Men at Work, page 17
In October and November 1930, business leaders like John Jakob Raskob and Charles M. Schwab, president of Bethlehem Steel, were still predicting that the economic situation had stabilized. “The indications of the past six or eight weeks are that the bottom has been reached,” announced Raskob, quoted in an article entitled, “Schwab Sees Record Prosperity.” In their view, things were looking up. Articles aimed at boosting the public mood claimed that “the cloud of depression is not without its silver lining.” Those with “small salaries but steady jobs,” one journalist trilled hopefully, might enjoy the “increased buying power of money.” “A pair of real silk hose can be bought for less than a dollar.” By February and March 1931, however, such pronouncements had mostly ceased.
While the stock market surged on Wednesday, February 11, 1931, the day the second group of Craftsmanship Awards were presented, closing at its highest level for the year, the headlines on the business page of The Brooklyn Daily Eagle expressed the uncertain situation: “Hardware Demand Is Only Moderate,” “Commodity Prices Are Still Wobbling,” “Steel Demand Spotty,” “Refined Copper Stocks Decrease.” The following day, The New York Times reported that the seventy-nine breadlines in New York City, serving seventy thousand meals a day, would coordinate their mealtimes, in order to “curtail the necessity for men spending nearly all day going from one bread-line to another to obtain enough food to sustain them.” The same article noted that salaries for white collar workers in January 1931 had declined 30 to 50 percent compared to January 1930.
Lewis Hine produced portraits of all sixteen (or seventeen) Craftsmanship Award winners in the first group, representing the structural trades. He photographed fewer than ten of the sixteen winners from the finishing trades. Perhaps these portraits are simply missing. Or perhaps, caught up in the thrill of following the ironworkers to the pinnacle, Hine spent less time with the men whose more prosaic work took place indoors. Or perhaps, like the newsmen and even Belle Moskowitz’s publicity office, Hine’s interest waned once the drama of structural ironwork concluded. Yet clearly, the publicity office had commissioned him to photograph the winning craftsmen. When Hine left this part of his assignment unfinished, Belle Moskowitz hired another photographer to supply the missing portraits. Hiram Myers, a colleague of Hine’s, whose darkroom he had occasionally used since at least 1919, photographed five of the men absent from Hine’s documentation of this second group of award winners. At least initially, Publicity Associates intended to create a complete set of portraits. Had Belle Moskowitz planned a second photo spread of winners for a later edition of Empire Statements, recognizing men from the finishing trades? Or did she imagine some other publication or commemoration, devoted to all the award winners? If so, it did not come to fruition. With the building’s grand opening looming, the publicity office may have been absorbed in more pressing matters. Whatever the reason, this second group of award winners fell by the wayside. Two men—William Deneen, an elevator constructor’s helper, and George R. Adams, a painter—were not photographed at all.
In every respect, the men of the second group of award winners were treated differently. While many of these men appear among Lewis Hine’s photos, none of the prints that ended up in the archives bears a name or other clue to the man’s identity. Indeed, none of Hine’s prints of the second group that I viewed had handwritten notes of any kind, in significant contrast to the first group. Additionally, there seem to be fewer images of these men, and frequently no images of them at their jobs. These sixteen award winners were equally honored by Al Smith, the contractors, and the New York Building Congress at a public ceremony. But they appear to have suffered from coming second and, perhaps, from belonging to less picturesque and “heroic” trades. While the ironworkers benefitted from being symbols of American achievement, and were featured in photo-essays and news outlets, no reporter published a profile of a plasterer. Journalistic attention made men of the structural trades exceptional, raising them from obscurity to momentary visibility, occasionally even preserving their full names. The men of the finishing trades had no such symbolic role to play. They remained ordinary workers, cloaked in unexceptional invisibility.
