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

by Jim Rasenberger

  “Yes, but that one is for the store.”

  “But I need a flag.”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t give you that flag.”

  “You don’t understand,” she pleaded. “My husband is coming home tonight.”

  The owner finally relented. He let her have the flag. “My wife,” said Mickey, “is a very convincing woman.”

  The dog ran up to greet Mickey as he stepped out of his car. He walked up to the door and opened it, feeling as if he’d been away for months. His wife hugged him, and then his son flung his arms around him. “My son is fifteen years old,” said Mickey. “It’s hard to get hugs. But he hugged me.”

  There was a great deal of hugging of ironworkers in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Ironworkers, like firemen and policemen and other rescue workers, found themselves thrust into the role of heroes, a role they had not played convincingly since the glory days of the late 1920s and early 1930s. The word “heroes” was devalued by overuse after 9/11, but the ironworkers really were heroes of a sort. For no pay (in those early days) and at no benefit to themselves, they risked their lives to help in a very fundamental way. All those qualities that had seemed odious about “hard hats” in 1970—the unreformed maleness, the brawny toughness, the jingoism—were recast overnight as courage, valor, and patriotism. “The men who normally power this city, the lawyers, brokers, financiers, are useless,” wrote a New York corespondent for the Washington Post that Friday. “The term ‘laborers’ has earned a new respectability among their fellow citizens…. And no one is calling them Larry Lunchpail and Joe Six-pack either.”

  At the end of every shift, crowds of well-wishers stood along the West Side Highway or at the police barricades and applauded the men as they drove out from Ground Zero in trucks. “All those people out in front when you go past the barricades,” said Kevin Scally. “That’s why you go back. That’s the best feeling I’ve probably ever had in my life.” The Mohawk ironworkers who arrived home at Kahnawake that weekend were hailed as local heroes. As they gathered that Friday night at the Legion hall and the Knights of Columbus and at the bar of Old Malone’s Restaurant, people crowded around to hear their stories of Ground Zero. “Even the French are treating us like heroes,” said Chad Snow, who went home that weekend after a few days on the pile. “And the French hate us.”

  In the weeks to come, ironworkers would be lauded almost continuously in the press. People who had no idea what an ironworker was or did before September 11, were suddenly aware of these men in hard hats doing extraordinary things at Ground Zero. On September 25, two Local 40 ironworkers, James Beckett and Mike Grottle, would ring the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange, a sure indication of ironworkers’ new status. Meanwhile, signs of appreciation began appearing in windows near construction sites around the city, including a very large one in a window across from the Time Warner Center: “THANK YOU, IRONWORKERS!” Kevin Scally predicted that all this gratitude and adulation would not last. “We’ll be popular for a while,” he said without rancor. “And then we’re gonna disappear.”

  MONDAY REVISITED

  That first Monday back at Columbus Circle sucked. It sucked even more than Mondays usually sucked, and no amount of good press could cure that. The men returned to Columbus Circle drained and distracted, many suffering hacking coughs brought on by the smoke at Ground Zero. For the Mohawks, the Sunday night good-byes had been even more difficult than usual. New York had never seemed so dangerous and so far from home.

  Many of the ironworkers had broken down over the preceding weekend. The stress and the sadness they’d managed to keep at bay throughout the week let loose in torrents and nightmares. It hit Kevin Scally the night before, Sunday night, after he came back from working on the pile all weekend. Joe Emerson was driving home on the Long Island Expressway when tears began to stream from his eyes. Nearly every ironworker who had spent any time at Ground Zero broke down that weekend. “I think it was knowing that I wasn’t going back,” said Kevin. “I just lost it.”

  As it turned out, Kevin and Joe were not done yet. Monday evening they got a call from the hall asking them to return to Ground Zero that night. This would entail putting in a full shift overnight—having already worked a full day—then going straight to work at Columbus Circle the next morning to put in another full shift. They both accepted without hesitation. “You hate it when you’re there,” Kevin explained, “but you hate it more when you’re not.”

