Keith drank from his third cup of coffee. "There're a lot of mornings I'd like to say f.u.c.k being walking boss and put on my belt and go connecting again."

Marvin nodded.

"These are all good raising gangs on this job," said Keith. "Frankly, though, I think Marv and I would kick any of their a.s.ses."

Marvin smiled.

"If our bodies could take it, me and Marvin would go out right now."

"Our bodies can't take it," said Marvin. "That's the problem."

"We abused them too long."

"Yeah, we did."

"But we had a h.e.l.l of a good time while we were doin' it."

"Oh, yeah," said Marvin. "We had fun."

Keith glanced at his watch. It was 12:30. He poured the rest of the coffee down his throat and stood. "Come on, Marv. Time to go shout at the morons."

BEAUTIFUL DAYS.

The heat lifted over the long Labor Day weekend, and the days that followed were bright and dry and cloudless, a string of September jewels. While most New Yorkers' experience of this perfect weather was muted by sealed office windows and recirculated air, the ironworkers enjoyed every moment firsthand, appreciating it as only people who work outdoors in murderous heat and frigid cold truly can. Adding to their pleasure was the fact that steel suddenly began to appear in abundance, as if freighted down the Hudson Valley on the same Canadian front that brought in the cool dry air. ADF had subcontracted out some of its work to other steel fabricators, and the company's other big job in New York, the Random House building on 56th Street, was complete, freeing up its own mills. A steady stream of trucks arrived at Columbus Circle. Keith Brown had his hands full, cursing the inept drivers and apprentices, grinding burnt-down cigarettes into the pavement.

The fourth raising gang arrived on the Tuesday after Labor Day. This gang was led by a foreman named Danny Doyle and included Mike Emerson-brother of Joe and Tommy Emerson-and a pair of Mohawk connectors, Johnny Diabo and Paul "Punchy" Jacobs. On that first week in September, all four cranes, at last, were running, and all four raising gangs were setting steel, enormous hunks of it jutting out at odd angles to satisfy the complex load distributions of Silvian Marcus' design. On Friday, September 7, Tommy Emerson's gang jumped the northeast crane, lifting it several hundred feet over the derrick floor. Then everybody went home to enjoy one last perfect weekend.

The Towers

The towers rose to a height of 604 feet apiece, taller than all but the tallest skysc.r.a.pers. From a distance, they appeared slender, even willowy, but that was an illusion. Their combined 40,000 tons of steel made them stronger than any building. They had to be stronger. Unlike a skysc.r.a.per, which supported merely itself and its relatively weightless human burden, these two towers would soon support a third huge thing between them: a 3,500-foot bridge span. This was, in 1929, twice as long as any clear span in the world. "The bridge, in all of its proportions, so completely transcends any bridge ever constructed," reported one of the engineers, "that it is difficult to grasp a sense of its magnitude." Eventually, the great suspension bridge, commissioned by the Port Authority of New York and designed by engineer Othmar Ammann, would be given a name worthy of itself-the George Washington-but in the early summer of 1929 it still had no official name. Nor was it officially a bridge. The towers were nearly complete but they remained unattached twins, separated at birth by the Hudson River, one rising from the banks of northern Manhattan, the other from the shallows beneath the New Jersey palisades.

If you were a self-respecting bridgeman active between the years 1928 and 1931, this was where you wanted to be: on the banks of the lower Hudson or somewhere over the water between. They came from all around the country to raise the bridge and made up one of the most expert and experienced crews of bridgemen ever a.s.sembled in one place, having honed their skills on recently built spans like the Delaware River Bridge at Philadelphia and the Amba.s.sador Bridge over the Detroit River. While the slack-jawed public gathered at the base of the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building to marvel at the ironworkers, these bridgemen, miles from the thick of the city, toiled away un.o.bserved and uncelebrated. But they believed they were up to something far more daring and spectacular than the domesticated "beam jumpers" and "housesmiths," as they dismissed their downtown brethren. These bridgemen were c.o.c.ky and blithe even by the usual standards of ironworkers, paying "no attention whatever to the line where planks end and the extremely hollow variety of s.p.a.ce over the Hudson River begins," according to one reporter who made a trip uptown. Near the base of the Manhattan tower, the bridge company posted a notice on the wall of a construction shack: [image]

The towers of the George Washington Bridge under construction, as seen from the Manhattan sh.o.r.e.