This invisibility has practical consequences for my search to reconnect the names on the Craftsmanship Awards plaque with the men in Lewis Hine’s photos. The lack of notes, the absence of work portraits, the lack of follow-through by the publicity office—these break the already fragile thread that connects the images to the individuals they document. Coincidentally, some of the men in the second group had particularly common names—John Connolly, John E. O’Connor. They were not just ordinary people in the usual sense, but additionally in this respect, fading more swiftly and thoroughly into the dark background of anonymity. As a result, they are more like their fellow workers who were not recognized with awards and whose association with the building has disappeared entirely. The only thing that distinguished the award winners was the award itself, and this was no more than a snapshot, in which they appeared for an instant and as quickly disappeared again.
In addition to the archives of Empire State Inc., the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University holds fifteen archival boxes of uncatalogued materials donated by the architectural firm that designed the Empire State Building, Shreve, Lamb, and Harmon. Most of these files concern famous visitors to the building—Queen Elizabeth, Winston Churchill, the king of Siam, movie stars, beauty queens, sports teams. One box, marked “1955, 1956,” includes a folder labeled “Birds Killed at ESB,” but contains no photos or articles about dead birds. Instead, it holds images of crowds waiting to enter the observatory. Another folder, enigmatically labeled “Empire State Bldg., hold for decision by Carl Willes,” harbors additional photos of the building under construction, including unidentified portraits of three workers. The folders in the final, unnumbered box contain a seemingly random mixture of photographs—a dozen of those dead birds; a series showing the building’s opening ceremony; celebrity visits; a handful of construction photos, most likely by Lewis Hine but hitherto unidentified; and five portraits of craftsmen from the second group of award winners, with their names, professions, addresses, and the names of their employers handwritten on the back. All these portraits were taken by Hiram Myers.
Hiram Myers was born in 1888 in New York and died in 1967 in Florida. He came of age amid the same progressive social reform movements that had nurtured Lewis Hine and Belle Moskowitz. Like Hine, Myers became a social worker and “social photographer,” documenting the lives of immigrants and the working classes. Like Hine, he had photographed the appalling conditions of child laborers in the United States for the National Child Labor Committee. Indeed, a 1910 photograph attributed to Hine, showing a family in a ramshackle tenement, and now in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, may be misattributed. It features the same stamp on its back as the photos by Myers of the Empire State Building workers in the Avery collection: “Publication Subject To Written Permission Or Invoice Hiram Myers.” Elsewhere, Myers is identified as the head of the “Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, New York City,” and a notice in a 1929 edition of The Survey Graphic describes him as “a commercial photographer in New York who does a great deal of work for social agencies.” Myers’s selection to complete the job Hine left unfinished once again betrays the influence of Belle Moskowitz, who evidently used her position at Empire State Inc. to undertake her own, small-scale jobs program, employing photographers whose social commitments she respected and who were hit especially hard by the difficult economic times. But perhaps because Hiram Myers did not become famous, no one has previously recognized that both he and Hine were commissioned specifically to document the Empire State Craftsmanship Award winners. These five portraits have never been linked to Hine’s work. While Hine’s images were collected, celebrated, and decontextualized, Myers’s images remained unknown in these folders.
There are many differences in technique and nuance between Hine’s portraits and those taken by Myers. But even considered solely as contract work, the portraits were handled differently. While Hine was hired with a more expansive brief, Myers’s contribution appears to have been limited exclusively to these five portraits. And unlike Hine’s prints, which frequently bear his handwritten notes, the only inscriptions on the portraits taken by Myers, likely by a member of Belle Moskowitz’s staff, identify the men by profession and by employer. The publicity office was more interested in their affiliation with subcontractors than in the men as individuals. Nevertheless, like the plaque itself, the intentions of the publicity office have been reversed by time. The notes allowed me to confirm the identities of these five men, the only confirmations from Empire State Inc. for all the award winners in the second, neglected group.
