Men at Work, page 18
George McWeeney was seventeen when his grandfather Thomas died. But he visited his grandparents often, and for years Thomas and his wife Mary would come from New York to spend a month with George’s family in Chicago. These visits created problems for Thomas’s daughter-in-law, George’s mother. Mary, it seems, was a difficult house guest.
Thomas McWeeney, elevator constructor, photographed by Hiram Myers.
“I remember those days—and I remember them because they made my mother so miserable,” George said. “Tom’s wife, Mary, she was not well educated. But she would always expect to be treated like a princess. A certain kaiser roll in the morning, a certain marmalade. I would stay up late and hear my mother sobbing about how Mary made her feel. She’d complain to my grandfather.”
I asked George whether his grandfather ever talked about his work on the Empire State Building.
“He never even spoke of it,” he responded, somewhat disappointedly. “Different generation, different times. Maybe sometimes, when we would see from time to time pictures of the construction, then maybe he’d talk about it.”
Was it something that people talk about in the family today? I wanted to know.
“It’s been so long now,” George said, “he’s been gone forty-five years.”
But George felt a lingering sense of achievement.
“I’m always amazed myself. I understood the importance of it. He didn’t finish school or go to college, and there he was working on the Empire State Building with his name on a plaque in the lobby, which is exactly one more than I have!”
George had never seen the photograph that Hiram Myers took of his grandfather in 1931.
“He looks very serious,” he said when I sent it to him, “like he’s worried about where next month’s rent is going to come from. Looking at it reinforces what I felt before. He wasn’t a particularly happy guy, and he seems a little dour in that picture.”
According to George’s father, the atmosphere growing up in the household was still characterized by the challenges of the Great Depression.
“Times were really tough for him,” George said. “He didn’t have a college degree. They lived through some hard times.” And this experience left a lasting impression on the mood at home. As George put it, “Like all the time, they were sort of asking, ‘Why was I dealt this hand of cards?’”
George recalled his grandfather sharing one embarrassing moment from that time. “One story he told, this was during the Depression, he was going to get a meal, and he got to the counter to pay for it, and he had stolen some sugar packets—sugar was being rationed or something in those days—and the guy says, ‘it’s $2.40 for the meal. And 40¢ for the sugar.’”
Nevertheless, as a grandfather, Thomas seems to have escaped the pall of those times.
“I have nothing but fond memories of him,” George said.
I wondered whether George had ever seen his grandfather’s Craftsmanship Award.
“I had pictures of it!” he exclaimed.
He was referring to the bronze plaque in the lobby, partly confirming Al Smith’s belief that the plaque would remain a touchstone for the award winners’ families down through the generations. But George was unaware that his grandfather had received an award certificate and a gold button at a formal ceremony in the building.
“I never saw that,” he said of the framed Craftsmanship Award and the gold lapel pin, of which the New York Building Congress was so proud. “And I’m sure I’d remember if I had.”
It wasn’t something he had hanging on his wall at home? I asked.
“Definitely not. I remember going to his home often, and I never saw anything like it. It wouldn’t have surprised me if, when they were moving some time, say from house A to house B, he said, ‘Aw, screw it. I don’t need that thing.’”
Frank W. Pierson Jr. came from a family of metalworkers, two of whom were named Frank Pierson. This created some confusion in identifying the man in Hiram Myers’s photo. In the 1910 census, Frank W. Pierson, then thirty-four years old, lived on West 125th Street with his wife, two sons, and his father. Frank was born in May 1875 in Chicago. His younger son, also named Frank, was born in New York in January 1908. By 1930, both Franks were metal lathers. Which one appears in Hiram Myers’s photo? The younger Frank Pierson was twenty-two years old in 1930. Judging from the portrait itself, it seems more probable that the father, by then age fifty-four, received the award. But perhaps both men were on the job at the Empire State Building.
An employment record shows the elder Frank W. Pierson working in the Panama Canal Zone in 1914 but does not specify his profession. According to his 1918 draft registration, however, he was a metal lather for Henry Steers & Co., located on the Brooklyn-Queens waterfront.