(Port Authority of New York and New Jersey) IT IS ABSOLUTELY FORBIDDEN FOR Pa.s.sENGERS TO RIDE ON TOP OF ELEVATOR OR TO SLIDE DOWN ELEVATOR CABLES.

The notice said a lot about the sort of men who worked on the bridge. An Indian had already died on the Jersey tower while attempting to jump onto a moving elevator cab. Other bridgemen were known to dispense with elevator cabs altogether and slide down the elevators' guide beams. "You can get quite a speed coming down five hundred feet on one of them," said H. G. Reynolds, foreman of the New York tower.

McClintic-Marshall Company ran the erection of both towers, but each side of the Hudson was a separate and distinct field operation. Bill Fortune was foreman on the New Jersey tower. Fortune was a Southern gentleman who favored tailored tweeds and polished shoes and played golf at Englewood Country Club on his days off. On the Manhattan side, it was Reynolds, a sharp-tongued Virginian born on a tobacco farm 65 years earlier. Reynolds was a self-proclaimed roughneck who had been working on bridges since he was 15. He had no use for golf or any other recreation. All he cared about was building bridge towers. Tall and lean, with steel-gray hair and bushy gray eyebrows, he even looked like a bridge tower. He was said to possess a fine sense of humor, but at work he was a "driver," a demanding boss who favored the stick over the carrot. "I'll reach right out and break my wrist on your thick head!" he was overheard shouting at a tagline man who was doing a poor job of steering a column.

The "Jerseymen" began their tower in mid-May of 1928. The New Yorkers began theirs in mid-July. "Give me the steel and I'll catch up and pa.s.s 'em," Reynolds promised his bosses at McClintic-Marshall. Impossible Impossible, they told him. Watch me Watch me, he responded. The rivalry was friendly but intense. Men would cut lunch early to gain a jump on the other tower. They hustled five days a week, eight in the morning until five in the evening, and half a day on Sat.u.r.day. Erection on both towers paused for lack of steel in the winter of 1929, then resumed in March. By early summer, the New York tower had pulled ahead of the Jersey tower. "You couldn't call it a rivalry," Reynolds boasted afterward in the best ironworking tradition. "It was a walk away for our side."

The towers were complete. The time had now come to join them and make a bridge.

SPINNING.

Suspension bridges are made by drawing many thousands of thin steel wires, each about the diameter of a pencil, back and forth between the banks of a river in a process called "spinning." The wires are slung over the tops of the towers, secured in the "anchorages" on either side, then bunched together into the cables that eventually hold up the road deck. Altogether, 107,000 miles of such wire would go into the four cables of the George Washington Bridge before spinning was complete. This was wire enough to reach halfway to the moon-or, as it happened, to New Jersey and back about 50,000 times.

In early July of 1929, a barge towed a wrist-thick steel rope over the Hudson from New Jersey to New York. Cranes mounted on each tower hoisted the dripping steel rope out of the water and slung it over the tops of the towers. The rope now swooped sharply from the Jersey sh.o.r.e, crested over the 604-foot tower, sloped down 275 feet into a drooping catenary, soared up again to the tip of the Manhattan tower, then plunged down to the Manhattan anchorage. With that first long cursive M, the towers were joined. The bridge was truly a bridge.

The function of this first steel rope, and several dozen that soon followed, was to support the two 22-foot-wide catwalks the bridgemen would use to make the rest of the bridge. These ropes were only a temporary stage, but upon them was played the most spellbinding performance of the bridge's construction. It commenced when a handful of bridgemen ventured onto them in an open craft of wood and metal called a "carriage." They traveled along in fits and starts, laying prefabricated floor sections of steel and wood cross-wise on the rope. The work got interesting when several of the men stepped out of the carriage and slid along the ropes, hundreds of feet over the river, hanging almost literally by the seat of their pants. A glimpse of this astonishing feat is included in a scratchy 12-minute film shot by the Port Authority during the construction of the bridge. A man sits on one of the ropes sidesaddle, scooting down its steep slope, using his hand to pull himself along. His feet are hooked under a parallel rope to keep him from falling backwards. Below is a sheer drop of four or five hundred feet.