  What pulled the ironworkers at the Time Warner Center out of their collective funk was the work. Almost immediately the job hit a new stride. Those four days the building stood stock-still had given the steel fabricators a chance to produce a backlog of shapes for the first time. After a miserly midsummer trickle of five or six trucks of steel per day, trucks now began arriving at a rate of 15 or 17 per day. To make up for lost time, Bovis decided to bump the ironworkers up to 10-hour days.

  In September, two kangaroo cranes, working in tandem, lifted 10 parallel, 92-foot headers over the courtyard to form a portico over the main entrance. Jerry and Matt on one side, Kevin and Joe on the other, the connectors bolted the headers in, then walked out onto the steel to join them crosswise with narrow beams. The headers were about a foot and a half wide, veritable turnpikes, and a safety crew had already hung a net about 30 feet below them. But net or no net, going out onto a strip of steel 70 feet over the ground and 45 feet from the nearest structure was dizzying. The strange part wasn’t looking down—looking down was nothing—but rather standing out in the middle of the header and looking straight up at the sky as a load of beams floated in from above. “That was a little hairy,” allowed Jerry.

  The raising gangs turned their attention to the jazz center at the end of the month. The jazz center was a proscenium-style auditorium that would roost in the middle of the Time Warner building, between the haunches of the two towers. When complete, it would be one of the premium music venues in the city, acoustically, ergonomically, and visually. But the pleasures of the future jazz fans would come at the cost of great effort and peril to the ironworkers. The steel in the jazz center was light but it was also extremely narrow, some beams barely wider than a man’s boot. It wowed and wiggled underfoot as the men set it. The connectors spent days walking around on this steel, often 60 feet over the floor, a trial of focus and nerves for the most hardened ironworker.

  One day in November, Jerry and Matt set a couple of cantilevered beams at the southeastern corner of the building, where it tapered into a sharp prow. The first beam stuck out 15 feet from the body of the building, parallel to 58th Street. Matt stepped onto it and walked halfway across it to where the crane hook attached to the choker. Seventy feet below to his right a cement truck idled on 58th Street, waiting for the light to change. Matt unbuckled the choker, slung it over the hook, made a cutting motion with his hands, and the crane hook shot off.

  Once the hook cleared, Matt walked on to the far (unsupported) end of the beam, where he stepped down onto the lower flange and sat. He pulled out a pack of Marlboros and tried to light one. The wind blew out the first match, but the second took, and Matt perched at the end of the beam, looking out over Central Park, holding smoke in his lungs.

  Jerry, meanwhile, had crossed a short beam that lay perpendicular to Matt’s. He stood and waited for the next piece of steel that would complete the prow—the third leg of the triangle. Matt exhaled, then turned and called to Jerry. What? Matt pointed at his bolt bag. Jerry reached into his own bolt bag, pulled out a bolt, and tossed it underhand to Matt, who swiped it from the air with one hand. (Had he missed, the bolt would have sailed out over 58th Street, a lethal missile, and probably taken out a windshield—or worse.) He dropped the bolt into his bolt bag, then got back up on his feet. The third leg was descending. Both men stood on the steel, looking up, waiting for it. Neither was tied off.

  As the pace of the job increased, little accidents and near calamities began to accumulate. A beam rolled over the foot of a tagline man. A young
African-American apprentice fell off a ladder and injured his back. In mid-October, Johnny Diabo, one of the connectors recently arrived from the Random House building, caught the tip of a finger between two pieces of steel and snipped it off. “It’s funny,” said Johnny as he regarded his damaged hand. “Just a couple weeks ago a few of us were sitting in a bar and saying how none of us had ever lost any fingers or toes.” Johnny took the fingertip home with him to Kahnawake that weekend and buried it in his backyard—an old Mohawk custom, he said—then returned to work on Monday, the finger bandaged in gauze and black tape.

  On a very windy afternoon in early November, Tommy, the operator of crane No. 3—Matt and Jerry’s crane—was lifting a beam off the derrick floor when an updraft got under his 180-foot boom and pushed it skyward. Jerry lunged and grabbed the tagline hanging off the beam. He quickly wrapped it around a column, trying to prevent the boom from riding any higher. For a moment, this arrested the upward thrust of the boom, but then the tagline snapped and the boom shot off. Everybody who saw this understood what would happen the instant the gust let up: the boom would fall, and the beam dangling under it would hammer down onto the building. More precisely, it would hammer down onto the head of an unsuspecting young ironworker from Buffalo, New York, who sat on the steel frame directly under it, obliviously bolting up.

