Men at Work, page 19
“She wanted to make sure the grandkids knew him and knew how proud he and she were to be Americans,” Robin said. “I asked her once in the 1990s if she missed him—he’d been gone for a long time by then. And she said, ‘Yes. It’s such a shame he’s missing out seeing his grandchildren growing up.’”
I wondered what Robin remembered of Ferruccio directly.
“He spoke with a very heavy accent,” she replied. “If you’d told me he was talking Italian, I would have been, ‘Okay.’” She laughed at the recollection. “This was a man who taught himself English by reading Dear Abby in the newspaper! And you know how they have the questions and answers? He would always say ‘An-swear.’”
But Ferruccio’s memory was important to her, and the Craftsmanship Award had, in its own way, become the medium though which Robin and her family remembered him.
“My relatives, they did take me to see grandpa’s name in the Empire State Building,” she said. “And anytime a friend tells me they’re going to New York, I tell them to go see the plaque in the lobby.” She laughed again, “And every time they go, they bring me a picture of it, as if I’d never seen it before.”
Yet the work on the Empire State Building and the Craftsmanship Award were not something that had occupied the family while Ferruccio was alive.
“I can tell you honestly, no. It didn’t become a thing until after he died. That plaque, that award, it gave the grandchildren a connection to their grandfather, who they might not otherwise have had a chance to remember,” Robin said. “I wish you had called eight months ago,” she continued after a pause. “In June my father passed away. I know he would have enjoyed this call.” She choked up at the missed opportunity.
It wasn’t the Craftsmanship Award or even the Empire State Building in any general, public sense that moved her, but rather this personal, intimate feeling, the connections and losses that suddenly became present to her when she thought about the role the award played in her family.
Second Craftsmanship Award ceremony, February 11, 1931.
The notes on the back of Hiram Myers’s photographs are the last documentation from Empire State Inc. concerning the men who won Empire State Craftsmanship Awards. For the remaining eleven men, connecting their names and faces, and determining details of their lives, depended on the contingencies of public documentation, which create their own random selection process, allowing some men to step forward against the dark background, while others remain vanishingly faint.
All of the sixteen Craftsmanship Award winners in the second group appear in a photo published in the Building Congress News in March 1931, documenting the ceremony that took place a month earlier, on February 11. The men are arranged in two rows, each holding his award certificate. Based on the information scribbled on the back of Hiram Myers’s portraits, it is possible to identify five of the men. Two more men, whose portraits do not appear to have been taken by either Lewis Hine or Hiram Myers, can nevertheless be identified as well.
Painting and decorating on the Empire State Building required only two months and did not begin until March 1931. Perhaps by this time, both Hine and Myers had moved on to other projects. But George R. Adams, the award-winning painter, can be seen standing in the center of the group photo in white overalls, displaying his Certificate of Superior Craftsmanship with a hint of a smile on his face. I was able to identify him by locating another photo, taken years later and published online on a genealogy website. In the later photo, Adams looks at the camera with a down-turned mouth. But in both photos, he has the same oval, bald head and slightly bulging forehead, unmistakably the same person.
When he worked on the Empire State Building, the painter George Adams was thirty years old and lived with his wife and their daughter, in Hempstead, Long Island. He was born on August 5, 1899. His father was a housepainter as well. The family can trace its roots at least as far back as Buckley Adams, born 1788 in Lincoln, Massachusetts. He appears to be distantly related to the second US president, John Adams.
George R. Adams, painter and decorator.
According to his obituary in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, George Robert Adams died on March 21, 1949. The article describes a man deeply connected to his community. He was “active in church and fraternal circles”; was a member of the Advance Hook and Ladder Company in Wantagh; and was a member of the advisory board of Bellmore Assembly, Order of Rainbow for Girls. George Adams’s granddaughter confirmed these details. But she had no personal or family recollections of her grandfather, who had died long before she was born.
William Deneen, elevator constructor’s helper, is another man who seems to have escaped the notice of both Lewis Hine and Hiram Myers, but who can nevertheless be identified in the group photo of the Craftsmanship Award winners.
