Men at Work, page 1
Copyright © 2025 Glenn Kurtz
Cover photograph by Lewis Hine courtesy Getty Images
Author photograph by Franziska Liepe
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
SEVEN STORIES PRESS
140 Watts Street New York, NY 10013
www.sevenstories.com
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Kurtz, Glenn author
Title: Men at work : the Empire State Building and the untold story of the craftsmen who built it / Glenn Kurtz.
Description: New York City : Seven Stories Press, 2025. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2025008092 (print) | LCCN 2025008093 (ebook) | ISBN 9781644215029 hardcover | ISBN 9781644215036 ebook
Subjects: LCSH: Hine, Lewis Wickes, 1874-1940 | Empire State Building (New York, N.Y.)--History | Building trades--New York (State)--New York--History | Iron and steel workers--New York (State)--New York--History | Documentary photography--New York (State)--New York--History
Classification: LCC F128.8.E46 K87 2025 (print) | LCC F128.8.E46 (ebook)
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025008092
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025008093
College professors and high school and middle school teachers may order free examination copies of Seven Stories Press titles. visit https://www.sevenstories.com/pg/resources-academics or email academic@sevenstories.com.
Printed in the USA.
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
1 The Named and the Unnamed
2 Men Who Make our Modern World Safe
3 “Who is the Craftsman?”
4 “The Man on the Job”
5 Splendid Ideals
6 “What the Men Think of It”
7 “Look Him in the Eye”
8 “The New Who’s Who”
9 The Sky Boy
Illustrations and Photo Credits
Acknowledgments
Afterword: On the Question of Sources
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
For A.X. G. and Z. F. M. K. and to the memory of my father, whose office was all the way up on the third floor.
ONE
THE NAMED AND THE UNNAMED
“Those who conceived it, those who designed it, those who made it, all built into the very steel and stone of Empire State a spirit dedicating it to the service and the glory of man.”
—Empire State: A History
“Pyramids, Empire State Building—these things just don’t happen. There’s hard work behind it. I would like to see a building, say, the Empire State, I would like to see on one side of it a foot-wide strip from top to bottom with the names of every bricklayer, the name of every electrician, with all the names. So when a guy walked by, he could take his son and say, ‘See, that’s me over there on the forty-fifth floor. I put the steel beam in.’”
—Mike Lefevre, steelworker
The Empire State Building has always been more than an edifice of steel and stone. Since its conception, it has occupied a unique place in the American imagination. Unlike its immediate competitors, the Chrysler Building and 40 Wall Street, which briefly vied for the title of world’s tallest office building in 1930, or the Woolworth Building, which held that title a generation earlier, from 1913 until 1930, the Empire State Building has always embodied something beyond a great skyscraper. The building’s unprecedented height, its powerful, elegant lines crowned by a soaring mast, gave physical form to an ideal of America. In the words of John Jakob Raskob, its lead financier, the Empire State Building represented “a land which reached for the sky with its feet on the ground.” A recent critic called it “a cathedral not merely of architecture, but of Americanness.” And while the venture was explicitly commercial, celebrating America’s arrival as an economic world leader, the “Americanness” of the Empire State was never circumscribed by its function as an office building. On the contrary, the building was, as its publicists ceaselessly repeated, a towering human achievement. It was “the tallest structure built by Man,” “Man’s greatest gesture skyward,” “a supreme expression of Man the Builder.” The business of America might be business, but the Empire State’s construction signaled the nation’s arrival on the grander stage of world civilization. In the phrase of a contemporary journalist, “it is the future, solid and tangible, there for you to stand on and touch.” Even its name distinguished it. The Woolworth Building, the Chrysler Building, the Manhattan Company Building at 40 Wall Street, all celebrated the great men or great corporations that built them, lending their namesakes the monumental stature of the skyscrapers themselves. For this reason, the Chrysler Building might be derided as “the fulfillment in metal and masonry of a one-man dream,” as one contemporary critic sneered. The Empire State Building, by contrast, seemed to encompass the American dream, something more dynamic, more abstract, than any individual or corporate striving. For almost one hundred years, it has seemed to embody our national character and our national aspirations. Perhaps only the Eiffel Tower in Paris—the world’s tallest structure from 1889 until 1930, though notably not a useful structure—packs the same vital charge of technical virtuosity and transcendent national symbolism. Tall as it is, the Empire State Building has always pointed to something higher.
As a symbol of national, indeed of human aspiration, the Empire State Building was resilient enough to escape the circumstances of its birth. Built between October 1929 and May 1931, its construction coincided with the onset of the Great Depression. This almost doomed it as a commercial venture. On its opening day, the building was only 23 percent occupied. It would not become profitable for two decades, and until the Second World War, it earned as much from visits to the observation deck as it did from rent. Yet the completion of the world’s tallest skyscraper just eighteen months after the stock market crash of October 1929 only emphasized the qualities that made America great, our grit in the face of hard times, our undaunted optimism.
