High Steel_ The Daring Men Who Built The World's Greatest Skyline Part 11

Jerry, meanwhile, had crossed a short beam that lay perpendicular to Matt's. He stood and waited for the next piece of steel that would complete the prow-the third leg of the triangle. Matt exhaled, then turned and called to Jerry. What? What? Matt pointed at his bolt bag. Jerry reached into his own bolt bag, pulled out a bolt, and tossed it underhand to Matt, who swiped it from the air with one hand. (Had he missed, the bolt would have sailed out over 58th Street, a lethal missile, and probably taken out a winds.h.i.+eld-or worse.) He dropped the bolt into his bolt bag, then got back up on his feet. The third leg was descending. Both men stood on the steel, looking up, waiting for it. Neither was tied off. Matt pointed at his bolt bag. Jerry reached into his own bolt bag, pulled out a bolt, and tossed it underhand to Matt, who swiped it from the air with one hand. (Had he missed, the bolt would have sailed out over 58th Street, a lethal missile, and probably taken out a winds.h.i.+eld-or worse.) He dropped the bolt into his bolt bag, then got back up on his feet. The third leg was descending. Both men stood on the steel, looking up, waiting for it. Neither was tied off.

As the pace of the job increased, little accidents and near calamities began to acc.u.mulate. A beam rolled over the foot of a tagline man. A young African-American apprentice fell off a ladder and injured his back. In mid-October, Johnny Diabo, one of the connectors recently arrived from the Random House building, caught the tip of a finger between two pieces of steel and snipped it off. "It's funny," said Johnny as he regarded his damaged hand. "Just a couple weeks ago a few of us were sitting in a bar and saying how none of us had ever lost any fingers or toes." Johnny took the fingertip home with him to Kahnawake that weekend and buried it in his backyard-an old Mohawk custom, he said-then returned to work on Monday, the finger bandaged in gauze and black tape.

On a very windy afternoon in early November, Tommy, the operator of crane No. 3-Matt and Jerry's crane-was lifting a beam off the derrick floor when an updraft got under his 180-foot boom and pushed it skyward. Jerry lunged and grabbed the tagline hanging off the beam. He quickly wrapped it around a column, trying to prevent the boom from riding any higher. For a moment, this arrested the upward thrust of the boom, but then the tagline snapped and the boom shot off. Everybody who saw this understood what would happen the instant the gust let up: the boom would fall, and the beam dangling under it would hammer down onto the building. More precisely, it would hammer down onto the head of an unsuspecting young ironworker from Buffalo, New York, who sat on the steel frame directly under it, obliviously bolting up.

"Buffy-watch out!"

Buffy, as the young man was known to his fellow ironworkers, did not look up to see what was the matter. He heard his nickname, discerned the urgency behind it, and leaped as if significant voltage had been applied to his backside. He leaped the way people leap in cartoons, flying over the beam to a column and grabbing hold of it. SLAM! SLAM! The beam cracked onto the very spot where Buffy had been sitting an instant earlier. The collision made a loud noise and sent vibrations whipping through the frame of the building. The beam cracked onto the very spot where Buffy had been sitting an instant earlier. The collision made a loud noise and sent vibrations whipping through the frame of the building.

Later, as a number of ironworkers unwound at Smith's Bar on Eighth Avenue, they agreed that if Buffy hadn't been so young and so scared, he'd be dead now. "If it had been an older guy, he'd just sit there," said David Levy, a bolter-up in his early 40s who had watched the event unfold. "I probably would have just sat there on my a.s.s."

"Buffy was scared s.h.i.+tless," said Jerry. "I've never seen a man move faster in my life."

"I was scared," agreed Buffy. "It was pretty funny."

"I'd definitely be dead," said David Levy, who had the distinction of being one of a handful of Jewish ironworkers in New York and whose nickname was simply Jew.

"So, if somebody shouted, 'Watch out, Jew!'-" 'Watch out, Jew!'-"

"-I wouldn't move." He shrugged. "I'd be like , What the f.u.c.k is wrong with you? Don't bother me, a.s.shole. That's the problem with getting old in this business. It takes more to scare you." , What the f.u.c.k is wrong with you? Don't bother me, a.s.shole. That's the problem with getting old in this business. It takes more to scare you."

JACK GOES BACK.

