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

by Jim Rasenberger

  In the fall of 1968, as Jack Doyle and his fellow ironworkers were climbing their way out of the ground, the tallest building in the world was the Empire State Building. The second tallest was the Chrysler Building. Both of these buildings were nearly 40 years old.

  Hundreds of new skyscrapers had been constructed since the end of World War II, some of them distinguished works of architecture, but the new skyscrapers had little in common with the skyscrapers of the 1920s. Where those had been clad in stone and thick with steel, the new ones were lightly framed and dressed in glass. Where the old skyscrapers had risen in ever ascendant step-backs toward a cupola or a peak, shaped like wedding cakes and rocket ships, the modernist buildings tended to be sheer-walled rectangles, perfect “glass boxes,” as they were often called. Where the old buildings had been decorative and brash, the new buildings were steadfastly austere.

  And, finally, where the old buildings had striven for height, these new structures aspired only to middling altitude, a mere 50 stories through the 1950s, 60 stories through the 1960s. The Depression had quashed the ambition to go higher. Every developer in town knew that the Empire State Building—the “Empty State Building,” as New Yorkers called it—had taken 15 years to reach full occupancy, and none wished to repeat that fiasco.

  The new buildings were structurally ill-equipped for great height in any case. It’s not that they lacked the strength for it; they were plenty strong. Indeed, their steel was significantly stronger than the steel found in earlier skyscrapers. But because the steel was stronger, engineers put less of it into buildings, which, in turn, made the buildings relatively light. And the absence of all the extra masonry cladding and heavy internal partitions that modernist architects disdained made the buildings even lighter. That incidental heft hadn’t made the old buildings stronger, but it had made them more stable, more inert. These new light buildings, in contrast, were highly susceptible to wind; and for every story added to their height, their wind loads increased exponentially. If buildings are going to be tall and light, they must also be somehow rigid. And in the early 1960s, lightness and rigidity seemed to be mutually exclusive.

  A young Bangladeshi-born engineer named Fazlur Khan found a way to resolve the contradiction. Before Khan, steel buildings distributed their loads evenly among columns running vertically throughout the area of the building. An early innovation that helped stiffen buildings was to bulk up the steel in the center of the building, in the form of a core; these cores housed the elevator shafts and stairwells and, most important, acted as spines for the building.

  Fazlur Khan was the first to seize on the idea of concentrating more steel on the outside of the building. He did to buildings what steel manufacturers had long been doing to structural shapes: he moved the steel to where it was needed most, concentrating columns not only around the core, but also around the perimeter. By moving much of the load burden to the external walls, Khan’s “framed tubes,” as he called them, marked a partial return to the design of old-fashioned masonry buildings. His buildings had both the spine of a vertebrate and shell of a crustacean. They were light, but they were also rigid.

  At the same time that Fazlur Khan was improving the technology of tall buildings, American developers were experiencing a new yen to build them. Khan’s own 100-story John Hancock Center, begun in Chicago in 1965, was the first of the new tall breed. Meanwhile, in New York, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey—the same agency, now renamed, that had commissioned the George Washington Bridge 35 years earlier—finalized plans for the World Trade Center. Standing at the center of this vast project would be the two tallest towers in the world.

  Architect Minoru Yamasaki, working closely with the Seattle engineering firm of Worthington-Skilling, designed two nearly identical rectangular buildings in which each of the 208-foot-wide walls would be made up of 61 columns. These columns, along with the thick but narrow panes of glass between them, would form the exterior of the buildings. They would also bear its weight in conjunction with the steel core. The design would give the buildings enormous uninterrupted floor spans, 60 feet from core to wall, which would translate into an unusually high ratio of rentable square footage—75 percent of the building’s area compared with the 50 percent common in older skyscrapers. And to sweeten the deal, the design would limit the use of steel to an economical minimum. It was true that, at 96,000 tons apiece, the steel in each of the World Trade Center’s towers would weigh about 60 percent more than the steel in the Empire State Building. But given the ratio of steel to square footage, this was relatively light. For that 60 percent, each tower would provide 150 percent more rentable space.