“The Empire State Building is a monumental proof of hopefulness,” asserted The New York Times on May 1, 1931, the day of its grand opening. The economic downturn would not last, the editors assured their readers, and therefore, the building’s “inspiring sweep” should “be thought of as having a significance which extends far beyond the corner of Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street.” True, the economic collapse was shocking. “It seems scarcely possible that it is little over twelve months ago that New York was a riot of expenditure, luxury, wholesale gayety and almost drunken prosperity,” marveled the Princeton, New Jersey, Patriot, in October 1930, just as steelwork on the Empire State was topping out. “Anyone who spends a larger part of their waking hours in the city of New York in the late autumn of this year cannot but admit the existence of a dull, heavy cloud of encircling gloom.” For the New Jersey paper, just as for The New York Times, however, the new skyscraper pierced the gloom. “There are a few bright spots left. Hard times, apparently, cannot stem the day to day magically changing skyline. Where the old red brick Waldorf-Astoria of tarnished memory once raised its venerable head, the enormous Empire State Building now soars upward to a terrific height and dominates the city.” While the moods of its symbolism have shifted with the times, as any enduring symbol’s must, the Empire State’s potency as a symbol has persisted or even increased over the years. When New York’s Landmarks Preservation Commission declared it the city’s “quintessential landmark” in 1981, therefore, I think they took a provincial view, understating the building’s larger historic and cultural role. Since its opening, the Empire State Building has been a symbol of the American Century, a symbol of the rising, indomitable American spirit.
This symbolism defines the Empire State Building. It defines how we see it, how we understand and relate its history, how we grasp its architecture and interpret the images associated with it. And for the length of the Empire State’s history, Lewis W. Hine’s magnificent photographs of its construction workers have provided the indispensable visual evidence for this definition, the Empire State as a grand, symbolic narrative. Of the hundreds of images Hine captured, one in particular has seemed to distill the structure’s inspiring essence. Often called Icarus or The Sky Boy, it shows a lone worker reaching upward to tighten a bolt.
The Sky Boy.
The man’s handsome face is tensed in concentration. His muscular arms and precarious stance convey daring and grace. As he reaches upward, the Hudson River and the country’s wide horizon fall away in the distance below him. “Lifted like Lindbergh in ecstatic solitude,” in the words of a recent commentator, this one heroic worker, it seems, embodies everything the skyscraper stands for. In The Sky Boy, the great endeavor achieves a human face and a vigorous body. He, too, reaches beyond himself, expressing in a single gesture the nation’s skill, strength, and determination. He, too, gives physical form to an American ideal. It would be beside the point to ask who he was. As much as the building itself, the Sky Boy captures the spirit of America rising.
Walk into the Empire State Building through its imposing Fifth Avenue portal today, and you will find the symbolic narrative built into the lobby architecture. As you emerge through the revolving doors, the first thing you see at the opposite end of the cathedral-like space, is a two-sto
The grand entrance.
Standing at the foot of this haloed representation, you can take in the monumental structure at a glance, experiencing for yourself what John Jakob Raskob hoped the building would symbolize. With your feet on the ground, you feel drawn skyward by the structure’s euphoric aspiration.
If your neck grows tired as you gaze upward, however, you might turn your glance to the right. There, ten steps beyond the black marble information desk, around a structural hump in the lobby design and perched inconspicuously above a radiator grille, you will discover a bronze plaque, mounted at eye level. Although not part of the architectural design, I think this plaque is symbolic, too. It measures thirty-two by twenty-six inches, tiny compared to the giant rendering of the building with which it shares the wall. Unadorned, it lists the names of thirty-two men, laborers who contributed to the building’s construction and who received Certificates of Superior Craftsmanship, awarded by the New York Building Congress. The plaque is unlit, and the passageway where it hangs is dark. When I visited in March 2025, a posted sign, “Entry Beyond This Point Is Limited to Tenants and Their Invited Guests,” warned visitors against approaching it. But if a guard doesn’t stop you, you can still step up and read the names of these thirty-two men, recipients of Empire State Craftsmanship Awards, embossed in hand-drawn, Art Deco lettering against a plain black background. Among them are Michael Tierney, rock driller; Gus Comedeca, steam shovel operator; James P. Kerr, stone setter; Charles E. Sexton, bricklayer; James Irons, stonecutter; Frank Moeglin, sheet metal worker; Vladimir Kozloff, wrecker; Ferruccio Mariutto, terrazzo worker; Samuel Laginsky, glazier; Peter Madden, asbestos worker.
The craftsmanship award plaque.
Here, within the lobby of the Empire State Building itself, are two competing symbols of the majestic skyscraper’s history and significance, one familiar and one forgotten.
