April 23, 2006
The Heroes
The 'Sky Boys'
By JIM RASENBERGER
THE shy, slight man who showed up on 34th Street one spring day carrying a four-by-five Graflex camera probably failed to make a powerful first impression on the workers he'd been hired to photograph. He wore owlish glasses, his ears stuck out, and his demeanor was that of the bookish schoolteacher he once had been. Altogether, he looked as if he could be blown off a steel beam by a stiff breeze.
Lewis Wickes Hine was easily underestimated. But from the moment he'd quit his job at the Ethical Culture School two decades earlier to devote his life to photography, he had proved himself brave and resourceful, not to mention enormously gifted. During his early years of photographing children in coal mines in Pennsylvania and cotton mills in South Carolina, he often posed as a Bible salesman or a life insurance agent to gain entry, then slipped away before he could be discovered and beaten up. The haunting portraits Hine brought back from those expeditions galvanized child labor laws in America and made him the pre-eminent documentary photographer of the Progressive era.
But by 1930 all that was long behind. Hine's brand of sociological concern was out of fashion, and his photographs were out of favor. The onset of the Depression only reduced the chance that this washed-up 56-year-old would find decent work with his camera. Still, when the phone call came from his old friend Belle Moskowitz, who was working as the Empire State Building's publicist, he must have hesitated before accepting her offer to become the building's official photographer. On one hand, it meant selling out to the kind of corporate interest he had long disdained. On the other hand, he needed the money.
Hine was hired to photograph all aspects of the building's construction, but it is obvious from his photographs that he found his most stirring subject in the structural ironworkers. These men — "sky boys," as Hine would come to call them — raised the building's steel frame, balancing on airy perches to join columns and beams, leading the way upward as the other trades followed from below. A tight-knit, swashbuckling clan of Newfoundlanders, Mohawk Indians, Scandinavians and Irish-Americans, they were self-proclaimed "roughnecks" who, as the New York Times writer C. G. Poore put it at the time, spent their days "strolling on the thin edge of nothingness."
Hine understood that to photograph the men who raised steel, it would not do to stand on the pavement. He would have to enter their element, to climb out among them at high altitude and take the chances they took. One of Hine's more ingenious techniques was to have himself hoisted in an open steel box rigged to a derrick line so that he could dangle over the ironworkers, a quarter-mile above the ground. Thus, he managed to capture, as no one had before, the dizzying and sometimes marvelous work of building skyscrapers.
That work had never been so marvelous as it was on 34th Street in the spring and summer of 1930. Under Hine's eye, the ironworkers raised 57,000 tons of steel in just six months, almost 50 percent more than the amount used in the Chrysler and Bank of Manhattan buildings combined.
Hine's photographs of the men, later collected in a volume called "Men at Work," convey an almost palpable appreciation of their physical labor. While his earlier reform-minded photographs portray his working-class subjects as sympathetic victims, those from the Empire State Building treat them as heroes: muscle-bound men, with strong jaw lines and sun-bleached hair, conquering gravity and steel.
They stand on airy perches, hang off guy wires and catch rides on the steel balls of derricks, all the while brimming with confidence and derring-do. The world below may have been descending into economic despair, but these are images of unabashed optimism. And whatever success the Empire State Building later achieved as architecture or real estate, Hine's photographs sealed its status as a stunning human endeavor, animating its steel and brick with something like soul. Even today, it is difficult to look up from 34th Street without conjuring one of Hine's sky boys clambering among the clouds, and the building is better for it.
After the steel frame topped out in November 1930, the workers dispersed and returned to less glorified work or, in the grip of the Depression, to none at all. Hine returned to his home in Hastings-on-Hudson and to mounting financial difficulties. The photographs he had taken on the Empire State Building would later fetch tens of thousands of dollars and become among the best-known images in the world, but they did little to help his foundering career at the time. When he died 10 years later, he was destitute.
For those months in 1930, though, both the photographer and the ironworkers were at the top of their games, and each gave the other an invaluable gift. Hine gave the men a degree of honor and immortality that is rarely bestowed on blue-collar workers. They, in turn, lent his photographs their exhilarating pride and grace, and inspired some of the greatest work of his life.
Jim Rasenberger is the author of "High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World's Greatest Skyline," a history of New York's ironworkers.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