  The steel did not feel light to Jack Doyle. “Everything we touched in the hole was huge. Every column we hooked onto was forty or fifty tons.” Higher up, the steel would slim down considerably, but in the hole it was gargantuan and cumbersome, and six floors of it had to be erected before the ironworkers could lift their necks above the ground.

  Jack spent the fall and early winter setting huge columns and girders with Manitowoc crawler cranes. Once the frame finally climbed above ground, he moved into a raising gang pushed by his older brother, George, and connected under a kangaroo crane. The World Trade Center marked the debut of these extraordinary new tower cranes, soon to become a fixture of skyscraper construction in New York, replacing the derricks that had done the job of hoisting iron and steel for a century. None of the ironworkers had ever seen a kangaroo before; now they were working with eight of the largest in the world.

  The gangs hung steel in three stages. First, they set a few floors of the core through which the many elevators would run. This was familiar work, fairly standard column-and-post connections. Next they set columns of the perimeter wall. The columns came in racks of three, joined together by horizontal spandrels and alternating in height between 15 and 30 feet. The ironworkers stacked the column racks around the perimeter of the building, bolting and welding them at the bottoms and the tops.

  Now came the most unusual part of the operation. Instead of setting standard I-beams horizontally between core and wall, the raising gangs used the kangaroos to hoist huge prefabricated sections of floor panel—60 feet long, 20 feet wide, and about 3 feet deep—and lower them snugly into the gap between core and columns. Structurally speaking, these floor sections killed three birds with one stone. They provided the decking into which concrete would be poured to make the building’s floors. They provided the ducts through which air-conditioning and electrical and telephone wires would run. And, most important, they contained the light steel trusses that would transfer lateral forces—wind, mainly—from the exterior walls to the core and make the building act as a single rigid body.

  One afternoon, George Backett, the super, called Jack over for a word. He told Jack he’d decided to appoint him foreman of a raising gang under the northeast kangaroo crane. “I want you to push the rig,” he said. “I know you can handle it.” It was an unexpected and daunting promotion. Jack was in his mid-20s, younger and less experienced than every other man in the gang, and this was the biggest skyscraper job in the world. If George Backett had asked, Jack might have hesitated to assume such responsibility. But George Backett wasn’t the type to ask.

  Jack took over the crane just as the job moved into a new phase. The heaviest portion of the building was behind them. The gangs had become acquainted with the kangaroos and the peculiarities of the tower’s design and were poised to kick up their speed a notch. It had taken them 18 months to get from the hole to the 30th floor. It would take just nine more months to top out at the 110th floor.

  As the building rose, legends and tales grew alongside it, some of these even true. There was the time the tugboat operators went on strike, shutting off the delivery of the floor panels, and somebody at the Port Authority had the bright idea of using an enormous helicopter—a skycrane—to make the deliveries. So one Saturday morning, Jack and the rest of his raising gang stood on a pier at the edge of the Hudson Rive
r to greet the skycrane and unload the floor panel. “And then we see it,” said Jack, still smiling at the memory years later. “It’s coming up the river with the piece hanging from underneath. Halfway up the river, all of a sudden we see the piece drop.” The panel had started to swing wildly and the pilot had cut it loose, and down it went to the bottom of New York Harbor. The ironworkers got their eight hours overtime and went home. That was the end of transporting floor panels by helicopter.

