High Steel.

THE DARING MEN WHO BUILT THE WORLD'S GREATEST SKYLINE, 1881 to the Present.

by JIM RASENBERGER.

PROLOGUE.

Of Steel and Men

"...high growths of iron, slender, strong, light, splendidly uprising toward clear skies...."

-WALT W WHITMAN "Mannahatta," 1881 "Mannahatta," 1881

Only a poet-maybe only Walt Whitman himself, for that matter-could have described the skyline of Manhattan in 1881 with such delirious hyperbole. High growths of iron? The highest point on the island in 1881 was the steeple of Trinity Church, built in 1846 and rising 284 feet over Broadway. The vast majority of secular buildings rose just four or five stories, and the tallest rose a mere ten stories. Even these were remarkably chunky structures, built of thick masonry or dense cast iron, hardly "light" or "slender." They soared like penguins.

But if Whitman's description seems a bit overwrought by today's standards, it was also prophetic. New York was on the verge of enormous physical change in 1881. The main evidence of this stood in the East River, in the form of two stone towers rising from the currents, one near Manhattan's sh.o.r.e, the other near Brooklyn's. The towers were high, startlingly high, each looming 276 feet over the river; but it wasn't the towers that made the Brooklyn Bridge so remarkable. It was the great steel cables draped between them, and the steel beams suspended from the harp-like web of steel wires. This was the part of the bridge that really mattered, the part that made it a bridge, unleashed from earth if not the laws of physics: steel.

Americans did not invent steel, but steel, in many ways, invented twentieth-century America. Cars, planes, ships, lawn mowers, office desks, bank vaults, swing sets, toaster ovens, steak knives-to live in twentieth-century America was to live in a world of steel. By mid-century, 85 percent of the manufactured goods in the United States contained steel, and 40 percent of wage earners owed their jobs, at least indirectly, to the steel industry. Steel was everywhere. Most evidently, and most awesomely, it was in the cities, ascending hundreds of feet above the earth in the form of steel-frame skysc.r.a.pers.

The first skysc.r.a.pers began to appear in Chicago in the mid-1880s, a year or so after the Brooklyn Bridge opened to traffic. The new buildings turned the old rules of architecture inside out: instead of resting their weight on thick external walls of brick or stone, they placed it on an internal framework-a "skeleton"-of steel columns and beams. The effect was as if buildings had evolved overnight from lumbering crustaceans into lofty vertebrates. Walls would still be necessary for weather protection and adornment, but structurally they'd be almost incidental. The steel frame made building construction more efficient and more economical, and it had a less pragmatic-yet more significant-effect. It gave humans the ability to rise as high as elevators and audacity could carry them.

The steel-frame skysc.r.a.per was born in Chicago, but New York is where it truly came of age. By 1895, Manhattan's summit had doubled to 20 stories, then it doubled again, then again-all before 1930 and all made possible by steel. And as skysc.r.a.pers sprang up from the bedrock, new steel bridges reached out to Brooklyn, to Queens, to the mainland across the Hudson, connecting the city so seamlessly to the world beyond that New Yorkers would soon forget they lived on an island.

In 1970, the summit of the city rose one last time, to 110 stories, on the stacked columns of two identical buildings in lower Manhattan. A stone's throw from Trinity Church and a short stroll from the Brooklyn Bridge, the twin towers of the World Trade Center seemed to herald a remarkable new age of building. They were so high-ten times as high as the "high growths of iron" Walt Whitman admired in 1881-they literally disappeared, some days, into the clouds.

The astonishing ascendancy of New York City's skyline has been recounted before, often and well. Several of its icons-the Flatiron Building, the Woolworth Building, the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building-have achieved a kind of celebrity usually reserved for Hollywood film stars and heads of state, while their architects and builders have basked in reflected glory. Strangely, though, one group of key players is usually neglected in the telling of the skyline's drama: the men who risked the most and labored the hardest to make it happen. Called ironworkers, or, more specifically, structural structural ironworkers, these are the brave and agile men who raised the steel into the sky: the generations of Americans and Newfoundlanders and Mohawk Indians who balanced on narrow beams high above the city to s.n.a.t.c.h steel off incoming derricks or crane hooks and set it in place-who shoved it, prodded it, whacked it, reamed it, kicked it, shoved it some more, swore at it, straddled it, pounded it mercilessly, and then riveted it or welded it or bolted it up and went home. That was on a good day. On a bad day, they went to the hospital or the morgue. Steel is an unforgiving material and, given any chance, bites back. It was a lucky ironworker who made it to retirement without losing a few fingers or breaking a few bones. And then, of course, there was always the possibility of falling. Much ironwork was done hundreds of feet in the air, where a single false step meant death. Steel was the adversary that made them sweat and bleed. It was gravity, though, that usually killed them. ironworkers, these are the brave and agile men who raised the steel into the sky: the generations of Americans and Newfoundlanders and Mohawk Indians who balanced on narrow beams high above the city to s.n.a.t.c.h steel off incoming derricks or crane hooks and set it in place-who shoved it, prodded it, whacked it, reamed it, kicked it, shoved it some more, swore at it, straddled it, pounded it mercilessly, and then riveted it or welded it or bolted it up and went home. That was on a good day. On a bad day, they went to the hospital or the morgue. Steel is an unforgiving material and, given any chance, bites back. It was a lucky ironworker who made it to retirement without losing a few fingers or breaking a few bones. And then, of course, there was always the possibility of falling. Much ironwork was done hundreds of feet in the air, where a single false step meant death. Steel was the adversary that made them sweat and bleed. It was gravity, though, that usually killed them.