Jack Doyle stepped out of a cab on the corner of Broadway and Liberty Street. It was a damp morning in mid-November. He wore a trenchcoat and pressed suit pants and a pair of two-tone leather bucks. The rain had ended, but the streets remained slick and the air misty and chilly, causing Jack's hip to ache a little. Favoring it, he approached the police barricade. He fished into his coat pocket for his pa.s.s, which he flashed before the police officer standing beside the barricade.

"Wrong pa.s.s," said the cop. "Brown was last week. This week is orange."

"Orange?"

"Yeah. They changed it."

"Is that right? Well, this is the one they gave me."

One of the ironworkers' foremen walked up to greet Jack, then had a quiet word with the cop. The cop finally relented: Jack was free to pa.s.s. Thirty-four years after the morning he first arrived in 1968, a catty young connector from Conception Bay, Jack Doyle walked down Liberty Street, back to where his journey to the top began.

All told, Jack had spent seven years of his life down here on the 16 acres of the World Trade Center. After topping out the north tower in 1970, he'd gone on to push a rig at 3 World Trade-the 22-story Marriott Hotel-then later became walking boss at 7 World Trade, a 47-story office building erected in the late 1980s. He'd worked in one capacity or another on every one of the seven buildings in the World Trade Center complex. And every one of them was gone now.

"Hey there, Jack." Several ironworkers greeted him as he walked west on Liberty Street. "Jack Doyle! h.e.l.lo!"

Ironwork had been good to Jack. Other than a few missing fingers, he'd gotten through his years on the steel without much damage. He and his wife had raised a family of three kids in the house on Staten Island he bought back in 1970, while pus.h.i.+ng his rig on Tower One. He'd sent the kids to good colleges and seen his son, Kevin, make Law Review at Seton Hall. He'd worked his way up through the ranks from pusher to walking boss, from walking boss to superintendent, and now, at the age of 58, he was president and business agent of Local 40 of the ironworkers union, which made him one of the top building trade executives in the city.

Jack approached the eastern edge of the site and looked out over the wreckage. Just two months had pa.s.sed since the attacks, but already an astonis.h.i.+ng 56,000 tons of debris had been trucked away, and the pile had been transformed into a pit. The pit still smoldered, exhaling a vapor of carbon monoxide, benzene, propylene, and several other possible carcinogens, but other than the odor, which was off-putting, Ground Zero seemed well controlled. The frenetic urgency that had characterized it for many weeks was gone, replaced by a trimmer and more efficient operation. From 300 ironworkers a few weeks earlier, the number had dropped to about 180.

Danny Robbins, a broad-shouldered, blond-haired ironworker, joined Jack at the edge of the pit. "Housewreckers still talking about taking down the Customs House with a wrecking ball."

"Smash it down? Sounds like a mess." They started walking north on Church Street, skirting the edge of the pit.

"Yeah, then our guys have to go in there and crawl all over it and burn it out and get hurt. It's stupid. We oughta go in there with a crane and take it apart."

"That makes more sense," agreed Jack. "I'll have a word."

"That'd be great."

They turned west, onto Vesey Street, and pa.s.sed the blackened and gutted Customs House. This had recently been a busy paved street cast in perpetual shade by the tall buildings surrounding it. Now it was a swath of sloppy mud, as empty as a country lane. A dirt field spread to the west and north, where pickups and SUVs were haphazardly parked. Jack stopped walking.

"That was 7 World Trade. That was a forty-seven-story skysc.r.a.per. I can't get over that. Look at that, it's a parking lot."

He stood there for a moment, gazing across the expanse of mud. 7 World Trade had never achieved quite the renown of the Twin Towers, but the job of building it was one that ironworkers talked about for years afterward. It was a big, complex job that involved hoisting and joining enormous members of steel, and a lot of men got badly hurt on it. One of the worst accidents befell a good friend of Jack's, Pat Kennedy, who lost his leg under a grillage of steel one morning while the building was still in the hole.

Danny Robbins led the way over rough ground, over beams and rebar. They came around the edge of the Customs House. The mud was thick and sloppy here. Jack, still catty after all the years, stepped lightly between patches of hard pan. A rim of mud formed at the soles of his bucks but he didn't seem to notice or care. Straight ahead, two men stood in ankle-deep sludge, shoveling around the edges of a rec.u.mbent column. One of the pair was a white-haired man who looked to be a few years older than Jack. The other was a young man with a couple days' growth of beard. This was Mike Emerson.