At the Empire State Building, as indicated on his portrait, the award winner Frank W. Pierson worked for Martin Conroy & Sons Inc., a subcontractor for metal lathing and plastering. On August 14, 1930, the company had forty-nine men at work on the Empire State: forty-five lathers, three laborers, and a foreman, performing work on the tenth through seventeenth floors.
In 1940, the father, by now a widower, lived with his son and daughter-in-law on Woodycrest Avenue, the Bronx. Both men were still working as “wire lathers.” The father, Frank W. Pierson, died in 1953 and is buried in Sparkill, Rockland County, New York. An entry in the official Florida Death Index shows that the son, Frank Woodruff Pierson Jr., died at age seventy-eight, on March 13, 1986, in Pinellas County, Florida.
Frank W. Pierson Jr., metal lather, photographed by Hiram Myers.
Owen Scanlon, the marble setter’s helper photographed by Hiram Myers, worked for William Bradley & Son Inc., a legendary marble yard located in Long Island City. Transportation, the giant sculpture adorning the entrance to Grand Central Terminal in New York City, was carved from Indiana limestone at the yard. The firm also cut the marble for the Chrysler Building, the Frick mansion (now the Frick Collection), and many other famous buildings in New York. The fact that Scanlon worked for William Bradley & Son Inc. helps to place him more specifically at the worksite. This company subcontracted for the marble work in the Empire State Building’s lobby. Interior marble work above the lobby was performed by a different subcontractor, the Traitel Marble Company.
Setting the marble in the Empire State’s lobby proved to be a serious challenge for the builders, beginning with the selection of the stone, since few quarries could supply sufficient quantities in the time necessary to complete construction. “The final selection,” as H. R. Dowswell, a member of Shreve, Lamb, and Harmon’s staff, reported in The Architectural Forum, “was Belgian Black base surmounted by a colorful combination of Estrellante and Rose Famosa.” Yet this decision presented practical problems.
Colorful marbles are invariably unsound and consequently difficult to cut, transport and set. On the Empire State Building, it was felt that the unusual height of the marble wall facing, some of which extends through three stories, demanded that every precaution be taken to insure permanency. It was accordingly decided to line completely the back of all Estrellante and Rose Famosa marble facing with an absolutely sound material. Ozark Missouri Gray marble 7/8” thick was accordingly secured, with German cement, to the back of each piece of wall facing, and the double thick material set and anchored in the usual manner.
Further detail is revealed in an advertisement placed in the Delaware Milford Chronicle:
It may be interesting to know that the L.D. Cault Company supplied the material that was used in the interior construction of the Empire State Building, New York. After the famosa stone was cemented on the limestone and placed in position in the building, the famosa stone separated from the limestone and fell in the corridors. This was due to the difference in the expansion of the two stones when subjected to a marked change in temperature. When this condition took place The Caulk Company was called into consultation and in their research department developed a material that met their every requirement and enabled the contractors to finish their contract on time. So when you visit the Empire State Building and you look upon the beautiful interior finish of the corridors, it will be interesting to know that the cement which holds the beautiful stones in place was manufactured by The L.D. Caulk Company, Milford, Del.
Owen Scanlon, marble setter’s helper, photographed by Hiram Myers.
It’s possible to trace Owen Scanlon with comparable precision to his birthplace in County Leitrim, Ireland. He appears in the Irish census of 1911, age five, living on a farm with his parents and five older siblings. His 1927 Declaration of Intention indicates Scanlon immigrated to the US aboard the ship SS Samaria, arriving in New York on October 26, 1926. In the Ellis Island database, an Owen Scanlon does arrive with his father on this ship and date, headed for the home of his brother, Thomas, at 407 West Fifty-First Street between Ninth and Tenth Avenues. Thomas, nine years older than Owen, had arrived in the US six years earlier. On the Declaration of Intention, Owen gives his birthday as May 15, 1906, meaning he was twenty-one when he arrived. According to that document, he had a “ruddy” complexion. He’s five feet nine, 150 pounds, with brown hair and gray eyes.