  The building hit another snag around the 44th floor, when the elevator operators went on strike. Now the only way for the ironworkers to get to the top was to climb. Every morning for weeks they humped themselves up the stairs, and when the stairs ran out, they climbed another five or six stories by ladder, and when they got to the top they sat down and caught their breath. A Mohawk pusher named Walter Beauvais decided to get around this inconvenience by hitching a ride from the ground on one of the floor panels. Riding loads was no longer acceptable practice, and had not been for years, but Beauvais—known to his fellow ironworkers either as “Chicken-bones” or “Hambone”—jumped on when nobody was looking and secreted himself under an overturned barrel. He grasped the choker, and the load took off. This was not the first time Walter Beauvais had gone around the rules—indeed he was a self-professed risk taker of the highest order—and the union shop steward had his eye on him. As it happened, that same shop steward was standing on top when Beauvais arrived and popped out from under the barrel, ready for work. The shop steward fired him on the spot. “I had to get to the top,” Walter Beauvais explained years later with a shrug. “Anyway, I came back after a week. No hard feelings.”

  BLOODY FRIDAY

  The north tower reached the 70th floor in mid-spring of 1970. The sounds of the city fell away and the view opened up into a remarkable panorama, not of the city below but of the world beyond the city, of the Atlantic Ocean and suburban sprawl, of wooded hills and countryside. On a clear day you could see up to 45 miles. You could see east across Brooklyn and Queens, all the way to Jones Beach and the Atlantic shipping lanes, as far as Asbury Park to the south and Tarrytown to the north.

  As vividly as he would later remember the astonishing view on a sunny day, Jack would remember the fog they began to encounter as they rose above the 70th floor. He’d remember how the hook of the kangaroo would drop over the side of the building and plummet into the whiteness. “We’d be on top, waiting for it to come back, and of course we couldn’t see the street. That was a ghostly thing, because the cables just went down and disappeared. After four or five minutes you’d just hear the crane engines start whining over your head. You could tell by the sound when they had a heavy load, but sometimes, if they’d just dropped the whip line, you couldn’t hear it. All of a sudden, boom, this big load of rusty steel would bounce out from the clouds.”

  They were approaching a thousand feet, but the deck felt as safe and protected as a quiet cove. The perimeter columns buffeted the wind and enclosed the ironworkers. Just how well the columns did their job became apparent when you walked to the edge of the floor, stuck your head out between them, and looked down at the street. The wind nearly blew your head off. The instant you pulled yourself back in, the wind stopped and the air went still.

  Standing on the deck, you felt detached from the world down there. You were a thousand feet up but sometimes it felt more like a thousand miles. Of course, this was an illusion. You were in the middle of New York City, in the middle of 1970.

  Nineteen-seventy was a pivotal, turbulent year in America. The Kennedys and Dr. King were dead, and the idealism of the 1960s had burnt down to a simmering rage. Nineteen-seventy was the year ironworkers and their fellow tradesmen proved they were as capable of venting rage as anyone else in America.

  The two defining political issues of the year were civil rights and Vietnam, and the ironworkers stood squarely on the wrong side of both. Their record on civil rights was weak at best. Neither Brooklyn’s Local 361 nor Manhattan’s Local 40 had initiated a single black person into their membership until 1964, the year Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. The exclusion of blacks in the union until this point may have been an explicit policy, albeit an unwritten one, but the primary motive behind it was more likely nepotism than racism. Before the Wagner Act of 1935, the union eagerly sought more members. Nowadays, it had many more aspirants than it could possibly accept. It was difficult for anybody, white or black, to get in unless he had a strong connection to someone who already belonged, preferably his father or a close uncle.

  The first black union ironworker, a slender 21-year-old named Michael Stewart, joined the New York local in 1964. By 1966, 14 other black men had enrolled in the apprentice training programs for Locals 40 and 361. The union trumpeted this as progress, but civil rights advocates dismissed it as tokenism, a “ruse” to cover up entrenched discrimination. A 1967 report by the New York City Commission on Human Rights found that the city’s building trade unions continued to maintain “almost insurmountable barriers to nonwhite journeymen seeking membership.” Local 40 was one of nine New York unions singled out for dishonorable mention.

  It wasn’t their views on race, however, that so effectively seared the image of construction workers as mindless reactionaries into many Americans’ minds in 1970. It was their views, and actions, on the Vietnam War.