"Hey, if it ain't Jack Doyle!" called the older man.

"What is this?" called Jack, grinning. "Since when do ironworkers carry shovels?"

"They've turned us into laborers here," said Mike Emerson with a laugh. "We're digging it out so we can get a chain under it."

Mike Emerson had been down here every day since he first arrived with his brothers on the morning of September 12. He'd worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week-a pace he would maintain for 10 months, straight through to end of the cleanup. Many tough ironworkers had spent a few weeks down here and called it quits, understandably finding the grimness of the site, the dead bodies, and foul smoke too much to bear. But others got energized by it. They found it weirdly sustaining. Mike Emerson, after his initial panic attack on the pile that first Wednesday, turned out to be one of these, much to his own surprise. "I found I had a knack for this kind of work," is how he put it. "The rugged work. Being in that environment. The burning, being out there in that big cloud of smoke and cutting pieces, hooking them up-it just came natural to me."

The work had taken a toll on his personal life. A week before the terrorist attacks, Mike's wife had given birth to a baby girl. Mike had barely seen the baby, or his wife, since the birth. He left home at 5 in the morning and returned at 10 in the evening. Nearly all of his waking hours were spent at Ground Zero or on the train commuting between there and his house 50 miles north of the city. He knew that he could quit at any time. And yet, for reasons he didn't quite understand himself, he also knew he had to keep going. "I gotta say, my wife, she's a tough girl. There were guys I worked with, their wives just couldn't take it. Mine never complained. She knew it was where I wanted to be. It was like I had a drive. Once I started there, I was h.e.l.l-bent. It was just something I had to do." Sitting on the train after a long s.h.i.+ft, Mike would close his eyes and count his blessings. He felt like the luckiest man in the world to be returning home to his family. But then, next morning, he'd wake up feeling an urgent need to get back to Ground Zero. As of mid-November, he'd yet to take a single day off since the attack. And when he finally did take one off-Christmas Day-he'd feel restless and guilty being home. "I thought a lot about all the kids that were left behind. 'Cause I used to see them down there, the families. Sometimes they'd come down. You knew how many lives were just friggin' wrecked."

In the early weeks, after most of the ironworkers had gone back to their regular jobs, and long after they really had any good reason to hope, Mike and the other rescuers at Ground Zero searched for the living. "We really all believed that there were people down there in air pockets, hanging on, waiting for us to uncover a hole. I'd been in that building nine million times. I knew there was a lot of underground, all these different levels. You really logically thought somebody could have made it out alive. But then, after two or three weeks, we were like Man, I can't believe we didn't find anyone alive." Man, I can't believe we didn't find anyone alive."

Now it was about finding the dead. Before 9/11, Mike had seen guys get badly hurt on jobs, but he had never seen a dead body. In the months since, he'd seen a great many of them in various states of disorder. The discovery of a corpse had become a familiar, even welcome, occurrence. It meant that a grieving family would have a body to bury; a sort of closure, if not exactly peace.

The work had become a regular job in many respects, albeit a regular job unlike any other on earth. It continued to be enormously dangerous. Ironworkers still pulled out cherry-red beams, the steel so fragile it could snap as they lifted it. Many of the men at Ground Zero had suffered minor injuries. As of early November, there had been 34 broken bones, 441 lacerations, more than 1,000 eye injuries, and hundreds of burns and sprains and smashed fingers. And plenty of dangerous work remained, for the further they dug, the more unstable the steel would be.

But for all the danger, those who had the knack for the work enjoyed a deep satisfaction in accomplis.h.i.+ng it. You knew you were doing something important. And you were treated like an important person. The perks included round-the-clock free food and coffee, warm shelter in which to rest, and a constant stream of celebrity visitors who came to gawk. Ground Zero was hallowed ground but it was also-this being New York-exclusive ground, and the blue police barricades were the velvet ropes of the moment. Susan Sarandon and Brooke s.h.i.+elds and Jack Nicholson and Miss USA and Derek Jeter-they all came to see the disaster and to ogle the heroes. For the ironworkers, this was an unfamiliar though not unpleasant sensation: being the object of a star's gaze. ground, and the blue police barricades were the velvet ropes of the moment. Susan Sarandon and Brooke s.h.i.+elds and Jack Nicholson and Miss USA and Derek Jeter-they all came to see the disaster and to ogle the heroes. For the ironworkers, this was an unfamiliar though not unpleasant sensation: being the object of a star's gaze.