While Owen’s profession is initially “laborer,” his brother’s declaration lists “Marble Setter’s Helper” as his occupation. Owen’s professional path thus appears to have been preordained. One year later, in 1927, when Owen petitions for US citizenship, he has also become a “Marble Setter’s Helper.” That document is witnessed by his two brothers, Thomas and James. James, too, is a marble setter’s helper. In 1930, when Owen Scanlon won the Craftsmanship Award, he lived with Thomas, by then thirty-two, and his sister Rose, age thirty, on Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan between Eighty-Eighth and Eighty-Ninth Streets. All three brothers may have worked on the Empire State Building.
Ferruccio Mariutto, terrazzo worker, photographed by Hiram Myers.
Six years later, Owen Scanlon died in a car accident. The Poughkeepsie Eagle-News for August 6, 1936, reported that Scanlon had “lost control of the car on a steep grade” while driving on Tongue Mountain, near Lake George, New York. Scanlon initially survived the accident with two broken legs. But he died in the hospital the following day. He was twenty-nine years old.
Ferruccio Mariutto, the award-winning terrazzo worker, is the last craftsman identified in the photos taken by Hiram Myers. Mariutto was employed by the De Paoli Del Turco Foscato Corporation, which had its office on West Forty-Fifth Street in Manhattan. On the note scribbled on the back of his portrait, Mariutto’s home address is given as 931 Quincy Avenue, the Bronx.
Both Mariutto and another award winner, Pietro Vescovi, are mentioned in an article by Javier Grossutti of the University of Trieste, discussing the contributions to American construction by craftsmen from the northern Italian region of Friuli. According to Grossutti, the company, L. Del Turco & Bros., was established in 1910 by Louis Del Turco, an immigrant from Sequals, about sixty-five miles north of Venice and a famous center of terrazzo work for centuries. Del Turco soon after joined with a company founded in 1899 by Vincent Foscato and continued by his two sons. The combined firm did terrazzo and tile work for many New York buildings, including the Steinway Building, Rockefeller Center, Lincoln Center, the United Nations Building, the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels, and the Guggenheim Museum. Despite virulent racial prejudice against Italians, Grossutti writes, mosaic and terrazzo workers from the Friuli region were recognized as “highly specialized labourers.” They were well paid and belonged to “the upper class of the labour force.”
Ferruccio Ettore Mariutto was born on January 14, 1912, in Koblenz, Germany. This is documented by both a 1931 and a 1933 Declaration of Intention to become a United States citizen. The latter document bears a photograph that confirms this is the same man who appears in the portrait by Hiram Myers. According to the 1933 document, Mariutto had immigrated on December 7, 1928, on the vessel Roma from Genoa. His previous residence was Cavasso Nuove, Italy. His occupation, “Terrazzo mechanic.” He’s five feet five, 160 pounds, and seventeen years old.
At the time of his work on the Empire State Building, Mariutto was nineteen. He lived as a boarder at the home of Arthur Miani in the Bronx. A 1928 photo shows the neighborhood populated by single-story, wood-frame homes, though it was not far from the former Henry C. Overing mansion, a grand residence which had by that time become the headquarters of the Eastern Mission Association, run by the Apostolic Lutheran Church. Mariutto’s living arrangements were auspicious because a few years later, on May 5, 1935, he married Anna Miani, the niece of his landlord. Their connection does not appear to have been coincidental, however. The Mariutto and Miani families had been intermarrying for generations. Ferruccio’s sister Luigia married Gino Miani, himself the son of a Miani-Mariutto match. And a generation earlier, Ferruccio’s uncle, Angelo Pietro Mariutto, had married Luigia Miani.
In 1940, Ferruccio and Anna were living with their two-year-old son and Anna’s extended family at the same address on Quincy Avenue, on the eastern edge of the Bronx, near the current on-ramp to the Throgs Neck Bridge. The household included her parents and her three siblings, ages fifteen to twenty-two, as well as her father’s brother and his family, thirteen people altogether. All the adult men were terrazzo workers.