This is the story of the ironworkers who built New York-and are building it still. Without idealizing them, it's fair to say that they are a remarkable breed. What makes them remarkable isn't just their daring or acrobatics; it's their whole way of life. History lives through them by way of their genealogies. Many come from a close-knit group of families, multigenerational dynasties of New York ironworkers. They are the sons and grandsons and great-grandsons of the men who built the icons of the past. They are the Montours, the Deers, the Diabos, and the Beauvais from the Kahnawake Mohawk Reserve near Montreal. They are the Kennedys, the Lewises, the Doyles, the Wades, and the Costellos from a small constellation of seaside towns in Newfoundland. They are the Collinses, the Donohues, the Johnsons, the Andersons, and the McKees, whose grandfathers immigrated to New York from Germany and Scandinavia and Ireland. When a young man from one of these families looks out over the skyline and says, "My family built this city," his brag is deserved.

Today's ironworkers are, in many respects, cultural relics. They live at odds with the prevailing trends of twenty-first-century American culture, or at least American culture as prescribed by glossy magazines and morning television shows. They drink too much, smoke too much, and practice few of the civilities of the hara.s.sment-free workplace. As gender roles become less defined, the ironworkers, virtually all of them men, continue to revel in a coc.o.o.n of full-blown masculine camaraderie. Education levels have increased across the board in America, but the education of most ironworkers stops at high school. Unionism is in decline, with just 11 percent of American workers still enrolled in labor unions at the start of the twenty-first century, but New York ironworkers remain avid and unabashed unionists. The labor force has turned en ma.s.se from manual work to high-tech, sedentary work in ergonomically correct settings, but ironworkers continue to depend on muscle and stamina and a capacity to endure a certain amount of pain. And as Americans become increasingly averse to risk, ironworkers continue to risk their lives every day they go to work.

On a cold afternoon several winters ago, I climbed out of a subway station at the corner of 42nd Street and Seventh Avenue and looked up to see a tall young man in a gray sweatshirt walking a pencil-thin beam hundreds of feet over Times Square. The economy was still booming, the World Trade Center was still standing. Christmas was a few weeks away. Down on the ground, Salvation Army bells jingled and people pushed along the sidewalks, dashing into the intersection. Up there, the young man seemed oblivious to all of this. He walked with a smooth stride, his arms loose at his side. For all the care he displayed, he might have been strolling down a country lane.

I never spoke to Brett Conklin that afternoon-I never spoke to him, in fact, until after he fell-but a few weeks later I saw him again, this time in a photograph. I'd written an article about ironworkers for the New York Times New York Times. The newspaper had dispatched a photographer to the building on Times Square where Brett worked, and when the article appeared it featured a large photograph of Brett on the front cover. The photograph shows a handsome young man, his hard hat turned rakishly backwards, standing on a beam at what appears to be the edge of the building. He's looking down with an expression that is-what?-fearless, contemplative, defiant. Or maybe none of those. It's an expression that I find impossible to read. I suppose what it is, really, is the expression of a young man whose life is about to change.

[image]

Icarus high up on Empire State, by Lewis Wickes Hine, 1931.

(New York Public Library/Art Resource, New York)

PART I.

The Hole

In Brueghel's "Icarus," for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

-W. H. AUDEN

Some Luck

Brett Conklin was one of the lucky ones.

Of the 1,000 or so structural ironworkers who worked in New York City in the winter of 2001, most, like Brett, lived somewhere else. They lived at the far reaches of the city's suburbs, in Connecticut or New Jersey towns where a man making a good middle-cla.s.s income could afford a patch of decent real estate. Or they lived in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, by the anchorage of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, where several hundred Mohawk Indians boarded during the week, four or five to a house. A few Newfoundlanders still held claim to the old neighborhood around 9th Street in Brooklyn, while another clan-the Newfies of Lindenhurst-maintained a well-kempt enclave on Long Island. One man lived on a farm in the Berkshires that winter, waking in the middle of the night to begin his star-lit drive to the city. Two men drove all the way from Wilmington, Delaware, to Times Square every morning, then back again every afternoon.

Wherever an ironworker lived, chances were he came into Manhattan by one of its tunnels or bridges. The difference was enormous. A tunnel was dank, gloomy, infested. Entering New York by tunnel was like sneaking into a palace through the cellar door: it lacked dignity. The proper way for an ironworker to enter the city was by bridge, swooshing over water, steel vibrating beneath him and gathering in the sky before him. The ironworker entering the city by bridge enjoyed a peculiar kind of pride. His work-or the work of his father or grandfather, of the generations of ironworkers that preceded him-lay before him and under him and vaulted over him. Every bridge and building represented a catalogue of friendships, marriages, births, falls, cripplings, and, in some cases, deaths. The relationship between an ironworker and the city's steel structures was intensely personal.