Jack Doyle walked onward, greeting ironworkers. No one seemed particularly surprised to see him out here in the mud. A man brought over a photograph of the World Trade Center and asked Jack to sign it. As Jack handed the photograph back, a puff of black smoke drew his attention back to the pile. The firemen turned their hose on the smoke. "Something just caught fire out there," said Jack. He squinted at the pile for a moment, then his eyes drifted to a husk of columns still standing near the Customs House. These columns were almost 10 stories high and had once belonged to the lower floors of Tower One. They were all that remained of it now. In a few weeks, they would come down, too, and nothing would be left. The columns had formed the northeast corner of the building, where Jack had pushed his rig 33 years earlier.

"Every piece of that steel I know," Jack said now. "I touched it all with these hands. And look, it's still standing." He smiled. "I'd say we did a pretty good job."

[image]

Mike Emerson in front of the remains of the north tower.

(Courtesy of Mike Emerson) CHRISTMAS.

On the Wednesday before Christmas, Keith Brown rang in the holidays by slugging the project manager for ADF. The chance of Keith Brown, the walking boss, hauling off and taking a swing at somebody had always seemed high, and ever higher as the work at Time Warner Center sped up and Keith's impatience and irritability waxed accordingly. But still-the project manager? The man was ostensibly Keith's boss, several ranks above him. n.o.body slugs the project manager. The man was ostensibly Keith's boss, several ranks above him. n.o.body slugs the project manager.

The fight was on everybody's lips at the Coliseum that evening. Some of the ironworkers had overheard the two men arguing over an open frequency two-way radio shortly before the fight. They heard the project manager yell at Keith, upset that certain pieces of steel had not yet been bolted up on the 12th floor. They heard Keith yell back, suggesting that the project manager refrain from shouting. They heard the project manager shout again, something to the effect of This work is f.u.c.ked up and you better get the f.u.c.k up here and get it done right. This work is f.u.c.ked up and you better get the f.u.c.k up here and get it done right. In retrospect, the project manager probably wished he'd chosen his words more carefully. In retrospect, the project manager probably wished he'd chosen his words more carefully.

"Sure," Keith responded into the two-way. "You stay there. I'll be right up."

The radio went silent. Everybody waited, including, to his credit, the project manager. Several minutes pa.s.sed, as Keith rode the elevator, then climbed to the 12th floor on ladders. When he stepped out onto the derrick floor, he saw the project manager waiting for him. The conversation went something like this: "Keith, listen-"

"Shut the f.u.c.k up-"

"Keith, I'm your friend."

"Bulls.h.i.+t." Smack Smack. Keith hit him.

"Keith, come on-"

Smack. Keith hit him again. "Don't you ever f.u.c.king raise your voice to me again." Keith hit him again. "Don't you ever f.u.c.king raise your voice to me again."

"Jesus, Keith-" Smack. Smack.

At this point, two ironworkers grabbed Keith and pulled him away from the project manager. "If it weren't for them, I'd throw you off the side of the building," shouted Keith at the project manager as the two men restrained him. "You should send these guys Christmas cards."

The ironworkers who gathered in the Coliseum that evening generally agreed that while perhaps Keith Brown had acted rashly in slugging the project manager, he had also been within his rights. "It's one thing when one ironworker shouts at another. That's in the family. But this guy, he's not an ironworker."

"I'll tell you this," added another man, "he sure as h.e.l.l shouted at the wrong wrong ironworker." ironworker."

The details of the fight having been duly pa.r.s.ed, and the chances of Keith Brown getting fired fairly weighed (the betting was that he would be, but the betting would turn out to be wrong), attention turned to more important matters, like the $500 pool of cash raised among the four raising gangs and the four crane operators. Each Wednesday the men put in a certain stake, usually $10 apiece, b.u.mped up to $20 this week in honor of the holidays, then played for it with the poker hand in the serial numbers on their paychecks.

"I plan on taking it," said David "Chappie" Charles, slumped over the bar, his eyes crinkled into a smile. "I'm just saying it's mine."

"No, I believe this one is mine," said Frank Kirby, looking deadly serious.