The portrait of steamfitter Louis Hummell illustrates the difference between photographs by Hiram Myers and those by Lewis Hine. Although similar in composition and approach, they differ in the very quality that distinguished Hine’s genius. Myers’s portraits, like Hine’s, pose the men frontally or show them at their jobs. To my eye, however, Myers’s work lacks the personal depth, the dimension of interpersonal exchange, that characterizes those by Hine. The expressions reveal less, communicate less. The men seem more self-conscious and so somehow less themselves. The photographs are both less specific and less symbolic.
The caption on the back of Louis Hummell’s portrait names him and his employer. The firm, Baker, Smith & Co., was responsible for the installation of the heating and ventilation on the Empire State. In the notebook documenting the date on which the most workers were present at the construction site, the company had 189 men working, seventy-five on heating, and 114 doing ventilation work. Additional men from the company may have been involved in pipe covering. At that time, Baker, Smith & Co. was already an old firm. An advertisement in The New York Times from May 5, 1865, features a “low pressure steam heating apparatus,” patented by Baker, Smith & Co., located at 37 Nassau Street. Other documents show the company in existence prior to the Civil War.
Details of the job Hummell and his coworkers performed at the Empire State Building can be found in several articles from the time. One, published in The Architectural Forum in October 1930, was written by Henry C. Meyer Jr., of the firm Meyer, Strong & Jones, the mechanical engineers for the Empire State Building and a company that still exists today. Here we learn that the building would contain seven thousand radiators with a total of 227,000 square feet of heating surface. The heating plant was divided among several different zones, with equipment in the subbasement, the twenty-ninth and fifty-fourth floors. To accommodate these heating mains without reducing the ceiling height in offices, the structural design for those two upper tower floors extended to seventeen feet, instead of the more typical eleven feet six inches. Further technical information about the plumbing and drainage systems, “interesting to all readers,” appeared in The Plumbers and Heating Contractors Trade Journal in November 1930. To handle its massive plumbing, the Empire State Building, which the author refers to as “this noble pile,” was outfitted with “two 8-inch soil stacks and their two 8-inch vents, four 6-inch soils and their 6-inch vents, one 5-inch sink stack, and six 4-inch waste stacks with separate 5-inch vent stacks all reach to the very top of the structure,” where some twenty-five pipes stick out “into the ozone so to speak.”
Louis Hummell, steamfitter, photographed by Hiram Myers.
While documentation of the job he performed is plentiful, records for Louis Hummell, with two L’s, are hard to come by. There was a steamfitter named Louis Hummel with one L, however, and the US census intimates a concise family history. Is this another instance in which the award winner’s name is misspelled on the commemorative plaque?
In 1920, Louis Hummel, eighteen, lived with his widowed mother and two brothers, on Second Avenue between Fifty-First and Fifty-Second Streets. By this time, Louis was already a steamfitter. An earlier record included an older child, Irene, but by 1920, she no longer lives with the family. The children were all born in New York, while their mother, Agnes, and their deceased father were both born in Ireland. Agnes is a laundress for a private family. A 1921 photo of Fifty-Second Street between Second and Third Avenues, held at the New York Public Library, shows a run-down neighborhood with loose cobblestones sticking up from a giant pothole in the middle of the street. A 1927 photo of Fifty-Second Street reveals a mixture of two-, three-, and four-story buildings, some dilapidated, while several lots are undergoing excavation for new construction.
In 1918, Louis George Hummel registered for the draft. This document provides a birth date, September 6, 1900. He registered on September 12, 1918, which would put him just a week past his eighteenth birthday. However, the New York City Births Index shows Louis G. Hummel was born on October 6, 1901. It seems likely that he lied about his age to join the army.
On July 14, 1925, Louis G. Hummel married Edith Margaret Melia, born in 1903. She may have been a girl next door, because she shows up in the 1920 census living with her mother just around the corner from the Hummel family, in her grandmother’s apartment on East Fifty-Second Street. There is a birth record for a daughter, born to Louis and Edith, on December 20, 1925, five months after the marriage license.