On the morning of February 20, 2001, as on most mornings, Brett Conklin had the good fortune to enter the city over one of the most spectacular bridges of them all, the George Washington, a 4,760-foot suspended span crossing the Hudson River between Fort Lee, New Jersey, and northern Manhattan. Shortly before dawn, his commuter bus, which he'd boarded 40 miles to the west, slowed for the toll, then shifted up and started across the bridge, and Brett could look up to see the two lacy steel towers, each taller than a 50-story skysc.r.a.per, and the four suspension cables draped between them, each weighing about 7,000 tons and still bejeweled, in the wintry gloom, with luminous green electric bulbs. Downriver a violet fog hovered over the tops of the buildings. Dawn was breaking. The newspaper forecast mild temperatures, rising to a high in the low 50s, mostly cloudy with a chance of dim sunshine. There was no mention of rain in the forecast.

Half an hour after crossing the bridge, Brett emerged from the Port Authority Bus Terminal and strode across Eighth Avenue. He was a striking man, six feet four inches tall, large-boned and well built, but with a soft, boyish face. Brett had recently moved in with his girlfriend but he spent a good deal of time at his parents' house, eating his mother's cooking, watching sports on television with his father and younger brother. He was, at 28, still very close to his family and proud of it. When his mother expressed reservations about his decision to go into ironwork six years earlier, he'd listened carefully, weighed her words, then made his own decision. Respectful but headstrong-that was Brett.

With his long stride, Brett covered the distance to the building on Times Square in a matter of minutes. He slipped into it through a side entrance on 41st Street. The building had reached 32 floors, just six floors shy of topping out. Upon completion, it would become the headquarters of Ernst & Young, the accounting firm, and take its place among five other skysc.r.a.pers to leap up in Times Square during the last two years, and among dozens to appear in Manhattan over the last five or six years. Like every other tall office building in New York, it would be supported almost entirely by structural steel.

Brett was lucky to be an ironworker in New York during one of the greatest construction booms in the city's history. The boom had been going strong since the mid-90s. Over the last few months, the stock market had shown signs of contraction, but n.o.body was too worried about that, not yet. Enough new office s.p.a.ce had been conceived in the bull market to keep ironworkers in pay for years. Local 40's shape hall on West 15th Street, where union ironworkers went when they needed work, was as quiet as a tomb. If a man showed up, he was sent right back out that same morning. Virtually anyone with a book-that is, membership in the local-who was healthy and wanted the work could have it. Even members of out-of-town locals who drove into town to partake of the bounty-"boomers," they were called-went out the same day on a permit.

A fine bounty it was, too. $33.45 an hour, plus a generous benefits package, made New York's wage the highest an ironworker could earn in North America. In good times, a capable hand could work virtually nonstop, turning that $35 an hour into $1,400 a week, and turning that $1,400 a week into $65,000 or $70,000 a year. At 28, with a girlfriend but still no family to support and no college loans to amortize, this was a considerable sum of money. Indeed, Brett was doing better than most of his old high school friends who had college diplomas and white-collar jobs. What's more, the work he did was a good deal more exciting-more satisfying satisfying-than anything one of them was likely to find hunched over a computer in a fluorescent-lit cubicle inside one of these skysc.r.a.pers that Brett and his fellow ironworkers built. Sometimes on weekend nights Brett would come into the city with his old high school friends and point out buildings he'd worked on. "We'd see the steel and the rigs and the kangaroo cranes, and I was always, like, look at that, see, that's what I do. I was always real proud of being an ironworker. That's one of the things about it. It makes you proud."

Brett stopped briefly at the shanty, a small plywood cabin that squatted on the concrete floor of the building's bas.e.m.e.nt. Inside, wooden benches ran along the walls and bare light bulbs dangled from the ceiling. On one of the plywood walls somebody had used a piece of chalk to draw an enormous pair of woman's b.r.e.a.s.t.s, probably to add some cheer, but there wasn't anything too cheery about a pair of disembodied b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Brett grabbed his gray hooded sweatshirt from a hook on the wall, then gathered his hard hat and a wide leather belt from the other hook.

Back upstairs, lines had already formed at the two construction elevators-"man-hoists," as ironworkers call them-that ran along the north side of the building. The wait presented an opportunity for a hundred ironworkers to huddle together and stamp their feet and stay warm by hurling insults at each other. Ironworker banter was relentless, and the men with the sharpest tongues dominated the lines for the hoist.

"Jesus, you look like s.h.i.t, Johnny."

"I feel like s.h.i.t. Last night was a tough one."

"But you always look like s.h.i.t, Johnny. What happened to your eye, anyway? Your wife do that?"

"Naw, it was your wife. She likes it rough."

