Men at Work, page 13
As William Orr Ludlow insisted, pride in himself and his work was the most desirable attribute in a worker’s character. But pride is a private thing. It cannot be imposed or assumed by another, and its subtleties of feeling are rarely trumpeted. Even the most self-confident worker might feel awkward when an organization or a nosy reporter insisted on the pride he ought to and must surely feel. He might be grateful for the recognition, and at the same time, privately, this gratitude could well be tinged with some skepticism or even resentment. Perhaps a hint of this ambivalence is captured in a notice entitled “Back-Pats” about the Craftsmanship Awards from November 1929, reporting that superior craftsmen “receive certificates and gold buttons, and they are not ashamed to take them.” “Not ashamed” is a nice euphemism, but certainly it is not the same as unabashedly proud.
Like almost every other journalist of the era, Margaret Norris dutifully emphasizes the workers’ pride in her quotations from Paul Rockhold. “Who wants to be a pencil pusher after he’s worked with steel—or a common laborer either?” says “Whitey” in her account. “There’s also the pride of achievement. It’s nice to point to a suspension bridge or a towering building and say, ‘I helped erect that.’”
In the context of this pride, Norris observes that “a framed Certificate of Superior Craftsmanship, awarded each year by the Building Congress to the outstanding man of his trade,” hangs on the wall of Rockhold’s Brooklyn home. Yet despite both Norris’s and the New York Building Congress’s efforts to enlist the Craftsmanship Award in the constitution of a worker’s pride, Rockhold himself seems unmoved by the honor. Asked about his award, Rockhold’s only comment is, ‘Well, I got a good feed out of it.’”
What did the men think about it? Like the question of who they were, to answer this honestly without recourse to patronizing myths, we would need a record of an individual’s thoughts.
Pietro di Donato was born in Hoboken in 1911 to Italian immigrant parents. His father, a bricklayer, died in a building collapse in 1923. His mother died shortly after, and di Donato, still a teenager, left school to support himself and his siblings. In March 1937, di Donato published a short story in Esquire magazine about his experiences as a bricklayer, “Christ in Concrete.” In 1939, di Donato expanded the story into a novel, which was enthusiastically received. Charles Poore of The New York Times, who also covered the Empire State Building beat, admired the novel’s experimental prose. “He can write, at will, like Sherwood Anderson, Dreiser, May Sinclair, Joyce,” though the novel, Poore felt, “is Italian to the core.” The book became a bestseller as well as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and di Donato was hailed at the time as an important literary voice, an authentic working-class writer exploring the immigrant experience. In the book, he paints an acerbically negative picture of the Craftsmanship Award.
The novel follows a bricklayer named Paul who, like di Donato himself, is forced to leave school as a young man to support his immigrant family after his father’s death in an accident. In one extended scene, Paul competes for a New York Building Congress Certificate of Superior Craftsmanship against his fellow workers.
“I must win the award! said Dave the only Jew bricklayer—said Frank the Scotchman—said Barney the Irishman—said Tommy the Englishman—said Hans the German—said Grogan the ‘real’ American—said they all. I must win! prayed Paul.”
The effect of this competition, rather than enhancing the workers’ pride in their work, instead proves divisive, causing them to turn against one another: “The men ran away with the job; to the delight of the foreman and the firm. Years of bricklaying sense were amplified to a point of acute accuracy and speed, and a man’s spirit was mortified if he was a brick or cross-joint behind the next man. They never mentioned the award and became respectful strangers bearing each other a wholesome terrible hate.”
When Paul is named the winner, he is invited to the ceremony to receive his award in the presence of his fellow workmen. “At noon the men were summoned to a large space on the second floor. Upon a wooden platform was the committee; the dapper bright-eyed mayor, officials, a stenographer, a few newspapermen, and three richly dressed women. When the workers saw the women they removed their caps and hats. Speeches were made while the men stared at the sheer-silked legs of the three rich women.”