The catwalks complete, the wire spinning commenced on the morning of October 18, 1929. The wires were shuttled across the span by narrow grooved wheels-they looked like oversized bicycle wheels-attached to tramway ropes. These ropes were endless loops of a giant motorized pulley, each rope hauling two wheels, so that as one wheel arrived in New Jersey, the other arrived in New York. The wheels flew past each other on their course over the river, spilling out wire in their wake, riding a few feet above the catwalk, where the bridgemen stood at the ready.

The job of the 300 bridgemen was to keep the wire spinning and to gather and bundle it into tight cl.u.s.ters. Some of the men were stationed at the anchorages, those huge hunks of concrete and steel on the banks of the river where the wires were secured to bedrock. When the wheel arrived, the men would grab the loop of wire it delivered, fasten it to one of the "strand shoes" in the anchorage, and reload the wheel with a new loop of wire. Then they would reverse the engine and send the wheel back to the opposite sh.o.r.e. A good gang would have the wheel in and out of the anchorage in fifteen seconds.

Speed was the mantra of every pusher on every bridge: faster, faster, faster faster! And if the booming voice of their pusher was the stick that drove them on to great feats, the carrot was the incomparable pleasure of beating the gangs working the other cables. How many times could they send their wheel across? How many more than the others? A round trip took about 10 minutes, so 50 trips would make a good day, but if one gang made 50, the other gang tried for 51 or 52. Among them, the bridgemen managed to spin out 100 miles of wire per hour, faster than any bridge crew had ever done before.

A second division of bridgemen manned the summit of the towers. "Here she comes," a man would call as the wheel approached, and then they would hear it, whirring and clattering as it climbed the steep slope from the anchorage. A moment later, it crested the tower, and a moment after that, it was gone, swooping down toward the river, leaving the wire behind. The men grabbed the wire and fed it into a groove on one of the four "saddles" from which the cables would hang. They had to grab it fast because, as the wheel descended, paying out more wire, the weight of the wire rapidly increased. A delay of a few seconds could mean they'd have to stop the wheel and jack up the wire and endure their foreman's loud abuse.

The remainder of the bridgemen took up positions at regular intervals along the catwalks. One man, the "appraiser," stood in the center of each catwalk and eyeballed the wire to make sure it had just the right slack and droop. The other men scattered over the sloping catwalk like hillside farmers. They stood several feet under the tramway rope and waited for the wheel. As it pa.s.sed, they grabbed the wire, still trilling and vibrating, and pulled it in by hand or metal crook, gathering it into sheaves, or "strands." Four hundred thirty-four wires made a strand; 61 strands made a full cable. Once the cables were spun, bridgemen would slowly pa.s.s over each with a giant hydraulic "squeezer," a ring-shaped clamp that compressed their 26,474 parallel wires into perfect three-foot-wide cylinders. Then they wrapped the cables with more wire, binding them like a sprain.

Gathering wire could be dangerous work. If the wind caught the wire before a bridgeman did, it could whip up and slap him off the bridge. One of the young men who worked on the bridge that autumn, George Bowers Jr.-his father, George Bowers Sr., also worked on it, as did a brother, Jim-had recently been employed on the Delaware River Bridge, a previous record holding suspension bridge. One afternoon, while spinning over the Delaware, he'd made the mistake of letting the wire get between his legs. When a gust of wind caught it, the wire lifted him off the catwalk, 15 feet into the air, slammed him back down onto the catwalk, then lifted him and slammed him down once more before he managed to dismount. Smoking was strictly forbidden on the wooden catwalks on account of fire hazard, but n.o.body made a peep when young George pulled out a cigarette and lit it.

Thirteen men had fallen from the Delaware River Bridge. Of those, three survived (including George's brother, Jim). By all expectations, this new bridge over the Hudson, twice the length, should have cost two or three times as many lives, but it did not. Just 12 workers perished on the George Washington Bridge. Three of the dead were caisson diggers who drowned when a cofferdam broke. The other nine died on the towers. Not one man died during the laying of the catwalk or the spinning of the cables.