In the shining steel outline, you have the Empire State Building as the American superlative. The tallest man-made structure, built in record-breaking time, it towers as a beacon, radiating ambition, self-confidence, and modernity. “The skyscraper is the most distinctively American thing in the world,” wrote Colonel William A. Starrett, one of the builders, “so far surpassing anything ever before undertaken in its vastness, swiftness, utility, and economy that it epitomizes American life and American civilization.” As the loftiest skyscraper, the epitome of the epitome, the Empire State Building is the focal point, not just of the lobby, but of New York City and State, of the nation and nations overseas, of the solar system—perhaps, if we recall the ceiling mural awash with stars, the fulcrum of the whole galaxy. It’s not too much to say that, in this wall relief, the Empire State—and with it, the rising American superpower—are imagined as the center of the universe. Civic and national pride, enthusiastic journalism and publicity, heroic images of the construction, and almost a century of popular culture all converge like the architecture on this central, symbolic representation of the structure.
When we think of the Empire State Building, this is what we think of, and not the office tower long since overshadowed by newer, taller competitors. There’s a reason Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan meet there in the 1993 film Sleepless in Seattle, and not at Chicago’s Willis Tower, formerly the Sears Tower, then the country’s tallest building. Skyscrapers are “expressions in steel of the passion of the twentieth century,” wrote critic Philip N. Youtz in 1929. No other peak in America attains the Empire State’s height of passion, its emblematic grandeur and romance.
From the start, the romantic story of the building as the symbol of American ascent has been told in correspondingly impressive language. “Insofar as a single building may be said to typify and represent the progress and dignity of the great city, EMPIRE STATE is New York,” claimed the owners in a New Yorker advertisement from April 1931, weeks before the building opened. Contemporary journalists went much farther. “As you shoot up and up, floor after floor, you are boosted straight into the future,” wrote one. “The Empire State building pierces the clouds and goes beyond them. At the top you’re just a little lower than the angels,” wrote another.
To those engaged in creating and burnishing the grand story, the building is an “airy tower of limitless aspiration.” It is “a temple of paralleled silver shimmering between earth and sky.” It is “poetry, mysticism and inspiration,” “the lantern of Manhattan,” the “First Wonder of a New World.” “The Empire State Building,” concluded John Tauranac in his 1995 history of its construction, “is the twentieth-century New York building.”
Innumerable books, films, cartoons, advertisements, photographs, and crystal, metal, wooden, and plastic souvenirs attest to and celebrate the potency and durability of this Empire State Building, proof of American hopefulness, vigor, achievement, and power.
I want to tell the other story, the forgotten story of the plaque with the workers’ names, the story of the Empire State Building and the ordinary men who built it. Like the commemorative plaque itself, this history of the Empire State is off the main path, overlooked, and only dimly legible. And yet, as if hidden in plain sight, the story of the men named on the Craftsmanship Awards plaque offers a singular window onto a neglected dimension of the famous building. This neglect is not accidental. On the contrary, it betrays a pattern of selective attention that is as telling and definitive of American culture as the Empire State Building itself.
The thirty-two Craftsmanship Award winners intrigue me because they stand out against the black background of thousands of unknown and anonymous workers who contributed to the landmark building’s creation. Astonishingly, no list of laborers was ever compiled. In contrast to the distinguished gentlemen who owned, designed, and managed construction of the Empire State, and whose names appear on a tablet at the base of the stainless-steel totem in the lobby, workers were plural, a group, not typically seen as individuals except as representatives. Like the Sky Boy and the other men who appear in Lewis Hine’s famous photographs, when viewed from the perspective of the building’s inspiring symbolism, it seemed beside the point to ask who the individual was. He was a worker. In this sense, it is surprising that the plaque exists at all. Indeed, the men listed on the Craftsmanship Awards plaque constitute the majority of those whom it is now possible to identify by name.
These two artifacts in the Empire State Building’s entrance, therefore, represent two different kinds of history, different decisions about whose names and what information are considered important and worth preserving, two sets of values by which to measure the meaning of the building and the nation that built it. The stainless-steel depiction of the building represents history on the grand scale, the story of a handful of powerful men at the pinnacle of their careers, giving monumental form to their vision of the new, twentieth-century American civilization. Biographies of these men, often memoirs by them, are easy to find, and narratives of their achievements draw on well-curated archives. Most histories of the Empire State Building focus on these men, the owners and builders. The commemorative plaque, on the other hand, represents a different scale of history, history closer to the ground, often the history of a different class. This is the story of countless, ordinary individuals performing their jobs and seen, if at all, only fleetingly—from below as anonymous, heroic figures, or from above as an undifferentiated mass. In each case, the men are seen through the lens of other people’s ideas about them. The histories of these ordinary lives are frequently impossible to reconstruct, and documentation, when it exists, is fragmentary and marred by unresolvable discrepancies. Yet history on the grand scale is no less partial and fragmentary. The celebrated story of the Empire State serves a national mythology; but it is incomplete, sanitized, simplified, a shorthand for the nation’s greatness. Stories on the individual scale, by contrast, are incomplete for the opposite reason, because the documentation is haphazard, and the lives of the men were messy and often tragic. The grand symbol is brightly lit and theatrically staged, making its incompleteness harder to see. It replaces detail with the pomp and approbation of public culture. The symbol of ordinary lives is incomplete as if by design. It is an aside, unlit if not entirely hidden or lost, and what remains of it is hard to make out, full of gaps and mysteries.