Originally, I had identified someone else as William Deneen. Lewis Hine took both a portrait and a work photo of another elevator constructor, with a caption that clearly identifies the man’s job.
But a fragile thread of genealogical research was sufficient to find William Deneen’s son, also named William Deneen, known as Bill, who quickly corrected my mistake.
Unknown elevator constructor, photographed by Lewis Hine.
“The photo of the worker which you sent does not appear to me to have any resemblance to my father,” he wrote when I shared Hine’s portrait with him. Instead, he identified a different man in the photo published in the Building Congress News.
“My father died when I was ten,” Bill Deneen said. “He was working for Sealtest Dairies. He actually died on the job, a heart attack. I think he was a delivery man.”
The Social Security Administration lists Deneen’s date of death as June 25, 1958. He was fifty years old.
“I remember him as a big, strong man, though that’s probably from a ten-year-old’s perspective. Hard worker, very religious. Catholic.”
William Deneen, elevator constructor’s helper.
After William Deneen’s death, Bill and his family moved from Ardsley, New York, to North Carolina, where his mother had relatives.
“They were reserved people to begin with,” he said. “And in North Carolina, they were pretty isolated.”
I asked whether William’s work on the Empire State and his Craftsmanship Award were something the family talked about.
“No. They didn’t make as much of a to-do about it as we do these days,” he replied. He could not recall anyone speaking of it during his childhood, even when his father was alive.
“I don’t know that we ever went to the Empire State Building when we lived in New York.”
I wondered then how he knew about his father’s contribution to the building.
“It was probably finding this commemorative plaque,” Bill responded, referring to the award certificate William Deneen holds in the photo. “It was packed away. My mother had it, but you didn’t exactly see it. And when my mother died, I was the executor. The first time I saw it was when I went through her stuff. My wife had it framed for me.”
The certificate now hangs in Bill’s office.
“There’s a certain amount of pride that your father was such a well-respected person,” he admitted.
Bill’s son, Andrew, had taken an interest in the award when he saw it as a young man.
“I have a recollection of the certificate showing up framed in our house, and then asking about that,” he remembered.
He had tried to find more information about his grandfather’s work on the Empire State.
“I’ve spent a lot of time looking through the Hine photographs that are available in the online collection,” he said. “It’s been a dream to get into the archive and find the definitive photo of my grandfather.”
One man among Hine’s portraits of Craftsmanship Award winners may be tentatively identified by his clothing. Perhaps this man is Frank J. Klein, plasterer. It would be typical for plasterers and painters to wear white overalls, as can be seen in the photo of the second group of award winners, where George Adams, painter, is also in white. In this photo, the distinctive hat would also tend to identify the man as belonging to the indoor trades. Spots of plaster or paint can be seen on the brim of his hat and on his neck. In the background, we see unfinished masonry surrounding a structural column and what may be the edge of a ladder, just above the man’s shoulder.
The name Frank J. was common among German or Austrian immigrants, who bore the Americanized version of the Hapsburg kaiser’s name, Franz Josef. Three men in the 1930 census seem like possibilities. One was a mason, one a paint mixer at a paint factory. The third is a plasterer, although the census gives the industry as “house building,” not construction. This Frank J. Klein is twenty-two years old, living on East Seventy-Fourth Street, Brooklyn, with his parents. But visually, that seems too young to be the man in this photo.
Whether or not this is the right man, the Frank J. Klein who won a Craftsmanship Award on the Empire State Building probably worked for Martin Conroy & Sons Inc., 110 West Fortieth Street in Manhattan. The plastering contract for the building was large enough to warrant its own paragraph in The New York Sun. The plaster supplier, Structural Gypsum Corporation, also placed advertisements in several trade journals, boasting that its products were being used on the highest building in the world. But none of the men who performed the work is mentioned in the newspapers.
Frank J. Klein, plasterer (tentative).