On the morning of September 30, 1930, as cable spinning wound down, a professional daredevil named Norman Terry slipped past guards at the Manhattan anchorage and climbed the steep catwalk to the tower. From 600 feet, he descended to the lowest point of the catwalk, about 220 feet over the middle of the river. Below, on the water, several photographers and reporters from the Daily News Daily News waited in a boat, having been tipped off to the stunt by Terry's manager. A film crew was there, too, ready to capture the event. Terry hesitated a moment, as if the view gave him second thoughts. Then, with his arms stretched out and his heels tight together, he sprang out into a perfect dive. He maintained his form until he was about 20 feet over the river, then suddenly seemed to buckle. He landed on his back, badly. Rather than earn himself fame and fortune as the first man to survive a jump from the George Washington Bridge, he obtained a less happy distinction by becoming its thirteenth victim-and the last man to die on the bridge before it opened to traffic on October 25, 1931. By that point, the ironworkers were long gone. waited in a boat, having been tipped off to the stunt by Terry's manager. A film crew was there, too, ready to capture the event. Terry hesitated a moment, as if the view gave him second thoughts. Then, with his arms stretched out and his heels tight together, he sprang out into a perfect dive. He maintained his form until he was about 20 feet over the river, then suddenly seemed to buckle. He landed on his back, badly. Rather than earn himself fame and fortune as the first man to survive a jump from the George Washington Bridge, he obtained a less happy distinction by becoming its thirteenth victim-and the last man to die on the bridge before it opened to traffic on October 25, 1931. By that point, the ironworkers were long gone.

The Depression was a surprisingly fine time to be a bridgeman in America. Privately financed skysc.r.a.per construction slowed to a trickle, but a flurry of publicly financed bridge projects kept the ironworkers' heads above water. In New York, the George Washington was soon followed by the Triborough Bridge-actually a trio of bridges envisioned by Robert Moses and designed by Othmar Ammann to thread together the Bronx, Manhattan, and Queens. The Bayonne arch was completed in 1931 and the Bronx White-stone, yet another Ammann design, in 1939.

The real action for bridgemen in the 1930s was not in New York, though. It was out west: the Conde B. McCullough Memorial Bridge over Coos Bay in Oregon; the Lewis and Clark Bridge over the Columbia River, also in Oregon; the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington State; the San Francis...o...b..y Bridge in California. And, of course, the Golden Gate.

No bridge would ever achieve quite the astonishing leap in scale that Ammann's George Washington made in 1931, but the Golden Gate was a dramatic follow-up. The total length of this new bridge, end to end, was almost 9,000 feet, with a center clear span of 4,200 feet, 20 percent longer than the G.W.'s. Almost as impressive as its size, at least as far as the ironworkers were concerned, were several safety precautions implemented by its builders during construction. American Bridge Company provided every worker with a leather hard hat, an unprecedented measure at the time. More remarkable, the company strung a cotton fiber safety net under the bridge to catch falling bridgemen. The safety net proved its worth at least 19 times.

While the bridge boom provided jobs to ironworkers, Congress pa.s.sed two laws that benefited them in other ways. The Davis-Bacon Act of 1931 required contractors on all federally financed construction projects to pay the prevailing wage of the locale where the work occurred. A contractor didn't have to hire union workers, but he had to pay a union wage to the men he did hire. The Wagner Act, pa.s.sed by Congress in 1935, guaranteed employees the right to organize into unions and seek collective bargaining with their bosses. For the first time in American history, the law forbade employers from firing an employee simply because he belonged to a labor union.

The Wagner Act had an immediate and salubrious impact. U.S. Steel and Bethlehem Steel, the dual Big Steel nemeses that ironworkers had been fighting since the turn of the century, recognized the ironworkers' union for the first time in 30 years. Ten years later, a Republican-controlled Congress would water down the Wagner Act with pa.s.sage of the Taft-Hartley Act, but relations with Big Steel would never return to their poisoned pre-Depression state. Bethlehem and U.S. Steel were now committed to hiring union labor, while the union, for its part, was content to keep the peace. In New York, the ironworkers would not strike again until 1963. And when they did, the issue would not be one of the old perennials, like money or jurisdiction or power. It would be a safety net under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.