The accordion door screeched open and 20 men crushed in. The cage shot up the outside of the building, rattling like a can of nails. Fogged Plexiglas covered the metal grilling, a favor not to the ironworkers, who weren't likely to care, but to the other tradesmen and the dozens of other possibly acrophobic surveyors and inspectors and financiers who might visit the site of a building under construction. Accelerating upwards at the edge of a building in an open cage held to a building by a thin monorail was not an experience for the faint of heart.

The hoist stopped with an abrupt clunk on the 27th floor. This was as high as it went. The operator yanked open the gate, and Brett and the others filed out and walked across the metal deck to the ladders. They started up the steep rungs, a coil of men stretching out, then bunching together, then stretching out again. The higher they climbed, the shorter the coil, as men dropped out along the way. At the 28th floor, the welders peeled off, then the detail men turned away at the 29th. Brett kept climbing.

From the moment he steps up onto the corrugated metal deck, a visitor unaccustomed to the summit of a modern skysc.r.a.per-in-progress is likely to find the surroundings unsettling. This is especially true if he happens to be among the 23 percent of Americans who described themselves in a 1999 Harris Poll as "very afraid" of heights. The clinical term is acrophobia. In the hierarchy of American fears, according to the poll, only ophidiophobia-fear of snakes-ranks higher.

The novice visitor's first shock, beyond the inescapable fact of height, will be the slap of wind on his cheeks; no matter how tranquil the morning below, the air, lacking obstacles to drag down its velocity, blows hard at the top of a skysc.r.a.per. More disconcerting is the absence of walls and ceiling. Without these bearings, the novice's brain balks, shooting an urgent message to nerve receptors in his extremities. The gist of the message is: DON'T MOVE! But even as his legs refuse to move, he notices that they are in fact moving moving-or rather, the building itself is moving. Tall buildings sway slightly, and the stronger the wind, the more they sway. It's called deflection. The Empire State Building, extremely rigid by today's standards, deflects a couple of inches off its vertical axis in wind. Newer, lighter buildings deflect a good deal more than that, up to two feet off their vertical axes on upper floors. The height of the building, in feet, divided by 500 provides a good estimate of how far a modern building deflects at its top in peak winds. (A 750-foot building, then, deflects up to a foot and a half.) A certain amount of deflection is perfectly natural, even beneficial, for a tall building; better for a structure to bend like green wood than to snap like dry timber. Some buildings, though, over-deflect, a condition which can cause structural problems. In rare cases, it stresses joints and, over time, sheers bolts and welds. More likely, over-deflection will simply cause leaks in windows and disrupt elevator service by pushing elevator shafts out of plumb.

Over-deflection isn't primarily a structural concern; it's a human concern. If a building moves too much in the wind, people on upper floors start to feel dizzy and nauseated. The issue isn't how far the building sways in any direction or even how fast it sways-it's how quickly it accelerates. accelerates. Just as in a car or on a train, humans feel movement inside a building when the building is speeding up or slowing down; it's acceleration that makes people's stomachs turn. By the time most buildings are ready for occupancy, they've acc.u.mulated so much bulk from their frames and walls and floors that they are fairly rigid. What deflection remains in buildings is then hidden by the walls and ceiling that surround the inhabitant and remove any visual and aural clues of movement. They fool the brain into a pleasant perception of stillness. Just as in a car or on a train, humans feel movement inside a building when the building is speeding up or slowing down; it's acceleration that makes people's stomachs turn. By the time most buildings are ready for occupancy, they've acc.u.mulated so much bulk from their frames and walls and floors that they are fairly rigid. What deflection remains in buildings is then hidden by the walls and ceiling that surround the inhabitant and remove any visual and aural clues of movement. They fool the brain into a pleasant perception of stillness.

No such luck at the top of a skysc.r.a.per under construction. Rigid-making walls and floors are still many months away. So are ceilings. The building moves all too obviously and the sky gapes all too endlessly, and it all takes some getting used to.

When the novice finally works up his courage and manages a few tentative steps across the derrick floor, he will find it hard going. The term derrick floor derrick floor, by which ironworkers refer to the ever-rising top floor of a skysc.r.a.per under construction, is a misnomer. For one thing, in this age of tower cranes, derricks are all but extinct. For another, the derrick floor isn't really a floor at all, but wide-wale corrugated steel decking. The troughs are ankle deep, perfect for receiving and molding the concrete that will eventually be poured into them but treacherous to walk on. To make matters worse, the decking is usually littered with debris-discarded bolts, sc.r.a.ps of wire, soda cans, chains. A first timer's instinct is to shuffle along slowly with eyes cast down, until suddenly he feels a shadow pa.s.s over and looks up to see a 15-ton girder swooping not 10 feet above him on the hook of a tower crane. Dark brown columns stick up from the deck like trees scorched by fire. Grids of beams link some of the columns, and men walk on the beams, while other men straddle them, working at the joints with torque wrenches and four-pound mauls called "beaters." The jarring sound of beaters whacking bolt heads-chung! chung! chung!-rings out over the steady blanketing hum of the crane engines. A pigeon alights, flaps its wings once or twice, then takes off again. Even pigeons seem to find the environment inhospitable.