The documents do not show how the family weathered the Depression. However, they seem to have prospered. In 1938, now age twenty-six, Mariutto traveled to England aboard the Queen Mary. He described his profession as “manufacturer,” though he still lived at the same address in the Bronx. In 1950, Mariutto appeared twice in The New York Times as the purchaser of property in the Bronx. Ferruccio Mariutto died on January 1, 1976, and is buried in Mount Hope Cemetery, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.
“I’m brokenhearted as I hear you talk about this,” said Robin Mariutto, Ferruccio’s granddaughter, when I shared with her what I had learned from the documents. “My dad and my uncle Fred would have loved to talk to you. And my grandmother, Anna, she would have been a font of information. She could have given you the names of everyone on the crew.”
Robin was only eight years old when Ferruccio Mariutto, her grandfather, died of lung cancer, possibly mesothelioma related to asbestos exposure. According to Robin, Anna’s father, Ugolino Miani, had been the foreman at the Empire State Building on the terrazzo crew that included Ferruccio.
“I do remember my grandmother telling me—here’s how she put it: when the Empire State Building was going up, they were giving out the Craftsmanship Award, and she called it ‘a project to make the men feel better about building the skyline of New York.’ And what she said was—Ugolino had won the award on the Chrysler building. When they wanted to give it to him for the Empire State Building, too, he said, ‘I’ve already won it. Give it to my son-in-law.’”
This may be an instance where family memory and documentation collide. Ugolino Miani is not listed as one of the award winners for the Chrysler Building. Indeed, I could find no record of Ugolino Miani’s Craftsmanship Award, either in the Building Congress News or in contemporary newspaper accounts of the many award ceremonies. However, not all awards were reported, and the Building Congress News mentioned only some ceremonies and listed the award winners’ names for only some of these. Perhaps his award was for an unremarked, lesser-known building, or perhaps the story serves more as a description of Ugolino’s character than as a verifiable fact beyond family history.
“Tile, terrazzo, and marble have been in our family a long, long time,” Robin recalled, adding that whenever the family went out to a store or a restaurant, the men would look at the floor and critique the job.
“My uncle Fred talked about ‘the dance,’” she continued. “When they’re putting down terrazzo floors, there are chips that are shiny, that sparkle. The only one who’s allowed to lay those is the foreman. They carry a bag—what do they call it? A crossbody, with the marble chips.”
For the Empire State Building, the marble chips were of three types, Botticino, imported from Italy, Belgian black, from Belgium, and Cardiff green, from Maryland.
“To get a good distribution,” explained Robin, “you have to spread them evenly. You do this wild-ass throw that distributes the marble chips across the floor. That’s the mark of the artist. That’s the sign of the master, that spread of the marble.” Robin sighed. “I wish I had a video of him doing this.”
As the documents had shown, the family lived together in the Bronx, eventually building their own house.
“The three brothers, each had a floor in the house they built. There was land all around them,” Robin said. “Though it’s hard to believe now, they literally would go out on Thanksgiving morning and shoot a pheasant for Thanksgiving dinner.” She added that Ferruccio was an avid hunter and fisherman. The family still has a video, taken on a family vacation in Florida, that shows Ferruccio fishing. “And the look on his face,” Robin marveled, “it was the happiest my father had ever seen him.”
Perhaps because Robin’s stories came down primarily through her grandmother, Ferruccio’s wife, Anna, the figure of her great-grandfather, Ugolino, was especially important in her recollections. According to her, Ugolino had sponsored Ferruccio when he emigrated to the US. The family had retained close contact with their relatives in Italy, and as Robin recounted it, Ferruccio’s father had written to Ugolino, worrying, “If he doesn’t get out of this town, he’s going to end up a criminal.” Ugolino had taken the young man under his wing.
“He came to this country as a skilled schoolboy,” Robin said. “He apprenticed while he was here.” Robin also had the suspicion that Ferruccio and Anna’s marriage may have been arranged, “part of the agreement for bringing him over to the US.”
While Ferruccio died relatively young, at age sixty-four, Anna had a much longer life. “Grandma Anna, she was my personal hero,” Robin said. A widow for more than thirty-eight years, Anna lived to one hundred and remained devoted to Ferruccio’s memory.