THE LAST GREAT BRIDGE.

The Narrows is a mile-wide neck of salt.w.a.ter joining the Upper Bay of New York Harbor to the Atlantic Ocean. It is the portal to the port of New York. Brooklyn thrusts out into the bay from one side, Staten Island from the other, and between the two washes the sea. The "bridge over the sea," as the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge has been called, was to be the last link in the interborough highway system that Robert Moses had begun with the Triborough Bridge 25 years earlier. Moses, the master-builder of New York, was back to perform one last monumental act of urban planning. Othmar Ammann was back to engineer one last superlative bridge.

Bridge building had slackened after the Depression, pausing for World War II, then picked up again in the late 1940s. Americans demanded automobiles, and automobiles demanded new highways and tunnels and, of course, bridges. In the five boroughs of New York City alone, ironworkers erected 28 bridges in the 28 years between the completion of the George Washington in 1931 and the start of the Verrazano-Narrows in 1959. Those two bridges, the George Washington and the Verrazano-Narrows, were the bookends of the great American age of bridge building. The George Washington was Othmar Ammann's first; the Verrazano-Narrows would be his last.

It would also be the last extraordinary bridge built in America. Its full span, anchorage to anchorage, would stretch 6,690 feet. Its clear span, at 4,260 feet, would be the longest in the world, reaching 760 feet farther than the George Washington's and 60 feet farther than the Golden Gate's. So great was the distance between the bridge's two towers that Ammann took the curvature of the earth into account in his calculations: each of the 690-foot bridge towers would rise straight up from the earth's surface, but they would be one and five-eighth inches farther apart at their tops than at their foundations.

The towers topped out in the fall of 1962, and spinning began in early spring of the following year. For 6 months, 15 hours a day, 6 days a week, the bicycle wheels raced back and forth over the channel, paying out their wire. The ironworkers split the day into two shifts, one shift spinning by day, the other by night.

Nearly as many people came to watch the work as to do it, for this bridge, unlike the George Washington, had the city's undivided attention. Every day, between a hundred and two hundred spectators, most of them elderly, retired, and male, gathered on the promontory off Bay Ridge to applaud and second-guess the work. In midtown Manhattan, the construction voyeurs who lined up along the edge of building sites and peeked through the plywood were called "sidewalk superintendents." Here they were "seaside superintendents." No plywood blocked their view of the bridge, but since the most interesting work occurred half a mile out to sea and several hundred feet in the air, the experienced ones brought binoculars.

Almost 12,000 tradesmen would work on the bridge before it was done, including concrete masons, electricians, and painters, but it was the ironworkers that the old men came to watch. "Without the structural steel workers," wrote one reporter who trekked out to Bay Ridge to observe the work, "bridgewatching is like Yankee-watching without Mickey Mantle in the lineup."

The writer Gay Talese often made the trip from Manhattan. He came to cover the bridge for the New York Times New York Times and to gather material for a slim book he later published about its construction. In his articles and his book, Talese wrote about Ammann and the politics of the bridge and the anger of the citizens dispossessed by the bridge, but his real interest, like that of the seaside supers, was the bridgemen. He was especially fascinated by the nomadic, carousing boomers. "They drive into town in big cars, and live in furnished rooms, and drink whiskey with beer chasers, and chase women they will soon forget," he wrote in his unabashedly romantic portrait. "They are part circus, part gypsy-graceful in the air, restless on the ground." Talese quoted a Dr. S. Thomas Coppola, who treated many injured bridgemen during the course of the bridge's construction. "These are the most interesting men I've ever met. They're strong, they can stand all kinds of pain, they're full of pride, and they live it up." and to gather material for a slim book he later published about its construction. In his articles and his book, Talese wrote about Ammann and the politics of the bridge and the anger of the citizens dispossessed by the bridge, but his real interest, like that of the seaside supers, was the bridgemen. He was especially fascinated by the nomadic, carousing boomers. "They drive into town in big cars, and live in furnished rooms, and drink whiskey with beer chasers, and chase women they will soon forget," he wrote in his unabashedly romantic portrait. "They are part circus, part gypsy-graceful in the air, restless on the ground." Talese quoted a Dr. S. Thomas Coppola, who treated many injured bridgemen during the course of the bridge's construction. "These are the most interesting men I've ever met. They're strong, they can stand all kinds of pain, they're full of pride, and they live it up."