And yet, it is breathtaking. The air is literally fresher, as gravity tends to keep heavy particles of pollution close to the ground. Some days the sky is a wide swath of blue and the top of the building could be hundreds of miles from the city, an alpine ridge populated by a strange breed of mountain men. Across the chasms, distant figures stand or sit in offices, but they look more like plastic dolls in a playhouse than real people. They do not seem to move much. Every now and then one of them turns and looks out vacantly at the ironworkers for a few moments, then turns away.

By 7:20 Brett was on the steel, climbing above the 32nd floor. The sun was making a lackl.u.s.ter effort to rise. The cranes hummed and the sound of steel meeting steel rang through the damp air. From where he stood, Brett could see most of the men up top. They were a fair sample of New York's ironworkers in the winter of 2001. On the derrick floor stood Joe Lewis, a stocky man with a heavy brogue. Joe was born and raised along the coast of Conception Bay in Newfoundland, a small speck on the map that had produced an extraordinary number of New York City ironworkers over the years. Joe's three sons were ironworkers and his brothers were ironworkers. His father had been one, too, until the work killed him.

On the other side of the building stood John Collins, a brash 40-year-old from a legendary family of New York ironworkers. His grandfather had worked on the Empire State Building; his father and seven uncles had worked on most of the big buildings of the last 40 years. John's father had recently pa.s.sed away, but an 82-year-old uncle still worked iron in the summers.

J. R. Phillips and his cousin Jeff Phillips straddled the steel a few yards from John Collins. Both were fourth-generation Mohawk ironworkers on both sides of their families. Like their fathers and grandfathers, they made a weekly commute down to the city from a small reservation just north of the Canadian border, spent their days on the steel, their nights in Bay Ridge, then drove home to Canada every Friday afternoon.

Hanging off the side of building on a small wooden platform called a "float" was Joe Gaffney, a sandy-haired man of Irish and Norwegian extraction whose brothers and uncle were ironworkers. In the winter of 2001, Joe Gaffney's mother happened to be employed in an office on Sixth Avenue that gave her a perfect view of the Ernst & Young building. She kept a pair of binoculars in her desk and would occasionally check up on Joe, then immediately regret having done so. The sight of her son perched on a thin plank of plywood lashed to side of the building 300 feet above the ground-it was really more than a mother could bear.

[image]

Brett Conklin on the Ernst & Young building, January 2001.

(Photo by Michael J. Doolittle) Now and then, the superintendent of the job, Frank Lane, would climb up to the top and have a look around. Frank-one of the two men who drove in to Times Square from Wilmington, Delaware, every morning-was young for a superintendent, still in his early 40s. With long sideburns, a wad of tobacco tucked inside his cheek, and bulging biceps, Frank looked tough even for an ironworker. In fact, as superintendents go, he was a decent sort. Most of the ironworkers actually admitted to liking him.

Nearly everybody up here had some deep familial connection to ironwork, which made Brett an exception. There were no ironworkers in Brett's family. Once you were an ironworker, though, you were were family. "We might get into it sometimes at a bar or something, but the next morning it's all forgotten," said Brett. "We look out for each other. You have to. Especially the guys in your gang." family. "We might get into it sometimes at a bar or something, but the next morning it's all forgotten," said Brett. "We look out for each other. You have to. Especially the guys in your gang."

THE RAISING GANG.

The gang is the essential unit of ironwork. The men are deployed in half a dozen different types of gangs, the task of each described fairly precisely by its name. Bolting-up gangs drive and tighten the bolts that hold pieces of steel together. The plumbing-up gang-there is usually one per job-traverse the beams, measuring and adjusting columns to ensure that they are perfectly vertical, or plumb. Decking gangs spread corrugated sheet-metal deck over completed rectangles, or bays bays, of steel made by the floor beams. Once a floor is set, other gangs follow to further secure it. This includes the welders, a few detail gangs, and the safety gang. The job of this last gang is to enclose hazards with steel cable, set nets on the outside of the building, and generally reduce the chances that a man will get killed.

A journeyman ironworker prides himself on his ability to work in any gang. No journeyman is above any job and no journeyman is below it. The wage is the same no matter what you do. All ironworkers are created equal.

In theory, anyway. In practice, one gang stands above the others. This is the raising gang. The five members of the raising gang-six if you count the foreman-are the men who actually erect the steel. They work under the cranes to set it, piece by piece, in the frame of the building. What they a.s.semble is by no means complete. It still requires a great deal of labor to make it plumb and strong. But like an elite military unit, it's the raising gang that goes in first and captures territory. By the time the others arrive, the raising gang is off to claim the next level of alt.i.tude.