While the men discussed their respective chances of getting lucky, Christmas lights flickered in the window and on the wall behind the bar, over a glittering array of bottles. John the bartender cracked open beers five or six at a time. Down near the jukebox the free buffet steamed in stainless steel troughs, and several ironworkers grazed over the buffalo wings and baked ziti. The place was crowded, and the beer and the food cast a warm glow over the men. In another hour or so, the young professionals of the Upper West Side would start to arrive and there would be an awkward overlap of clientele-the pivotal half hour or so when John had to be on his toes to break anything up before it started. For the moment, though, the bar belonged to the 30 or so ironworkers who were there, and the atmosphere was convivial but subdued. Johnny Diabo and his connecting partner, Paul "Punchy" Jacobs, were sitting at a table together, and so were Matt and Jerry, talking about what ironworkers always talk about at bars: ironwork. From across the bar came Joe Emerson's booming voice, shouting something at Matt-"Yo, NBC"-which was Joe's nickname for Matt. It meant Nothing But Connect, and it was Joe's way of ribbing Matt for his vow that, henceforth, he planned to do "nothing but connect." Matt responded by giving Joe the finger. Kevin Scally glanced at his watch. He'd gotten married in October and had a wife waiting for him back home. Somebody handed him a new beer and suggested to Kevin that he might as well put any ideas of leaving out of his mind.

Mickey Tracy was still there, too. It was time for him to start his long journey home to Connecticut, where his wife and son would be waiting for him. He took a sip of Heineken and scratched his jaw. "You know, I've been thinking," he said. "I've had a good life. ironwork has been good to me. You're part of something bigger. You changed the skyline. I'm 5'4", but I stand tall, understand? You can't take that away from me, baby. This business gave me a great life."

"So would you like your son to be an ironworker?"

"My son," said Mickey, "is going to be a lawyer."

TWELVE.

Topping Out

On a cold and gray November afternoon in 1951, John McMahon, a young ironworker for American Bridge Company, stood over the Monongahela River near Pittsburgh, deep in the heart of Big Steel country. He was working in a gang of bridgemen rehabilitating an old steel bridge that crossed the river between U.S. Steel's blast furnaces on one side and its open-hearth furnaces on the other. Half a century later, McMahon still recalls the moment his 20-year-old self grasped the enormity of Big Steel. "It was the day before Thanksgiving and I was packing up to go home, standing up on top of the truss, and I was looking down the river and I said, 'Good G.o.d Almighty, this is some outfit I'm working for.' Everything we used belonged to them. The rivets and the paints, and everything you could see-the barges, the trains, the factories-and every stack had smoke pouring out of it and all h.e.l.l was breaking loose, and there was fifty or sixty thousand people working in there and it was just a-goin' Jesse, twenty-four hours a day seven days a week. And I thought, 'h.e.l.l, we'll never run out of work.'

"Now it's all gone. And I'm still here. It's all barren ground, they've torn it all down. They got waterfront property for sale."

No one in the middle of the twentieth century could reasonably have predicted the precipitous decline of American steel over the latter half of the century. The view that John McMahon took in from that truss over the Monongahela was one most Americans shared of the steel industry in 1951. It was a vast and inviolably American enterprise. Since its founding in 1901, U.S. Steel Corporation had controlled 30 percent of the world steel market, while the American steel industry as a whole had claimed as much as 60 percent of the world market. This advantage remained unchallenged through the first half of the twentieth century. Coming out of the war at mid-century-around the same time that John McMahon was marveling from the bridge over the Monongahela-the United States still produced half the raw steel in the world. In 1953, U.S. Steel would have its biggest year ever, producing 35.8 million tons of product. The company would never match that number again.

The seeds of Big Steel's demise were sown in its success. Postwar profits were so generous that Big Steel lapsed into complacency. The genius and drive that allowed Andrew Carnegie to antic.i.p.ate the future was sorely lacking in the modern steel executives. They kept making steel almost exactly as they'd been making it the previous 50 years, in antiquated open-hearth furnaces. Postwar Europe and j.a.pan, meanwhile, were rebuilding with new technology, most significantly the BOF (Basic Oxygen Furnace) that would make steel production more efficient and less expensive, and that would shortly help those countries take a huge bite out of America's share of the world steel market.