And sometimes, of course, they died. The first man to die on the Verrazano-Narrows fell off an approach ramp and landed on the road below. The second fell inside the Brooklyn tower. The third and last was a soft-spoken 19-year-old named Gerard McKee. He was 200 pounds and well over 6 feet tall, a gentle giant who came from a large family of ironworkers in Red Hook, Brooklyn. He fell on a gloomy Wednesday morning in October of 1963, while attaching suspender cables that would hang down from the cables and hold the road deck. His partner, another young ironworker named Edward Iannielli, heard a shout and turned to see McKee grasping the edge of the catwalk by his fingers, dangling 350 feet over the water. Before Iannielli or anyone else could save him, McKee lost his grip and fell. He was an excellent swimmer, a former Coney Island lifeguard who'd amused himself as a boy by swimming across New York Harbor from Red Hook to the Statue of Liberty. If anyone could have survived a plunge into the Narrows, it was Gerard McKee. But no one could.

Gerard McKee's death triggered an ironworkers' strike, led by Jim Cole, Local 40's Newfoundlander business agent. The ironworkers refused to go back to work until American Bridge agreed to stretch nets under the bridge, just as the company had done 30 years earlier under the Golden Gate. Four days later, American Bridge conceded.

Robert Moses neglected to include ironworkers in the opening ceremonies for the bridge on November 21, 1964, just as he had neglected to include them in the groundbreaking ceremony and the ceremony to mark the commencement of the wire spinning. He did remember to include Othmar Ammann, the bridge's engineer, referring to him in a speech as "one of the significant great men of our time." Unfortunately, he neglected to mention Ammann by name, so when a small old man stood up and lifted his hat, most people in the audience probably had no idea who he was. Ammann died a year later at the age of 86.

As for the other old men, the seaside supers, they had to find something else to do with their free time now. The show was over. They had witnessed the end of an era. Rivets were on the way out, to be replaced by high-strength bolts and welding. The rivet gangs would soon be a memory. So, too, would be the sight of the steel wires traveling back and forth across water, because no new suspension bridge would go up in New York again, not in what was left of their lifetimes anyway, and probably not in their children's or grandchildren's lifetimes either. The last great bridge was done. The attention of the city, and of the ironworkers, turned north across the bay to a 16-acre patch of soft ground in lower Manhattan, where two towers were about to rise higher than any structure yet built by man.

[image]

Spinning the first cables on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. This view is from the top of the Brooklyn tower, 690 feet above water.

(courtesy of MTA Bridges and Tunnels, Special Archives) SQUARE ONE.

Early on a bright morning in September of 1968, a young ironworker named Jack Doyle descended a long dirt ramp into the huge square hole at the bottom of the city. He was 24 years old. He spoke with a Newfoundlander's brogue and walked with a slight limp, the result of a blow he'd taken to his hip while playing hockey in Conception Bay. The doctor had advised him to seek a sedentary occupation. Instead, Jack Doyle had followed his father and uncles and brothers into ironwork, becoming, of all things, a connector. "Guys would see me up there limping and get worried," he recalled years later. "Well, not to blow my own horn, but I walked steel with the best of them. I was pretty catty."

He was catty-a Newfoundlander term for surefooted-but he was blessed with an equally indispensable ironworkers' talent for luck. He'd fallen three times and gotten away without a scratch. The first time, in Canada, he landed in a s...o...b..nk. The second time, in Detroit, he managed to grab a brace on the way down and sustained minor injuries. The third time, just a few months behind him now, he nearly died. He fell just one floor but landed on a table where carpenters were cutting sheets of plywood with a large circular saw. He missed the blade, and bisection, by inches.