The two key men in a raising gang are the connectors. Working in pairs, connectors make the initial couplings of steel beams and columns as the pieces swoop in under the booms of cranes. They s.n.a.t.c.h the steel from the sky, "set" it in position, "hang" it with a high-strength bolt or two, then move on to the next piece as the other gangs-the bolter-ups, the welders, the detail men-come in behind to make the couplings permanent. The connectors are the alpha dogs of high steel. They are the most agile, the strongest, the most fit. Connectors routinely climb 30-foot columns, scooting up vertical trunks of steel using nothing but their arms and legs, much as a rac.o.o.n pulls himself up a tree. Connectors also walk the narrow beams that run along the perimeter of the building, 30, 40 stories over the ground, or higher. By law, ironworkers are supposed to wear safety harnesses that are attached to the frame of the building whenever they work at a significant height above the deck or the ground, but connectors are an exception to this law. They move so quickly that tying-off would be impractical. This means they are always in danger of falling or getting knocked off. A piece of wild steel, a gust of wind, a missed bolt-it doesn't take much to send a man over. The connector's job is demanding, dangerous, and highly compet.i.tive. It is the job that every young ironworker wants. Brett Conklin had it.

Brett was born to connect. Height did not bother him. He didn't mind standing on a beam with the deck 30 feet below on one side and Broadway hundreds of feet below on the other: he liked liked it. Brett was also a natural and avid athlete. Football was the game he loved most. On weekends, he played linebacker on a flag football team in the Rockland County league. He was strong, aggressive, and agile, all necessary attributes of a connector. it. Brett was also a natural and avid athlete. Football was the game he loved most. On weekends, he played linebacker on a flag football team in the Rockland County league. He was strong, aggressive, and agile, all necessary attributes of a connector.

The only thing working against Brett on the steel was his size. Connectors, like gymnasts, tend toward compactness. This gives a man the advantage of quickness and a low center of gravity, the better to stick to the steel. Brett compensated for his 6'4'' frame with a fine sense of balance and good reflexes. As for his weight-205 pounds of himself, plus 40 or 50 pounds he carried in tools and bolts on his connecting belt-this was a lot to haul up and down columns all day long, but from the moment Brett became an ironworker and set his sights on connecting, he trained himself to overcome his size with strength and technique. He climbed every chance he got in those early days, learning how to distribute his weight, how to let his legs do most of the work, how to angle his size 11 boots between the f.l.a.n.g.es. "I just practiced, practiced, practiced," he said. "I became good at it, really good. Climbing columns was definitely one of my better points as a connector."

By the time Brett got to the Ernst & Young building, he was at the top of his game-"the total package," in the words of his connecting partner, Tommy Mitch.e.l.l. He had experience, having connected for the better part of five years, but still held onto the enthusiasm of a young man doing something he loves. "The thrill of it," recalled Brett. "It was thrilling. All day long you're moving, working hard, learning something new. You work hard, and the day flies by. I loved that feeling. I loved to work hard."

He knew very well the work was dangerous. The chance of something going wrong seldom left your mind, and whenever it did, something would happen to bring it back to you. You'd be walking a beam and a sudden gust of wind would knock you off balance for a second, and when you got to the other side your heart would be racing and you'd think, Well, that was close Well, that was close. A few weeks earlier, a rookie crane operator, sitting in for the regular operator, had gotten a piece of steel caught on a safety cable that ran around the perimeter of the derrick floor. The operator, unaware of his mistake, kept booming up as the piece started to bend. A few seconds more and it would snap or slip out of the choker and possibly fall to the street. Without thinking, Brett ducked under the safety cable and leaned out over the edge of the building. The steel was whipping around, swinging at him like a club, but he balanced on a wide beam several hundred feet above 42nd Street and somehow managed to pry it free. The piece popped loose and sailed away. Only after he stepped back onto the deck did it occur to Brett how close he'd just come to falling.

Altogether, the Ernst & Young job had been safe. One man had broken his foot, another had crushed a finger. A Mohawk Indian named Jeff, who had been working in Brett's gang, had gotten injured when a piece of steel hit him in the chest. But within the spectrum of possible injuries that could befall an ironworker, these were all fairly run-of-the-mill; none were killers or career-enders. The only ironworker on this job who had spent any length of time in the hospital was a young connector known to his fellow ironworkers as Big Ben. Sometime after Christmas, Big Ben, who never smoked and took great care of himself physically and who was, as his nickname implied, famously strong, came down with cancer. It was just one of those things: you never knew.

Later, Brett would recall fragments of the event. They'd rattled around in his mind like pieces of a missing jigsaw puzzle. The gang spent the morning setting steel on the 32nd floor. They had just landed a column when a light drizzle began to fall. The rain was a welcome surprise, since it meant the day would probably be called and the men would get to go home early. It's one of the few axioms of ironwork: rain cancels work. Wet steel is too slick to climb or walk. Before quitting, though, Brett had one thing left to do. He had to scale the column to its top, 30 feet straight up, and unhook the line of the crane. It was an entirely routine procedure for a connector, one that Brett had performed hundreds of times. Brett grabbed hold of the f.l.a.n.g.es with his hands, dug in with his feet, and started to climb.

