High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World's Greatest Skyline (28 page)

There were days Keith Brown drank two cases of beer between morning and night. The boy who hated the taste of beer had grown up to be a full-blown alcoholic.

One day, Marvin announced he’d decided to stop drinking. He wanted nothing more to do with alcohol. “I was getting sick and tired of it,” said Marvin. “You get to that point in your life—you gotta grow up sooner or later.” Keith kept at it for another year after Marvin stopped, but the pleasure went out of it.

That was the year Keith’s father died. It was also the year he and his wife separated. His life had reached a crossroads and he knew it. He was sitting in his house one night, drunk, halfway through a can of beer. He realized that if he wanted custody of his children—and he did—it was now or never. “I said to myself, you gotta make a decision. You’re either going to give them away, cause you can’t raise no kids drinking, or you put it down and never touch it again.” And that was the end of it. Once he made the decision, he never went back.

Keith and Marvin connected together for another eight years. Their last connecting job was a huge Midtown office building for Bear Stearns, the New York financial concern. It was 1998 and they were both on the cusp of forty, generally the age a connector starts thinking about moving on to less strenuous labor. One afternoon the superintendent approached Keith and asked him if he wanted to take over as walking boss. Keith knew that accepting the promotion would mean severing his partnership with Marvin, perhaps forever. Before giving the super an answer, he went to Marvin and spoke to him. “If you don’t want me to take it, I won’t,” he said. “It’s your call.” Marvin told him to take it. He told Keith he was going to see the job to the end, and then he, too, was going to hang up his connecting belt.

Three years later, in the late summer of 2001, Keith Brown and Marvin Davis were still together, still partners, and still went everywhere together. They were both walking bosses on the Time Warner Center, sharing the building between them. Keith commanded the first phase of erection, the raising gangs, the rigs, the bolter-ups, and the steel deliveries. Marvin took care of the follow-up, the detail crews, the welders. They didn’t see as much of each other as they used to. They no longer commuted to and from work together, as they had for years, because Keith had recently started seeing a woman who lived in the East Village. Most afternoons, though, they met up for lunch, usually at a Greek deli on 58th Street where everyone knew them.

“How are my friends today?” the counterman bellowed as they straddled a couple of stools one afternoon.

“Happy as a bowl of fuckin’ sunshine,” mumbled Keith. “Lemme have a cup of coffee. What are you having, Marv?”

Marvin ordered a grilled cheese. At 43, Marvin was a year older than Keith but looked a couple years younger, his features softer, less weathered. He was still the quiet one, the calmer one, still married to the same woman, still living in the same house.

Both men appeared fairly exhausted as they sat at the counter. Keith’s stomach was bothering him this afternoon, squelching his appetite. The stress of management was more difficult than the bodily wear and tear of connecting. It was also, both agreed, less satisfying. Instead of building all day, they were digging through an avalanche of logistics and paperwork—and rules. They both appreciated the irony that they, who had broken all the rules, now found themselves in a position where part of their job was to enforce them.

“That’s hard for me,” said Keith. “Who am I to tell somebody he can’t drink? For me to say no drinking, they just look at me and say, ‘Yeah, right, who are you bullshittin’?’ But I have to do it. And they all know where it’s going.”

Where it was going was toward a more bureaucratic kind of steel
erection driven not by the quest for speed but by the fear of liability, by the proliferation of rules and regulations. Every small change, the sort of thing ironworkers used to take care of by themselves with a torch and beater, now had to be signed off on by an engineer. Every move the ironworkers made was scrutinized by someone else. Every walk across a beam was nit-picked by a site safety manager. “Now insurance companies are coming looking at the way we’ve done it for a hundred years and wondering how the hell they let this go on.”

Keith didn’t miss the drinking but he missed the old days. He missed his father, too, tough as the old man had been. Keith understood now how alike they were, just as his mother had always told him. He also understood now that there was a strange kind of caring behind the shouting. His father had wanted his son to become a good ironworker. And Keith had become one. “If he hadn’t busted my balls, I wouldn’t have worked so hard. That’s one thing I give him credit for. Much as these kids hate me, I see ’em standing still, I yell at ’em. I’m probably the worst of them around, but I’m not half as bad as the old-timers. Christ, I used to want to kill those old bastards. I’m sure these kids feel the same about me. But someday they’ll look back, they’ll understand what I was shouting about.”

Keith drank from his third cup of coffee. “There’re a lot of mornings I’d like to say fuck 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 asses.”

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 hell 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.

T
he towers rose to a height of 604 feet apiece, taller than all but the tallest skyscrapers. 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 skyscraper, 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 assembled in one place, having honed their skills on recently built spans like the Delaware River Bridge at Philadelphia and the Ambassador Bridge over the Detroit River. While the slack-jawed public gathered at the base of the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building to mar
vel at the ironworkers, these bridgemen, miles from the thick of the city, toiled away unobserved 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 cocky 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 space 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:

The towers of the George Washington Bridge under construction, as seen from the Manhattan shore.
(Port Authority of New York and New Jersey)

IT IS ABSOLUTELY FORBIDDEN FOR PASSENGERS 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 pass ’em,” Reynolds promised his bosses at McClintic-Marshall.
Impossible
, they told him.
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 Saturday. 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 shore, 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 clusters. 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 shore. 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
! 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 passed, 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 pass 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 nobody 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
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 skyscraper 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.