  “Buffy—watch out!”

  Buffy, as the young man was known to his fellow ironworkers, did not look up to see what was the matter. He heard his nickname, discerned the urgency behind it, and leaped as if significant voltage had been applied to his backside. He leaped the way people leap in cartoons, flying over the beam to a column and grabbing hold of it. SLAM! The beam cracked onto the very spot where Buffy had been sitting an instant earlier. The collision made a loud noise and sent vibrations whipping through the frame of the building.

  Later, as a number of ironworkers unwound at Smith’s Bar on Eighth Avenue, they agreed that if Buffy hadn’t been so young and so scared, he’d be dead now. “If it had been an older guy, he’d just sit there,” said David Levy, a bolter-up in his early 40s who had watched the event unfold. “I probably would have just sat there on my ass.”

  “Buffy was scared shitless,” said Jerry. “I’ve never seen a man move faster in my life.”

  “I was scared,” agreed Buffy. “It was pretty funny.”

  “I’d definitely be dead,” said David Levy, who had the distinction of being one of a handful of Jewish ironworkers in New York and whose nickname was simply Jew.

  “So, if somebody shouted, ‘Watch out, Jew!’—”

  “—I wouldn’t move.” He shrugged. “I’d be like , What the fuck is wrong with you? Don’t bother me, asshole. That’s the problem with getting old in this business. It takes more to scare you.”

  JACK GOES BACK

  Jack Doyle stepped out of a cab on the corner of Broadway and Liberty Street. It was a damp morning in mid-November. He wore a trenchcoat and pressed suit pants and a pair of two-tone leather bucks. The rain had ended, but the streets remained slick and the air misty and chilly, causing Jack’s hip to ache a little. Favoring it, he approached the police barricade. He fished into his coat pocket for his pass, which he flashed before the police officer standing beside the barricade.

  “Wrong pass,” said the cop. “Brown was last week. This week is orange.”

  “Orange?”

  “Yeah. They changed it.”

  “Is that right? Well, this is the one they gave me.”

  One of the ironworkers’ foremen walked up to greet Jack, then had a quiet word with the cop. The cop finally relented: Jack was free to pass. Thirty-four years after the morning he first arrived in 1968, a catty young connector from Conception Bay, Jack Doyle walked down Liberty Street, back to where his journey to the top began.

  All told, Jack had spent seven years of his life down here on the 16 acres of the World Trade Center. After topping out the north tower in 1970, he’d gone on to push a rig at 3 World Trade—the 22-story Marriott Hotel—then later became walking boss at 7 World Trade, a 47-story office building erected in the late 1980s. He’d worked in one capacity or another on every one of the seven buildings in the World Trade Center complex. And every one of them was gone now.

  “Hey there, Jack.” Several ironworkers greeted him as he walked west on Liberty Street. “Jack Doyle! Hello!”

  Ironwork had been good to Jack. Other than a few missing fingers, he’d gotten through his years on the steel without much damage. He and his wife had raised a family of three kids in the house on Staten Island he bought back in 1970, while pushing his rig on Tower One. He’d sent the kids to good colleges and seen his son, Kevin, make Law Review at Seton Hall. He’d worked his way up through the ranks from pusher to walking boss, from walking boss to superintendent, and now, at the age of 58, he was president and business agent of Local 40 of the ironworkers union, which made him one of the top building trade executives in the city.

  Jack approached the eastern edge of the site and looked out over the wreckage. Just two months had passed since the attacks, but already an astonishing 56,000 tons of debris had been trucked away, and the pile had been transformed into a pit. The pit still smoldered, exhaling a vapor of carbon monoxide, benzene, propylene, and several other possible carcinogens, but other than the odor, which was off-putting, Ground Zero seemed well controlled. The frenetic urgency that had characterized it for many weeks was gone, replaced by a trimmer and more efficient operation. From 300 ironworkers a few weeks earlier, the number had dropped to about 180.