Joe Lewis was a few floors below when he heard the sound, a sickening THUD. THUD. It lacked the peculiar tw.a.n.g of falling steel and Joe knew instantly what it meant. "Ah, jeez," he said. "That's somebody just went down." By the time Joe got upstairs, ironworkers were gathered around Brett. He lay supine on the derrick floor. He'd blacked out for a few seconds, then come to. Somebody was calling into a radio for help. Brett lay there, stunned, looking up at the 30-foot column from which he'd just fallen. It lacked the peculiar tw.a.n.g of falling steel and Joe knew instantly what it meant. "Ah, jeez," he said. "That's somebody just went down." By the time Joe got upstairs, ironworkers were gathered around Brett. He lay supine on the derrick floor. He'd blacked out for a few seconds, then come to. Somebody was calling into a radio for help. Brett lay there, stunned, looking up at the 30-foot column from which he'd just fallen.

Don't move, somebody said.

You flipped over, somebody else said. You were coming down head first. You were coming down head first.

Brett gasped. His back and chest felt scorched. He was sure he'd broken his back. The pain in his back was almost unbearable. He did not even feel his ankle.

When an ironworker falls up top, the fastest way to get him down is by crane. The crane's boom is rigged up to a seven-by-five metal bin with low sides, called a scale box. Usually, scale boxes are used to transport supplies from the street to the decks, but in emergencies they double as airborne stretchers.

Brett descended from the top of the Ernst & Young building in one of these. A few paramedics and fellow ironworkers rode down with him. Brett lay on his back, facing up. Later, he'd remember how the rain fell on his face, the way the cold drops p.r.i.c.ked his skin. He'd remember the crowd gathered on the sidewalk and the faces of the ironworkers sticking out from the edge of the building 30 stories up, gazing down at him. The paramedics gingerly lifted him on a board, then slid him into the back of an ambulance. Then the doors slammed and the ambulance sped south down Seventh Avenue to the trauma center at St. Vincent's Hospital.

The rest of the day was a blurry nightmare of pain and upset. From a gurney in the hospital Brett called his parents. His mother answered. The moment she heard his voice, she began to cry. "It was horrible...horrible," Brett would recall a year later. He then repeated the news to his father.

That evening, with his parents at his side, Brett digested the preliminary test results. He had a collapsed lung, three crushed vertebrae, and a fractured spine. The worst damage was to his left foot, still too numb to feel. Apparently, the foot had taken the brunt of the fall. The bones were splintered, one of them spearing his ankle joint, and bone fragments were scattered throughout his foot. Over the next two years, Brett would undergo several operations to repair the foot. He would undergo hundreds of hours of physical therapy for his leg and back, then psychological therapy to deal with the trauma of having his young life permanently altered.

Ironworkers' injuries don't usually make the newspapers. The Sunday after Brett Conklin fell, though, a small item about his accident appeared in the New York Times New York Times. The reporter had visited Smith's, an ironworkers' watering hole on Eighth Avenue, on the very evening of the accident. There he'd found several ironworkers drinking and talking about it. "I looked up and saw him climbing the column," one of the ironworkers told the reporter. "I looked up again and saw him coming down."

"It was his own fault," said another. "It was too wet and he shouldn't have been messing around. The kid learned the hard way."

According to the article, Brett had tried an "old ironworker's trick" of sliding down a column headfirst. He'd been goofing around-"skylarking," in ironworker parlance-when he lost control. "He slipped, did a flip in the air and landed two floors below," wrote the reporter. "He missed falling through a hole in the steel, and death, by two feet."

By the end of the following Monday, virtually every ironworker in New York had either read the item or heard about it. Most found it infuriating and implausible. A certain amount of skylarking was probably inevitable, but anything that put a man in harm's way was looked upon severely by ironworkers. The implication that Brett had attempted a death-defying stunt on a damp day when he was almost guaranteed to fall seemed ludicrous.

No one knew exactly why or how Brett fell. Not even Brett knew. He wished, he once admitted, that the whole event had been videotaped, so he could watch it over and over and over again. He wanted to figure out what happened-how one moment he had been reaching up, the next falling upside-down toward the deck. As for the ironworkers in the bar, it was perhaps comforting to place blame on the injured man, to a.s.sume that he did something to cause his own injury. It meant you had control over your own destiny. Poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d...but it would never happen to me. Poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d...but it would never happen to me.

The truth was that bad things happened all the time, and not for any good reason, and they happened not just to the reckless and the stupid, but to the smartest, the quickest, the most experienced. Within six months of Brett's fall, Frank Lane, the superintendent, a man who looked like he could handle pretty much anything, had his legs pinned under a load of steel in Atlantic City, crippling him. Joe Lewis fell through a plank on a building on 59th Street and Sixth Avenue, destroying the nerves in his right arm and ending his ironworking career. Big Ben, the connector with cancer, got cured and came back to work. A few weeks later, a beam rolled over onto his leg and broke it.

FALLING.

Between 35 and 50 ironworkers die on the job in America every year. This is perhaps not a resounding number, given a workforce of approximately 50,000, but it's high enough to make it one of the most lethal jobs, per capita, in the country. (Only timber cutting and fishing rate as more lethal in a 1998 table compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.) As for serious nonfatal accidents-that is, serious enough to put a man out of work for a period of time but not serious enough to kill him-the Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA) estimates that American ironworkers sustain about 2,300 per year. This estimate is probably low. As OSHA itself has conceded, nonfatal injuries are difficult to track, since contractors are not legally obligated to report them. One good indication of the relative danger of the job is the fact that, nationally, employers pay an average of $41.24 in workers compensation per $100 of payroll for ironworkers, one of the highest premiums of any occupation in the country.

