I did and left me falling through the air. The next thing I remember I was in deep water.”

  The bridge hit the river with a “clap of thunder,” as one witness put it. The New York Times described the sound as “a terrible crash which was plainly heard in Quebec, and which shook the whole countryside so that the inhabitants rushed out of their houses, thinking that an earthquake had occurred.” When D. B. Haley and Ingwall Hall came back up to the surface, injured but alive, the water was turbulent and filled with debris. “Everything was out of sight except timbers,” said Hall, “and I do not know how many voices were hollering for help.”

  Most of the men had been dragged deep into the river by the steel and killed outright. Nearer the shore, where the water was shallow, men were trapped but still alive. They remained so as night began to fall. “Their groans can be heard by the anxious crowds waiting at the water’s edge, but nothing so far can be done to rescue them or relieve their sufferings,” reported the New York Times. “There are no searchlights available, and by the feeble light of lanterns it is impossible to even locate some of the sufferers.” A village priest lowered himself by rope down the face of the cliff on the south shore, then waded into the shallows to administer last rites to the trapped men. Then, as the horrified spectators watched and listened, the tide came in and washed over the men, and their voices went silent. Of 86 men who had been working on the south arm of the bridge that afternoon, 75 were dead.

  The collapse reverberated around the world. Its shudders were felt with particular keenness south of the border. The bridge was in many ways more of an American enterprise than a Canadian one, built by an American bridge company and by American methods, and overseen by an esteemed American engineer. Many saw its collapse as an American failure. “The fall of the great Quebec cantilever bridge is the most disastrous calamity that could possibly have overtaken the profession of bridge engineering in this country,” lamented Scientific American two weeks after the collapse. “The tremendous significance of this disaster lies in the suspicion, which to-day is staring every engineer coldly in the face, that there is something wrong with our theories of bridge design, at least as applied to a structure of the size of the Quebec Bridge.” It was almost too disturbing to contemplate. If Theodore Cooper had been wrong, how confident could other bridge builders be that they weren’t wrong, too?

  The southern arm of the Quebec Bridge, August 28, 1907, one day before the collapse.

  (Courtesy of National Archives of Canada, PA-029229)

  The press treated Cooper kindly in the days after the collapse, as if he were the victim of bad luck rather than bad design; or as if the very practice of bridge engineering were to blame, rather than Cooper himself. But an inquiry launched by the Canadian government in the aftermath of the disaster quickly determined otherwise. The Royal Commission found Cooper to have committed several blunders that were attributable not to a failure of engineers as a body, but to his own poor judgment.

  After the collapse.

  (Courtesy of National Archives of Canada, C-009766)

  The gravest error concerned the weight of the bridge. While the bridge was still in its design stage, Szlapka, with Cooper’s blessing, had estimated a total weight for the bridge of 31,400 tons. Later, when it became clear that the weight of the bridge would be significantly higher, more like 38,000 tons, Cooper did nothing to change the specifications of the steel. He decided the new loadings fell within the margins of error figured into the bridge’s design and pronounced them safe. By doing this, he was allowing a unit stress on the steel—that is, the pounds per square inch the steel would be expected to bear—that was 20 percent higher than the standard practice of his day. Cutting so close to the bone might have been warranted in a smaller, more typical bridge, but in a bridge of this magnitude, where there was little precedent to rely on, it was foolhardy and arrogant. Cooper trusted the steel too well. And others trusted him too well.

  In Cooper’s defense, he was underpaid and overworked. Lack of money tied his hands. He could not conduct tests that might have proved informative; he could hardly afford a secretary to help him with paperwork. The report took these facts into consideration and spread blame around. But most of the blame it placed squarely on the shoulders of Cooper and Peter Szlapka, the Phoenix Bridge engineer who drew the design. The language in the report by the Royal Commission was plain but devastating: “The failure cannot be attributed directly to any cause other than errors in judgement on the part of these two engineers…. The ability of the two engineers was tried in one of the most difficult professional problems of the day and proved to be insufficient to the task.”

  The words were a wakeup call to engineers around the world, who checked and rechecked their calculations. To Cooper, they were as good as an epitaph. Though he would not in fact die for another 12 years, his career as an engineer was over, his reputation destroyed. For all his accomplishments, only one fact really mattered about Theodore Cooper now: he was the man who built the Quebec Bridge.

  Beyond its significance as a monumental engineering debacle, the fall of the Quebec Bridge was, of course, a human tragedy. The tragedy was especially staggering at Kahnawake. Of the 75 men who died, 33 were Mohawks. Many families on the small rustic reservation of 2,000 people had lost a relative. In the days after the collapse, the bereaved clustered in front of the post office, an old stone structure that possessed the single phone in the village. They waited for news and tallied the loss. Twenty-four women were widowed. Fifty-six children were fatherless. One family, the D’Aillebouts, lost four brothers, as well as an uncle and a cousin. Joseph D’Aille
bout left 11 children behind.

  A delegation from the reservation traveled downriver to gather the dead, but there were few bodies to bring home. Most were pinned underwater by the failed steel, where they remain today. A funeral for the eight men whose bodies were recovered took place the Monday after the collapse. The village was almost entirely Catholic in those days, and the ceremony was held in the St. Francis-Xavier Mission, a stone church near the river. Eight simple coffins lay on a platform in front of the altar. A local choir sang liturgical chants in Mohawk. The Archbishop of Montreal said mass to the overflowing church. “I am here to pray and share your grief,” the Archbishop told the mourners, as a priest translated his sermon into Mohawk. “A father is above all in sympathy with his children in trial. Yours is a severe one. The remains of eight victims now lie before us; but how many more have found a watery grave, perhaps never to be recovered? Like Rachel’s, your sorrow is one that will not be allayed.”

  BOOMING OUT

  The sorrow had a peculiar effect on the Mohawks. Rather than end or diminish their enthusiasm for high steel work, it seems to have done precisely the opposite. In 1915, just 8 years after the disaster, an investigator for the American Board of Indian Commissioners visited Kahnawake and reported that 587 out of 651 adult males belonged to the structural steel union, up from less than 100 in 1907. Even if this figure is inflated—it’s difficult to believe it’s not—there does seem to have been a real surge in interest. Apparently, the danger of the work only added to its appeal. “It made high steel much more interesting to them,” a retired Mohawk riveter told Joseph Mitchell in 1949. “It made them take pride in themselves that they could do such dangerous work.”