The honor of the award pales in Paul’s mind next to his sudden, inexplicable proximity to the “glaze-skinned, soft, white-fingered men who owned the great building and the city.” The class difference is simply too great for the workers and the owners to see each other as people. Just like workers as viewed by owners and journalists, in Paul’s perspective, seen from below, these men appear hardly like human beings at all. “That afternoon while laying brick he marveled at the memory of the dainty pink-cheeked perfumed dolls of men who gave out the awards and spoke tired high-class talk.”
When the details of a man’s personal identity have dissipated with time, and his words have not been recorded or otherwise preserved, what remains of a craftsman is his labor and the open question of his private self-awareness, hinted at, perhaps, in a photograph. The names of four of the award winners can be recovered by attending to Lewis Hine’s portraits of them performing their jobs.
Thomas Walsh, derrickman.
Thomas F. Walsh, the hoisting engineer identified in Belle Moskowitz’s Empire Statements, already demonstrated the difficulty of singling out a man with so common a name. There are thousands of Thomas Walshes in the 1930 US census—clerks, drivers, doctors, teachers, soldiers, dockworkers, farmers, bricklayers; there is a shipyard pipefitter, boilermaker, rope polisher, coal trimmer, nurse, and stenographer. Thomas Walsh, the award-winning derrickman, has nothing to identify him except his profession and his portrait.
In Men at Work, Hine identifies this as the “bell-man.” The portrait of Thomas Walsh shows him sitting in the well of a column top, the traveling block and hook load of a much lighter derrick slung into a rivet hole. Hine often included some indication of a worker’s profession in the setting or background of his formal portrait, as we see in the portraits of sheet metal worker Frank A. Moeglin and stone setter James P. Kerr, among others. In both images of Thomas Walsh, the derrick looms alongside him, as definitive as a signature. In the work portrait, Walsh gazes up at the derrick’s boom and fall line, beyond the camera’s frame, holding in his hands the two cords by which he relays signals to the hoisting engineer who tends the derrick’s engine on a floor below, out of sight of the ironworkers. When we admire the pictures of daring ironworkers “riding the ball” of the derrick’s hoist, it’s instructive to recall that their lives depend on the concentration, coordination, and skill of the hoisting engineer and the bellman.
Gus Comedeca, steam shovel operator, is another of the award winners whose identity has been reduced over time to his profession. I could find no records at all for a Gus Comedeca.
In the 1930 US census, however, instead of Comedeca, there is an August Camodeca, a “stationary engineer” in the industry “steam plant.” Could his name be misspelled on the lobby plaque? Newspaper announcements of the Craftsmanship Awards frequently misspelled or otherwise mangled the men’s names. It would be a different matter, however, if the name on the bronze plaque itself were incorrect. Yet this is not the only instance where a mistake of this kind may distort the worker’s identity on the commemorative plaque meant to honor him.
Gus Comedeca, steam shovel operator.
Augustino Camodeca, known as “Gus,” was born on December 29, 1893. A draft registration card from June 5, 1917, gives his birthplace as Hulberton, New York, near Lake Ontario. If this is the right man, he is thirty-seven years old in Lewis Hine’s portrait, married with three children.
He shows up in the Newark, New Jersey, telephone directory in 1922, and in the Elizabeth telephone directory in 1928, both times with the profession “eng.,” which must mean engineer. He’s in the 1930 census, residing at 342 Florence Avenue, in Hillside Township, New Jersey, and again in the 1947 and 1951 telephone directories. His April 26, 1942, draft registration card shows him still living at the same address. According to that document, he’s five feet eleven, two hundred pounds, with a “ruddy” complexion, working at the Naval Dry Dock in Bayonne, New Jersey. If this is the correct man, then he died at sixty-eight years old on September 1, 1962. He is buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Newark, New Jersey.
The contingencies of historical memory and identification are starkly illustrated by Hine’s work portrait of Gus Comedeca or Camodeca. In the photo, the name George J. Atwell is clearly visible on the steam shovel. While information about the steam shovel operator who helped to dig the foundations of the Empire State Building is not preserved, possibly including the correct rendering of his name, “Big George Atwell,” a “gray-thatched, bulldog joweled man,” appears in the newspapers with some frequency. In January 1931, in just one instance, he is mentioned for digging the foundation of 101 Wall Street, an excavation that inadvertently contributed to the archaeology of New York City, unearthing “pewter pitchers and plates, cannon balls, anchor chains, portions of the hulls of clipper ships,” as well as the foundations for an old hotel on land that was once an island known as Hunter’s Key.