There are many ways for an ironworker to become injured. He can get hit by a piece of swinging steel or a dropped tool. He can inadvertently lop off his finger between two pieces of steel. He can lose his leg under a load. But the easiest way is by falling. Falling is the leitmotif of an ironworker's life. This is not to say he's doomed to fall-chances are he won't-but falling is a possibility possibility that confronts him every time he steps out onto a beam or shinnies up a column. Falling is the thing he is always striving not to do, and the moment he stops striving not to do it, he puts himself in danger. Gravity lies in wait. All it needs is a false step, an ankle that turns in, a slight stumble, an instant of an imbalance or idiocy or just plain s.p.a.ciness. Falls account for 75 percent of ironworker fatalities. that confronts him every time he steps out onto a beam or shinnies up a column. Falling is the thing he is always striving not to do, and the moment he stops striving not to do it, he puts himself in danger. Gravity lies in wait. All it needs is a false step, an ankle that turns in, a slight stumble, an instant of an imbalance or idiocy or just plain s.p.a.ciness. Falls account for 75 percent of ironworker fatalities.

Other than skydivers, no group of humans has had more experience of falling from elevation than ironworkers. In New York City alone, hundred of ironworkers have fallen to their deaths and thousands more have fallen and lived. Thanks to reforms inst.i.tuted by insurance companies and OSHA, ironworkers are much less likely to fall now than they were even twenty years ago. And those falls that occur are likely to be shorter and more survivable than the falls of previous eras. Still, ironworkers fall, and short falls are plenty dangerous. A study conducted in 2000 by the National Inst.i.tute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) examined 91 fatal falls by workers, including, but not limited to, ironworkers. Half the fatalities occurred in falls under 30 feet. Nineteen fatalities-over a fifth-occurred in falls under 15 feet.

When a man falls from an earthly structure, even when he falls a considerable distance, the entire event lasts no more than a few seconds. A 50-foot fall will be over in about one and a half seconds. One Mississippi Two Missi- One Mississippi Two Missi-and it's done. Exactly how fast a man falls depends on a number of factors, including the position of his body, the clothing he wears, and how the wind is blowing that day. No matter how fast he falls, the rate of his acceleration will be 32 feet per second for every second of descent. He starts slowly, then speeds up very rapidly. Eventually, the gravitational force pulling him down will be matched by the friction of the air he is falling through, and then he will stop accelerating and maintain a fixed speed the rest of the way down. This speed is his terminal velocity terminal velocity-somewhere between 120 and 140 miles an hour. Unless it's a very long fall, the man will hit ground well before he reaches terminal velocity.

The important part of any fall, the part that can decide whether a man lives or dies, is that slender fraction of a second when there is still opportunity for a falling man to act, when his reflexes may work faster than his speed of descent and he may try to save himself by grabbing hold of something on the way down. They all try and many, amazingly, succeed. Good ironworkers are agile as cats; some are just as lucky.

In the late 1920s, an ironworker named Slim Cooper was driving a rivet on the 36th floor of the Grand Central Building on Park Avenue when the plank he was standing on gave way. Nowadays, floors are filled in as the building rises, so that if a man falls through the derrick floor he'll usually land on the floor below. But in the 1920s, buildings were open shafts for many stories below the working floors, making a fall inside every bit as lethal as a fall outside. Fortunately for Slim Cooper, a pair of parallel planks happened to lie across the beams directly below, on the 35th floor. As Slim plunged through the narrow breach between them, he flung his arms out. The boards caught him under each arm and held him there, his feet swaying over the open shaft until his gang could come and rescue him. "I meant to quit after that," Slim Cooper said later, "but I never did."

One man gets lucky, another gets unlucky. Seven men fell to their deaths during the construction of the Williamsburg Bridge at the start of the twentieth century. The last two of these, Harmon Hansen and Adolph Weber, fell in July of 1903. They were a hundred feet over land on the Manhattan side of the bridge when a wooden derrick they were using broke and plunged to the cobblestone street. In this case, their instinct to grab hold of something did them no good. They clutched the guy wire of the plunging derrick and it pulled them down with it. On the same bridge, two months later, a 25-year-old riveter named William Sizer was overcome by a dizzy spell and started to fall. He reached out and grabbed the nearest thing at hand, a keg of rivets. The keg came with him. Even as he began spinning head over heel, Sizer held onto the keg for dear life, letting go of it only an instant before slamming into the East River "headforemost," as the New York Times New York Times put it in the next morning's edition. A few moments later-headforemost-he popped back out of the water, bruised, bewildered, but very much alive. "I can hardly believe I fell from the bridge," he told reporters as he lay in Bellevue Hospital recovering from his 130-foot dive. put it in the next morning's edition. A few moments later-headforemost-he popped back out of the water, bruised, bewildered, but very much alive. "I can hardly believe I fell from the bridge," he told reporters as he lay in Bellevue Hospital recovering from his 130-foot dive.