The decline was swift. In 1960, America produced just 25 percent of the world's steel-a 50 percent loss of market share in 10 years. By 1970, as Jack Doyle was topping out Tower One of the World Trade Center (to which Big Steel contributed not an ingot), the number had fallen to 20 percent, and by the mid-eighties it was just over 10 percent, where it has been parked, with slight variation, ever since.

At the start of the twenty-first century America produced less steel than China, j.a.pan, or the European Union. U.S. Steel Corporation-known now as USX-produced a tiny fraction of the world's raw steel, and none of it was structural. Bethlehem Steel, whose wide f.l.a.n.g.e H-columns had had a profound impact on the construction of early skysc.r.a.pers, was also out of the structural steel business and filing for bankruptcy. American Bridge Company, once the most formidable steel erection company in the world, still existed, but barely. McClintic-Marshall and Post & McCord were gone entirely.

The largest American producer of structural shapes at the start of the new century was Nucor Corporation, which made its steel from recycled sc.r.a.p, including junked auto bodies, old refrigerators, and demolished steel-frame buildings. The sc.r.a.p steel was melted down in electric arc furnaces, recast, then sent back out into the world as new shapes and products. The 192,000 tons of steel that had once supported the World Trade Center were destined for just such a fate. If the towers' steel would not end up in one of Nucor's electric arc furnaces-most of it had been s.h.i.+pped to steel manufacturers overseas-the result would be the same: melted, recast, reincarnated. Some of the new steel would probably return to these sh.o.r.es and find its way into a skysc.r.a.per of the future. This a.s.sumed, of course, that skysc.r.a.pers of the future were going to be made of steel and not, for instance, of reinforced concrete. Once this would have been a safe a.s.sumption. No longer. The demise of the American steel skysc.r.a.per was already well under way before September 11, 2001. The fall of the Twin Towers was bound to hasten it.

Why did the towers fall? Journalists, engineers, politicians, and the bereaved families of victims began asking the question almost immediately after the collapse. No fewer than three major studies-two federal, one private-have been devoted to answering it. It's tempting to dismiss all of this inquiry as speculation into the obvious. Any seven-year-old knows why the towers fell: because planes traveling over 500 miles per hour and loaded with 10,000 gallons of jet fuel slammed into them. The very question-why did they fall?-a.s.sumes the towers could have done otherwise, that somehow they failed failed when they fell. But as one of those federal studies (commissioned by FEMA) declared in its final report, "The structural damage sustained by each of the two buildings as a result of the terrorist attacks was ma.s.sive. The fact that the structures were able to sustain this level of damage and remain standing for an extended period of time is remarkable and is the reason that most building occupants were able to evacuate safely." when they fell. But as one of those federal studies (commissioned by FEMA) declared in its final report, "The structural damage sustained by each of the two buildings as a result of the terrorist attacks was ma.s.sive. The fact that the structures were able to sustain this level of damage and remain standing for an extended period of time is remarkable and is the reason that most building occupants were able to evacuate safely."

The exact sequence of events that led to the collapse of the towers will probably remain a mystery, since much of the forensic evidence turned to dust in the collapse. From such evidence as exists, though, most engineers agree that the initial impact of the planes, destructive as it was, had little, if anything, to do with the towers' collapse. The buildings absorbed the force of the planes quite easily. The structure was so strong that, by one estimate, columns as close as 20 feet to the impact zone barely registered the strain.

It was not the initial impact that brought the buildings down but the fire that came afterwards. First fed by the conflagration of jet fuel, then by ignited paper, carpet, and furniture, the fire weakened the steel and made it unable to support the building. Steel doesn't melt until temperatures reach about 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit-the temperature at which it is smelted-but it softens and distends at much lower temperatures, around 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit. The temperatures in the Twin Towers in their last hours were far higher than that, perhaps as high as 2,000 degrees in some areas. New York City fire code requires contractors to spray steel components with a thin coat of fireproof material, but apparently this material chipped off the steel when the planes. .h.i.t the buildings, leaving the metal bare and vulnerable.