For the next twenty years of their lives, however, I could find few documents for Louis George Hummel or for his family. It appears that Louis and Edith separated or divorced. The 1940 census shows Edith living with a man named Nelson, though it misspells her name as “Thummel.” And in 1942, when Louis again registers for the draft, he lists his mother Agnes as his closest contact. Louis is still working as a steamfitter, now for the Whitney-Dierks Heating Corporation, located in Long Island City. Agnes M. Hummel died on June 9, 1943, and is buried in Mount Saint Mary Cemetery in Flushing, Queens. Louis G. Hummel died of heart disease on May 15, 1954, and he is also buried at Mount Saint Mary Cemetery.
On August 14, 1930, the date documented in the sole surviving Daily Job Report, the Otis Elevator Company had four foremen, ninety-eight mechanics, and 113 helpers at work installing elevator rails, piping, and wiring. Signal work, then a novelty which allowed elevators to function with both greater autonomy and more centralized control, occupied an additional twenty-eight men, bringing the total at work that day to 243. Because of the unprecedented size of the building, new kinds of hoisting motors, along with other safety innovations, were necessary to make elevator service practical. Indeed, as in the case of the dancing derricks which so appealed to William Engle, these autonomous elevators were sometimes seen as figures for the ideal worker. “Here we have a mechanism which is about as human as mechanical ingenuity can make it,” wrote a New York Times correspondent, identified only as “W.K.” “It has a sort of mind, because it takes and obeys orders. It responds to signals, remembers all the stops that it must make, never missing one, speeds itself up and slows itself down at a rate which is not distressing to the pit of the stomach, flings doors open and shuts them, watches intently whether so much as a hand is stretched between the car floor and the landing and refuses to move until the hand is withdrawn to safety.”
But while the surviving Job Report recorded the highest number of laborers at the building in total, it does not appear to reflect the peak of elevator installation. According to a celebratory pamphlet issued by the Otis Elevator Company describing their work on the Empire State Building, twenty-seven elevator constructors began work at the site on May 5, 1930, when steel had reached the sixth floor. By July 11, 280 men were employed constructing the fifty-eight passenger elevators, six freight, two tower, and a final mooring mast elevator for the finished building, as well as maintaining and extending the material lifts for construction supplies and the independent, temporary elevators necessary to bring workers to their jobs throughout the rising structure.
One of these men was thirty-year-old Thomas McWeeney. Thomas Francis McWeeney was born on February 5, 1900, the son of Irish immigrants. In the 1905 New York State census, the family, including three children, lives on Second Avenue in Manhattan between 103rd and 104th Streets. The father, John, is a driver.
Thomas McWeeney enlisted in the US Army in April 1917. He served overseas as the bugler in the Fifty-Eighth Artillery company for a year and was discharged on May 7, 1919. By 1930, when he received the Craftsmanship Award, he was married and living in a rented two-story, two-family home on Eighty-Ninth Street in Queens with his wife, also the daughter of Irish immigrants, and two young children.
By 1940, McWeeney was an elevator inspector for the Argonaut Insurance Company in New York. His family had grown with the birth of a son in 1932. They lived in a rented home on Forty-Fifth Street in Queens. Thomas was making a good living, with an annual income of $2,440, at a time when the median income was $956.
Like his father, McWeeney’s older son, also named Thomas, joined the armed forces, and he served in the Marines during World War II. He was wounded twice, and items about him appear in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle on August 29, 1944, and again on June 20, 1945. The articles note that his parents live on Eighty-Second Street in Jackson Heights, Queens. Sometime after the war, like so many families, the McWeeneys moved out of the city to the suburbs, settling in Garden City, Long Island. Thomas McWeeney Sr. died on August 31, 1978, and is buried in Long Island National Cemetery, East Farmingdale, in Suffolk County.
“He was a great guy,” his grandson George McWeeney recalled. “You wanted to know him. He always came out as being smarter than most people in the room, always had stories to tell, and when he started to tell a story, people listened. One of these guys you like to have around.”
