New Yorkers in Exile

[BullNBear52]

Ironworkers of the Sky
By RANDY KENNEDY


"You need to have a very unique trait inside, to go running out on the iron," says Kevin Sabbagh, 24, a fifth-generation ironworker known as Woogie.

To get to the top of 1 World Trade Center as it stands in mid-August, just shy of 1,000 feet above Lower Manhattan, higher than anything else on the island’s southern end, first you walk to the middle of the blast-resistant concrete cathedral that will become the building’s lobby. From there, a hoist takes you to the 39th floor, whose perimeter has already been glassed in. A sign spray-painted in screaming construction orange — “EXPRESS ALL DAY” — directs you to a second hoist, inside which Don McLean is singing, “Bye, bye, Miss American Pie . . .” and men in hard hats decoupaged with flag decals are bobbing their heads to the beat.

On the 70th floor, the end of the line for the hoist, you emerge and climb five more stories inside a cage staircase attached to the outside of the building’s south face before taking a final flight of stairs. At the top of these you see — disconcertingly, even though you have known where you were heading all along — brilliant sunshine. Above you is blue sky and two floors of skeletal steel not yet covered in decking. The only other thing overhead, on the bare beams, is the remarkably small tripartite crew of workers doing jobs that have remained virtually unchanged since steel-frame construction began a little more than a century ago: guiding the steel into place as the cranes lift it up (the raising gang), securing it permanently (the bolting gang) and ensuring that all of it is vertically true (the plumb-up gang).

It is like arriving at one of Earth’s extremities — the Tibetan plateau, the Antipodes — except that you somehow feel as if you have been here before. And in a sense you have, because this scene is deeply embedded in the image bank of the 20th and 21st centuries. In fact, it sometimes seems as if the very existence of the men who build skylines by hand has been inextricably linked to the existence of the men (they have mostly been men) who have photographed them — first lugging their wooden view cameras, with tripods and dark cloths, then their Speed Graphics and Leicas — to the places where steel meets sky, giving flesh and bone to ironworkers who otherwise would have been phantoms of progress, risking their lives, unseen, hundreds of feet above the city.

The names of many of the photographers, working for newspapers or construction companies, have been forgotten. But some were titans: Lewis Hine, who applied his compassion for the working class to the builders of the Empire State Building; Bruce Davidson, who poetically chronicled the construction of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.

The lure of ironworking imagery is, in part, formal: the complex geometry of straight lines and sharp diagonals against the almost classically curved human forms of arms, legs and backs. But the affinities between ironworkers and photographers themselves run deep. Both professions are defined by the compulsion to go where most people won’t go and see with their own eyes what most people will never see. The sentiment of Ethan Kitzes, a 41-year-old ironworker at 1 World Trade, could apply just as well to Robert Capa on Omaha Beach in 1944 or Frank Hurley adrift on an Antarctic ice floe with Shackleton in 1915: “There is no dress rehearsal.”

In July, The New York Times Magazine assigned Damon Winter, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer for the newspaper, to spend five days alongside workers like Kitzes, who was among the first wave of volunteers on Sept. 12, 2001, brought in to extract steel from the ruins of the twin towers and who has returned to the site as a member of the plumb-up gang.

Even among the elite class of ironworkers that specializes in raising high steel, the 40 or so men who perform the most dangerous work at 1 World Trade are a kind of special forces. There are veterans like Turhan Clause, a 46-year-old bolter-upper and an Algonquin Indian whose father and grandfather were also in the trade. And members of the next generation like Jim Brady, 29, an astonishingly agile connector who grabs the steel with gloved hands and sets it in place, shinnying beams without a harness. Brady’s broad face itself seems to sustain the immense weight of the Trade Center site’s past and express the perseverance that has powered the rise of a new tower — a structure whose symbolic importance is undisputed even if its cost and commercial justification remain dubious.

Neither Brady nor his colleagues are very good at doing what photographers do for them: standing outside themselves to articulate the almost Romantic-era daring of their job in a world of increasingly bloodless, prefab industry. But Christopher Marron, a 39-year-old first-year apprentice ironworker who once worked on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (he was there the morning of 9/11), seems to speak plainly for them all: “I look forward to getting here. I look forward to working my ass off. I look forward to sweating. And I look forward to finishing this building. I plan on staying all the way to the top.”

Additional reporting by Pamela Chen.

Damon Winter ([e-mail]) is a staff photographer for The New York Times. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for his coverage of the Obama presidential campaign.

Editor: Joanna Milter ([e-mail])


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/magazine/ironworkers-of-the-sky.html?pagewanted=print