The most vulnerable steel of all happened to be in the floor trusses. Those trusses, 60 feet long in most cases, spanned the gap between the core of the building and the exterior columns. They not only carried the weight of the floors, but also provided the all-important lateral support between the perimeter and the core. They kept the perimeter walls from caving and buckling. A study by FEMA surmises that as the trusses heated up, they began to "lose rigidity and sag into catenary action"-they began, in other words, to droop. As they drooped, they lost their function as lateral braces for the columns. The angle brackets that held them to the columns, relatively small pieces of steel, probably sheared. The floors broke free of the columns and began to cascade, in a vertical domino effect, one on top of the other, the weight of the higher floors tearing through the lower floors. The columns, lacking lateral support, buckled and followed the floors to the ground.

The theory of the falling trusses has been disputed in a study commissioned by Larry A. Silverstein, leaseholder of the World Trade Center. This study suggests that it was not the floor trusses but the towers' columns that gave way under the intense heat. If so, the towers behaved much as any other steel building would have behaved under similar circ.u.mstances and were not uniquely vulnerable. This conclusion happens to benefit Silverstein, for the more like other buildings the Twin Towers behaved, the less liable Silverstein will be to legal claims made by victims' families. In the end, whatever the reason for the towers' collapse, one thing seems certain: it was a body blow to the reputation of steel.

A few weeks after the disaster, in a television interview, Barbara Walters asked Donald Trump what lessons builders of the future might learn from the Trade Center. "More concrete," said Trump. Concrete would not have melted as the steel did; it is more heat resistant than steel. Trump's view was echoed widely in the months after the attack. "It's better to build in reinforced concrete," Dr. Mir M. Ali, a professor of architecture at the University of Illinois, told the New York Times New York Times. "If there is an impact, crash, or explosion, it can absorb the energy better. That makes the building less vulnerable." The technology of concrete had improved greatly in recent years, said Dr. Mir, and an all-concrete structure would have lasted longer than a steel structure. "The trend is toward more concrete."

Charles Thorton, founding partner of Thorton-Tomasetti Group, perhaps the most prestigious structural engineering firm in the world, soon added his voice to this consensus. He suggested that his Petronas Towers in Malaysia, now the tallest buildings in the world, could have withstood the attack better than the Twin Towers, in part because they were made mostly of reinforced concrete.

A more fundamental question to come out of 9/11 was whether very tall buildings were still viable structures. Who wants to work or live in a potential terrorist target? A USA Today USA Today Gallup poll taken soon after the attack found that while 70 percent of Americans still favored construction of skysc.r.a.pers, 35 percent admitted they were less likely to enter one. A 900-foot skysc.r.a.per planned in downtown New York was quickly sc.r.a.pped, as were Donald Trump's plans to build the world's tallest building in Chicago. If very tall buildings were to remain a part of the urban landscape, they would exist under different circ.u.mstances, composed, probably, of different ingredients. The symbolic power of the skysc.r.a.per-the Great American Steel Skysc.r.a.per, anyway-was defunct. Gallup poll taken soon after the attack found that while 70 percent of Americans still favored construction of skysc.r.a.pers, 35 percent admitted they were less likely to enter one. A 900-foot skysc.r.a.per planned in downtown New York was quickly sc.r.a.pped, as were Donald Trump's plans to build the world's tallest building in Chicago. If very tall buildings were to remain a part of the urban landscape, they would exist under different circ.u.mstances, composed, probably, of different ingredients. The symbolic power of the skysc.r.a.per-the Great American Steel Skysc.r.a.per, anyway-was defunct.

WINTER.

This was not good news for American structural ironworkers. Certainly not for New York's ironworkers, for whom steel-frame skysc.r.a.pers were the bread and b.u.t.ter of their trade. It was true that, in the short term, the events of 9/11 had put ironworkers in the spotlight as they had not been for 70 years. This had no real practical benefit, but it felt good. It was also true that the rebuilding of the now barren 16-acre site would probably provide a great deal of work over the next several years. But whatever replaced the World Trade Center would probably contain less structural steel (and more reinforced concrete) than what had been there.

If ironworkers at Time Warner Center spent a lot of time fretting about the future of their trade, they did it privately and quietly. There wasn't much opportunity for fretting that winter in any case. The days at Columbus Circle were long and busy, as the steel, oblivious to its own newfound frailty, continued to rise. The building stepped in at the eighth floor, narrowing considerably, so the floors required less steel and went up faster. By the start of January, the south side of the building had reached the 20th floor. It was up to the 26th floor by the middle of the month.