Samuel Laginsky, glazier.
Samuel Laginsky won the Craftsmanship Award for his work as a glazier, installing windows on the Empire State. His identity is also confirmed by Lewis Hine’s photograph of him at his job, and he can be found standing between Gus Camodeca/Comedeca and James P. Kerr in the newspaper photograph of the first award ceremony in October 1930.
According to a document related to his naturalization in 1922, Samuel Laginsky was born on May 15, 1894, in Teplik, Russia, now Teplyk, Ukraine, about 180 miles south of Kyiv. A manifest at Ellis Island, dated April 21, 1906, shows three members of the Laginsky family arriving in the United States, a mother with two sons. Their passage was paid for by the husband and father, Samuel Laginsky Sr., residing at 257 Monroe Street in Brooklyn, a three-story brownstone that still exists.
Laginsky’s draft registration from 1917 makes him a year younger, with the birth date May 15, 1895. At that time, he is still listed as an “alien,” not a citizen. But Samuel is already a glazier, employed by the Springfield Sash and Glass Company. He’s married with one child. On the draft registration card, an address in Springfield, Massachusetts, has been crossed out and replaced by one in New Haven, Connecticut, where it seems the family had relatives. Samuel’s brother would eventually settle there. According to related records, the brother, Morduchi in some documents, or Mordka in others, changed his name to Morris, and in still other documents went by M. Louis or Louis M. He and his wife ran a house fixtures store, which, according to the New Haven city directory from 1931, they called “The French Fixture Company.” At the time Samuel received his Craftsmanship Award, he was thirty-three years old and lived with his family in the Bronx, on East 139th Street, a few blocks from fellow award winner Peter Madden. He and his wife, Sarah, age twenty-nine, had four children.
As is the case with other workers, while Samuel Laginsky remained anonymous, the products he installed were advertised in trade journals. In Glass Digest from June 1931, we can read, “The Empire State Building presents a phase of the modern building trend of interest to glass manufacturers, glass jobbers and distributors. The largest individual order for polished plate glass ever placed was filled by the Libbey-Owens-Ford Glass Company of Toledo, Ohio, supplying polished plate glass for over 5,000 windows in the Empire State Building.” According to the Starrett’s notebook, the window glass was installed by the Contractors Glass Company, and the window frames by the Campbell Metal Window Corporation of New York.
Samuel Laginsky suffered a gruesome death two years later. The Poughkeepsie Eagle-News ran a front-page notice on October 20, 1932, “Worker Killed in 10 Foot Fall. Glazier’s Skull Fractured as Window Frame Drops at Wingdale Hospital.” The accident, which had occurred the previous morning, October 19, is described in detail. Laginsky “pitched headlong from a window, 10 feet from the ground, under the impact of a heavy window frame that overturned on him as he went to work standing on the sill.” The district attorney ordered an investigation into the accident, citing the possibility of criminal negligence at the hospital, also known as the Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center, which had opened in 1924 and housed approximately five thousand patients. According to the article, Laginsky was thirty-five (in fact, he was thirty-seven or thirty-eight), and the father of five children, although the census lists only four. The oldest child would have been fifteen. In the aftermath of the accident, it seems the family moved in with their relatives in New Haven.
Adam Bigelow, winner of a Craftsmanship Award for dampproofing, is the final man I identified based on his profession. In the photo album created by the Starrett Corporation to document the Empire State’s construction, now in the collection of the Skyscraper Museum in lower Manhattan, there is an image very similar to this work portrait by Lewis Hine. There, the caption identifies the job the worker is performing, but not the worker. By naming the job, however, the album enabled me to identify Adam Bigelow. In Hine’s portrait, Bigelow is applying a cement compound to a masonry wall to make it watertight. According to the in-house notebook, dampproofing for the Empire State was applied by the Hydro-Bar Corporation of New York City. Work began on July 14, 1930, and was completed five months later on December 10, 1930. As is visible in this photo, the process consisted of spreading a grout mixture, composed of lime, cement, and other ingredients, over the entire interior surface of all exterior walls. An asphalt emulsion was then applied to this first layer, forming an elastic sheet approximately a sixteenth of an inch thick.