Pietro Vescovi, who won a Craftsmanship Award as a terrazzo worker’s helper, is the final member of the second group of award winners who may be tentatively identified, in this case, by his mustache. In a strange coincidence, a professional contact of mine happened to mention that his college roommate was the grandson of an Empire State construction worker named Vescovi. Indeed, Jim Vescovi’s grandfather, Antonio Vescovi, was a terrazzo worker, who himself won a Craftsmanship Award in April 1930 for his work on 40 Wall Street. Pietro Vescovi, who won the award for the Empire State, was a cousin or an uncle. As a child, Jim heard stories about him, passed down from his grandfather to his father to him.
Pietro Vescovi, terrazzo worker’s helper (tentative).
“He was short, pretty stocky, and very strong,” Jim related when I spoke with him on the phone. “Pietro and Antonio would argue about who was stronger.”
One story involved each man lifting the other over his head to prove his strength. Beyond that, Jim said, “he loved to drink white wine. He would come over to my grandfather’s on Saturdays and drink. Most of them made their own wine and kept it in the cellar.”
Jim never met Pietro Vescovi. But looking at Lewis Hine’s photos, he identified this man. “That looks a lot like my grandfather,” he said. “Same mustache.”
Genealogical information, however, makes this identification highly tentative.
Like Ferruccio Mariutto, the other terrazzo worker to receive a Craftsmanship Award, Pietro Vescovi is mentioned in Javier Grossutti’s paper, “Emigration from Friuli Venezia Giulia Towards the United States.” This source identifies Vescovi’s birthplace as Berceto di Parma, about halfway between Genoa and Bologna, in northern Italy. But this turns out to be incorrect.
Pietro Vescovi does indeed arrive in the United States from Castellonchio, Parma, about five miles from Berceto, aboard the SS Giulio Cesare on September 19, 1923. He’s sixteen years old, which would make him twenty-four in 1931 when he won a Craftsmanship Award, too young to be the man in this photo. When this Pietro Vescovi arrived in the US, he joined his father, Giuseppe, who had emigrated much earlier, in May 1875, at age twenty-four. The father had immigrated with another Pietro Vescovi, perhaps the grandfather. But in 1923, the younger Pietro, who would go on to help build the Empire State, was returning to the US, not arriving. He was born in New York, not Italy. A handwritten note on the 1923 manifest indicates that he presented his birth certificate on arrival. His birthdate was June 2, 1907. A New York City record shows a “Peter” Vescovi born on this date to a family residing at 42-15 Twenty-Third Avenue, in Astoria, Queens. The only other record I could find for Peter Vescovi was the Social Security Death Index in January 1986. His last residence was Long Island City, just a few blocks from where he was born.
For the final winners of Craftsmanship Awards—seven from the second group, and one from the first group, cement mason Gino Santoni—my search was inconclusive. At the first award ceremony, in October 1930, Al Smith had said the names on the bronze plaque in the building’s lobby would be preserved as a statement, a testimonial to the men’s contribution to their city, their state, and their country. But as the publicity surrounding the award ceremonies died away, and attention turned to the grand story of the building as a monument, these names were left in its shadow. At the scale of the individual, where precise names become significant, not enough information survived for me to connect the names and the faces. Only in a few cases did biographical research yield some material. I could find no Gino Santoni, for example, but several Eugene Santinis. Perhaps this name, too, is misrepresented on the award plaque. Here is where the image becomes blurriest and the bronze tablet in the building’s lobby turns opaque. We know the men’s names, more or less. It seems probable we have at least some of their photos. But for now, at least, the connections between the names and the faces cannot be restored. Like Hine’s dissociated portraits, they confront us not as statements, but as questions. The new who’s who.
These are the remaining names:
John Connolly, Roofer;
Joseph Leffert, Tile Setter’s Helper;
R. Maddalena, Tile Setter;
William L. Moran, Steamfitter’s Helper;
John E. O’Connor, Plumber;
Gino Santoni, Cement Mason;
Louis Shane Jr., Marble Setter;
Clifford Smith, Electrician.