  The Vietnam War was fought overwhelmingly by working-class Americans. Just 20 percent of troops came from white-collar households, while 80 percent had acquired no more than a high school education. They were small-town farmers from rural America and young black men from the inner city. And they were, many of them, the white sons of building tradesmen. To these young men and their families, anti-war protesters were spoiled college kids who wriggled out of the draft and then had the temerity to bad-mouth their country and the military. Throughout the 1960s, as protests against the war grew louder and more rancorous, the “silent majority,” as Nixon called his pro-war working-class constituency, bit their lips and seethed. Then, one spring day in 1970, a few blocks from the World Trade Center, a group of ironworkers and other building tradesmen stopped seething and exploded. The event became known as “Bloody Friday.”

  The seeds of Bloody Friday were probably planted years earlier, but the direct antecedent was a speech President Nixon gave on April 30, 1970. Having repeatedly promised to withdraw troops from Vietnam, Nixon now told America he’d decided, on second thought, to extend the draft and, furthermore, to invade Cambodia and root out Vietcong resistance. Anti-war activists were outraged. Demonstrations flared up at college campuses across the country. On May 4, National Guardsmen opened fire on demonstrators at Kent State University in Ohio, killing 4 students, wounding 11 others, and sending the country into a state of shock.

  Four days after Kent State, on Friday, May 8, anti-war demonstrators, mostly students from New York University and Hunter College, staged a rally on the corner of Wall Street and Broad Street, near the base of the World Trade Center. City schools were closed for the day and American flags flew at half mast in honor of the four dead students in Ohio. The rally was progressing peacefully when, just before noon, 200 or so construction workers, including ironworkers from the World Trade Center and the U.S. Steel Building (rising on the former site of the Singer Building) suddenly descended on the demonstrators, pushing through police lines and beating the students with fists, boots, and pipes. The mob then stormed City Hall and ordered officials to restore the flag to full staff. This done, the mob launched into a rousing chorus of “God Bless America.”

  Seventy people were injured before the riot ended. The police, who tended to share the tradesmen’s attitude toward the student demonstrators, did little to intervene. “They came at us like animals,” said one 20-year-old student. “You could hear them screaming, ‘Kill the commies.’ They charged and we ran for our lives.”

  One of the “animals” was a 29-year-old ironworker, an ex-Marine who worked on the U.S. Steel Building and had recently broken three of his
toes when a steel beam fell on his foot. “It was probably the only day my foot didn’t hurt me a bit,” he told the New York Post. “I had other things on my mind.”

  To a city and country already reeling, Bloody Friday and several successive demonstrations, collectively known as the “hard-hat riots,” were one more extraordinary fact to absorb. Liberals, especially, were confounded. Wasn’t the proletariat supposed to be on the same team they were on, snuggled up under the inclusive embrace of the Democratic Party? Apparently not. Apparently, the proletariat wished them bodily harm.

  Conservatives, for their part, welcomed the hard hats as a much-needed antidote to hippie peaceniks. Nixon could hardly contain his glee, declaring Bloody Friday “a very exciting thing.” At a special White House ceremony later that month, the president personally thanked a gathering of trade union representatives for their support. In return, Peter Brennan, president of the Building and Construction Trades Council of New York, presented Nixon with a hard hat of his very own.

  But the romance was short-lived. In February of 1971, just 10 months after praising the hard hats at the White House, Nixon bowed to pressure from pro-business lobbying groups and suspended the Davis-Bacon prevailing wage act, a singularly harsh blow to trade unions. Nixon’s betrayal came as a shock to the ironworkers and other tradesmen, but nobody felt too sorry for them. They had done far too good a job of tarring themselves as racist warmongers to stir up much support from their old allies, the liberals. As for conservatives, they only had a use for them, it seemed, when they were beating up liberals.

  COLOSSUS

  Autumn arrived, heralded by the carcasses of dead birds on the top deck. “They were small birds, little black birds,” remembered Jack Doyle. “Probably flying at night and hit the boom.” Evidently, the birds were migrating on last year’s flight plan and had no idea a building had risen into the winds that carried them south.