Jack arrived at the foundation of the World Trade Center directly from the shape hall. He'd known about these new buildings for years. He'd read a magazine article about the Trade Center back in Canada, how the towers were going to be the tallest in the world, and the idea of working on them had thrilled him even then. And now here he was, 6 stories below ground, in the largest hole ever dug in New York City, a vast basin wide enough to accommodate 16 football fields. Most of the grillages-the pedestals of steel beams that would transfer the weight of columns to the concrete footings-had already been set. A few huge columns rose from the ground at the northwest corner of the hole, the first inklings of the north tower.

Jack had been moving around almost continuously since leaving home five years earlier. He'd worked on skysc.r.a.pers in Toronto, then boomed to Detroit for a while, then Philadelphia. He'd been back to Newfoundland, too, where he'd met a girl from the town next to his and gotten himself engaged.

Coming to this hole at the bottom of Manhattan was like coming home. Two of his brothers, Norm and George, were there. His first cousin, Leo Doyle, was superintendent in those early days, and d.i.c.k Brady, his fiancee's brother, was there, too, pushing a rig. There were dozens of young men he recognized from the head of the bay, like Joe Lewis and Willie Quinlan and Billy Moore. As he stood there in the cool dampness, he knew he'd arrived exactly where he wanted to be. "I knew when I went down there that morning that I was staying," he said. "I wanted to see the top of it."

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 skysc.r.a.pers had been constructed since the end of World War II, some of them distinguished works of architecture, but the new skysc.r.a.pers had little in common with the skysc.r.a.pers of the 1920s. Where those had been clad in stone and thick with steel, the new ones were lightly framed and dressed in gla.s.s. Where the old skysc.r.a.pers 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 "gla.s.s 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 alt.i.tude, 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 skysc.r.a.pers. 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 part.i.tions 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 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 sh.e.l.l of a crustacean. They were light, but they were also rigid. 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 sh.e.l.l 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 Hanc.o.c.k 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 gla.s.s 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 skysc.r.a.pers. 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 s.p.a.ce.

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 c.u.mbersome, 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 skysc.r.a.per 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 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 skysc.r.a.per job in the world. If George Backett had asked, Jack might have hesitated to a.s.sume 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 Sat.u.r.day morning, Jack and the rest of his raising gang stood on a pier at the edge of the Hudson River 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 n.o.body 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."

b.l.o.o.d.y 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 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 pa.s.sed 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-cla.s.s 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-cla.s.s const.i.tuency, 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 "b.l.o.o.d.y Friday."

The seeds of b.l.o.o.d.y 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 "G.o.d Bless America."

Seventy people were injured before the riot ended. The police, who tended to share the tradesmen's att.i.tude 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 New York Post. "I had other things on my mind."

To a city and country already reeling, b.l.o.o.d.y 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 n.o.body 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 carca.s.ses 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.

Then winter. "One day early that winter," said Jack, "we had one of those silver thaws, where it got mild and wet snow was falling, then turned cold fast, especially at that height. The next morning I went up with the super and the shop steward to have a look at the cranes, to see that everything was fine up there." Jack and the two other men rode the elevator, then climbed the last few floors on ladders, and when they stepped out through the core onto the deck, they found themselves in a place they hardly recognized. "It was like something out of Doctor Zhivago Doctor Zhivago," said Jack. "There was an inch of ice all over the crane booms, all over the lacing and the cables, and they were standing there, everything decorated in ice. The heat of the day was starting and you could hear the ice cracking. Up on the boom, every now and again, a small piece would crack and fall, but nothing else, just everything silent and beautiful. It was like the world stood still."

Down below, the carping had already started. Broadcasters worried the towers would block the transmission of television signals from the top of the Empire State Building, leaving black rectangles in the middle of television sets all over the Tristate area. Real estate moguls predicted the towers would glut the market and depress prices throughout the city. Aesthetes objected to the towers because they were ugly-"annoyingly familiar," as Glenn Collins put it in the New York Times Magazine New York Times Magazine, resembling "two shiny new sticks of Arrow staples, standing on end."