And these are the faces of unidentified workers on the Empire State Building, at least some of whom, based on their resemblance to men who appear in the group portrait published in the Building Congress News, were winners of Empire State Craftsmanship Awards.
Unidentified workers.
Unidentified workers.
NINE
THE SKY BOY
On June 16, 1931, columnist Henry W. Clune noted one very conspicuous way that Belle Moskowitz made use of Lewis Hine’s magnificent photographs of the men who built the Empire State. “Turning the corner of this fantastic modern Babel recently, I noticed a whole main-floor window devoted to photographs of the workmen who actually had lifted up and secured in place the tiered beams that reached ultimately to the lower stratum of cloud mists.” Shortly after the building’s grand opening, the corner windows at Fifth Avenue and Thirty-Third Street became a showcase for Hine’s portraits. Clune, one of the first to review Hine’s Empire State photos, provides a characteristic gloss on the men. “Below the serrated lines of forehead, clear eyes that held the half twinkle of D’Artagnan adventures looked straight out at their beholders.”
Nor was Empire State the only office building to highlight Hine’s extraordinary images. An undated memo from Publicity Associates indicates that “the New York Times has agreed to place a number of Mr. Hine’s photographs in their Times Square windows.” As the Great Depression entered its second year, Moskowitz must have recognized the public relations value of celebrating the building’s May 1 opening with a heroic display of workmen, rather than as a triumph of American business. Noting this about-face in the building’s publicity strategy in The Skyscraper in American Art, 1890–1931, Merrill Schleier writes, “Raskob’s and Smith’s working-class roots, Hine’s sympathetic views of the skyscraper builder, and the realities of the Depression shifted the emphasis from the businessman to the common man. In the face of rampant unemployment, the omnipotent workman was a source of hope and a role model for the struggling masses.” A contemporary note in The Daily Worker offered a less detached perspective on this display of Hine’s photos. “I wish to call your attention to the irony of the recent picture exhibition shown in the windows of the Empire State Building. They are ‘art-photos’ of the proletariat who constructed the skyscraper. Now they are out of work. And all the benefit and value of their labor goes to Al. Smith [sic] and company.” Another contributor to the Daily Worker was harsher. “The gall of Al Smith and other owners of the building, to show a photo exhibition of workers who built it, workers who gave their lives to put it up—who own not one brick in it, and are not allowed to enter it except to scrub the floors and are now jobless and hungry.”
In pictures of the display, found in the archives of the architects, we can see rock driller Michael Tierney featured prominently, along with many other Hine photos that would eventually become among the best-recognized images in American photography. The exhibit itself attracted public attention and over the coming months it would appear in other venues as well. Hine titled it The Human Element in Skyscrapers.
These prominent displays, along with the excitement and ubiquitous publicity in the run-up to the building’s grand opening, gave a lift to Lewis Hine’s career. The Survey Graphic published a well-received, multipage spread of Hine’s images in January 1931, titled “Up from the City Streets,” in a nod to the 1928 biography of Al Smith, written by Belle Moskowitz’s husband, Dr. Henry Moskowitz. A few weeks later, Hine delightedly informed Paul Kellogg, “World’s Week has just waked up to my existence and is using special stuff and wants more. A raft of lesser lights are using the skyboys and altogether a little stream of shekels trickles in and the applecart job seems more remote.” Hine began to garner national attention for his work, and he shared his gratitude with Paul Kellogg in another letter ringing in equal measure with vindication and humility. “It was only a year ago, come St. Patricks’ (the birthday of Al’s Big Shanty), that I decided to move out into the open spaces where there is less overhead and more under foot, for I thought I had shot my best bolts and was ready for the armchair by the fire. Some subsequentials would indicate that there is a lot of wallop in the old Model T, if only the supply of gas and oil holds out. There is nothing to brag about but a deal to be thankful for.” In a touching addendum to one letter, Hine thanks his friends for their years of support. “I want to tell you I shall always remember what a factor you two and Survey have been in putting my stuff on the map, to say nothing of what your appreciation and encouragement have meant all through the first quarter century of Hineography. The other three quarters ought to be that much easier.”