The 1930 census record for Adam Bigelow is dated April 23, two months before the Empire State job would begin. He was twenty-eight years old and lived in Union City, New Jersey, at 314 Forty-First Street, with his wife and two stepchildren, ages twelve and ten. The census indicates that his wife, Madeline, was sixteen at the time of her first marriage. Adam was born in New York, the grandson of German immigrants.
Tracing Adam Bigelow backward, he appears in the 1905 New York State census, age two, living with his parents in Hell’s Kitchen on West Fortieth Street in Manhattan. Adam’s father, August, is a roofer, closely related to dampproofing, which remained the family profession for several generations. By 1915, they had moved out of the tenement neighborhood to West Nineteenth Street in Weehawken Township, New Jersey. By then, in addition to Adam, now age twelve, there are five other children. A seventh child is present in the 1920 census.
In 1940, ten years after Lewis Hine took this portrait, Adam Bigelow still lived in Union City with his family. The two children are no longer stepchildren. Bigelow must have adopted them. A family tree posted online shows that Adam and Madeline also had a son, William G. Bigelow, born in 1933. William became a roofer, like his father and grandfather. One of William’s sons, Adam’s grandson, went on to become a successful professional wrestler, “Bam Bam” Bigelow, who died in 2007 of a drug overdose.
The family tree was posted online by Adam Bigelow’s great-niece. When I contacted her, she responded that only one member of the preceding generation was still alive, an elderly aunt, Adam’s niece, who confirmed that her uncle’s name is engraved on the plaque at the Empire State Building. According to this niece, several members of the family may have worked on the Empire State as roofers or dampproofers. Indeed, I found a Henry Bigelow, dampproofer, who may have worked alongside Adam on the Empire State and who received his own Craftsmanship Award in October 1932 for work on the Union Inland Terminal.
Adam Bigelow, dampproofer.
Adam’s great-niece regretted that she knew so little about him. Any papers or stories associated with his life had been passed down to other family members, now deceased.
“As far as Adam,” she wrote to me, “he was born and raised I’m told in Hell’s Kitchen in a large family. The family seemed to marry and slowly move one by one and buy houses in Bergen County in the Carlstadt/Rutherford area. Some of them making a brief stop in the Union City, North Bergen area of Hudson County as they moved from working poor to middle class.”
A Craftsmanship Award conferred by the New York Building Congress may have been welcome recognition from above when these workmen received it. But two generations later, Adam’s descendant remembered him for this other, very ordinary, American achievement, raising himself up into the middle class.
Lewis Wickes Hine, photographer, around 1930.
SEVEN
“LOOK HIM IN THE EYE”
The one workman present at the Empire State construction site for whom ample documentary evidence still exists is Lewis Hine himself. Hine published articles and essays; he wrote copious letters, which have been collected and published posthumously. During his lifetime, numerous journalists profiled him, and for three-quarters of a century, art historians and critics have been amassing a detailed literature, dissecting his images and assessing his importance as an artist. In the search to identify the workers, each scrap of information is significant as a clue to their lives. It ought to be much easier to approach Hine as a person and to understand what he brought to his work. Yet reading through his essays and letters and immersing myself in the critical debates surrounding his photographs, I find the reverse to be true. The mass of information and the various interpretations help situate Hine in a broader intellectual and historical landscape. But strangely, in establishing Hine’s larger cultural importance, critics have muddled what seems to me the peculiar genius manifest in the individual photographs. Just as I have narrowed my focus from the conceptual to the specific in order to see the men in his portraits as people rather than symbols, so, to grasp what is most extraordinary about Hine as a photographer, I think we must separate the sources from the stories that have grown up around them—to separate, that is, what is said about Hine, even what he said about himself, from what happened in the instant he tripped the shutter.