  Danny Robbins, a broad-shouldered, blond-haired ironworker, joined Jack at the edge of the pit. “Housewreckers still talking about taking down the Customs House with a wrecking ball.”

  “Smash it down? Sounds like a mess.” They started walking north on Church Street, skirting the edge of the pit.

  “Yeah, then our guys have to go in there and crawl all over it and burn it out and get hurt. It’s stupid. We oughta go in there with a crane and take it apart.”

  “That makes more sense,” agreed Jack. “I’ll have a word.”

  “That’d be great.”

  They turned west, onto Vesey Street, and passed the blackened and gutted Customs House. This had recently been a busy paved street cast in perpetual shade by the tall buildings surrounding it. Now it was a swath of sloppy mud, as empty as a country lane. A dirt field spread to the west and north, where pickups and SUVs were haphazardly parked. Jack stopped walking.

  “That was 7 World Trade. That was a forty-seven-story skyscraper. I can’t get over that. Look at that, it’s a parking lot.”

  He stood there for a moment, gazing across the expanse of mud. 7 World Trade had never achieved quite the renown of the Twin Towers, but the job of building it was one that ironworkers talked about for years afterward. It was a big, complex job that involved hoisting and joining enormous members of steel, and a lot of men got badly hurt on it. One of the worst accidents befell a good friend of Jack’s, Pat Kennedy, who lost his leg under a grillage of steel one morning while the building was still in the hole.

  Danny Robbins led the way over rough ground, over beams and rebar. They came around the edge of the Customs House. The mud was thick and sloppy here. Jack, still catty after all the years, stepped lightly between patches of hard pan. A rim of mud formed at the soles of his bucks but he didn’t seem to notice or care. Straight ahead, two men stood in ankle-deep sludge, shoveling around the edges of a recumbent column. One of the pair was a white-haired man who looked to be a few years older than Jack. The other was a young man with a couple days’ growth of beard. This was Mike Emerson.

  “Hey, if it ain’t Jack Doyle!” called the older man.

  “What is this?” called Jack, grinning. “Since when do ironworkers carry shovels?”

  “They’ve turned us into laborers here,” said Mike Emerson with a laugh. “We’re digging it out so we can get a chain under it.”

  Mike Emerson had been down here every day sin
ce he first arrived with his brothers on the morning of September 12. He’d worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week—a pace he would maintain for 10 months, straight through to end of the cleanup. Many tough ironworkers had spent a few weeks down here and called it quits, understandably finding the grimness of the site, the dead bodies, and foul smoke too much to bear. But others got energized by it. They found it weirdly sustaining. Mike Emerson, after his initial panic attack on the pile that first Wednesday, turned out to be one of these, much to his own surprise. “I found I had a knack for this kind of work,” is how he put it. “The rugged work. Being in that environment. The burning, being out there in that big cloud of smoke and cutting pieces, hooking them up—it just came natural to me.”

  The work had taken a toll on his personal life. A week before the terrorist attacks, Mike’s wife had given birth to a baby girl. Mike had barely seen the baby, or his wife, since the birth. He left home at 5 in the morning and returned at 10 in the evening. Nearly all of his waking hours were spent at Ground Zero or on the train commuting between there and his house 50 miles north of the city. He knew that he could quit at any time. And yet, for reasons he didn’t quite understand himself, he also knew he had to keep going. “I gotta say, my wife, she’s a tough girl. There were guys I worked with, their wives just couldn’t take it. Mine never complained. She knew it was where I wanted to be. It was like I had a drive. Once I started there, I was hell-bent. It was just something I had to do.” Sitting on the train after a long shift, Mike would close his eyes and count his blessings. He felt like the luckiest man in the world to be returning home to his family. But then, next morning, he’d wake up feeling an urgent need to get back to Ground Zero. As of mid-November, he’d yet to take a single day off since the attack. And when he finally did take one off—Christmas Day—he’d feel restless and guilty being home. “I thought a lot about all the kids that were left behind. ’Cause I used to see them down there, the families. Sometimes they’d come down. You knew how many lives were just friggin’ wrecked.”