The higher the building rose, the colder the weather up top. The wind whipped in from the river and the ironworkers could do little to stay warm but keep moving. There were days the temperature dipped into the low 20s and the wind chill dropped into the teens and the steel felt like ice. At lunch, some men took refuge in the Coliseum or at the tables in the back of the Rich and Famous Deli on 60th Street, but many didn't even bother trying to warm up. What was the point? They ate their lunch sitting on the sidewalk, watching the pedestrians scurry by.

Then the temperature rose above freezing and winter rain came, days of it, a steady, damp-nose, flu-inflicting rain. The ironworkers reported for work at the usual time, hung around the cold shanty to see what the weather would do, then Joe Kennedy came out of his trailer and dismissed them.

Rain days were a mixed blessing to the ironworkers. They were holidays-sort of. Exactly how much of a holiday depended on a man's pay scale. Foremen worked on straight time and got paid no matter what the weather did, so rain, from their point of view, was all good. Connectors usually made a deal for one paid rain day per week, so they didn't mind the occasional soak either. The rest of the ironworkers had to make do with an hour of "show up pay" they got for showing up on time and waiting around while the bosses listened to the weather report and decided what to do.

A day of rain now and then was a respite; a week of it began to feel like unemployment. The men went back home or dispersed to one of the established rain-day watering holes, like Smith's on Eighth Avenue and 44th Street. The Mohawks usually returned to Bay Ridge and took refuge in the Snook Inn, a s.p.a.cious and handsome tavern on Fourth Avenue, or the cozier confines of the Killarney on Fifth. Most of the men who boarded in Bay Ridge had never seen their home-away-from-home except in the dark or in the rain. If it wasn't night or wet, they were likely to be working, or up north in Kahnawake.

A Friday afternoon in early February found the raising gangs on the south tower erecting the trusses under a dazzle of false spring. Most of the truss pieces had been fabricated in an old steel mill near Montreal (directly across the St. Lawrence River from Kahnawake, as it happened) but looked as if they came straight out of the Mesozoic. They were gargantuan and ugly, sprouting fins and ridges and tusks. Once they were bolted together on the 18th floor of the north tower and the 23rd floor on the south tower, the truss pieces would top-out the steel frames and serve as foundations from which the concrete towers would rise, transferring the towers' weight to the foundation through the enormous steel "boomer" columns. Other than the boomers, these truss pieces were the largest steel components in the building.

On this sunny but bracing February afternoon, a few triangles of the truss rose already complete along the southern edge of the tower. George's gang worked on the eastern edge of the tower, lifting steel from the ground and setting it on huge timber skids on the deck, a staging area between earth and air. On the southwestern corner, the other raising gang-Pat Hartley's gang-was busy setting steel. They had already lowered a hulking diagonal column to the perimeter of the floor and were attaching its base to a lower column. This new column would make up one side of an isosceles triangle in the diagonal zigzag of the truss. In a move that would have made a safety inspector blanch, had there been one up here to observe it, Punchy Jacobs ducked under the safety wire and hung out over the edge of the building, holding on to the diagonal with one hand, banging a bolt through it with the other. As he swung the beater, a strange shrill sound slowly crescendoed over the hum of the crane, something like a gull's call-the song of vibrating steel. Johnny Diabo stood near Punchy, ready to take the maul when Punchy tired. Johnny's missing finger had knocked him out of connecting for a while, but now he was at it again. His fingertip-the one that he'd buried in his backyard at Kahnawake-had grown back, good as new. When the bolt was in and the nut tight, Johnny climbed the slanted column to the top, silhouetted against the sun, and unlatched the choker.

The day was perfect for physical labor. For several hours the men worked quietly and intensely, laying in the diagonals. Then it was break time. An apprentice arrived at the top of the ladder with a box of snacks and refreshments. The men sat on columns and beams laid out on the floor and rested, talking quietly. A few of the ironworkers drank tallboys from brown paper bags. They were up high now and there were no safety inspectors to bother them, no contractors to reprimand them-n.o.body at all watching over them. They were on their own, which was exactly how they liked it.

UNFINISHED BUSINESS.

The steel frame of the building officially topped out on February 27. The date reflected the schedules of invited dignitaries more accurately than it reflected the state of the building. The steel frame would not in fact be complete for another few months. The steel portion of the building would not be truly truly complete until more than a year later, when ironworkers returned to crown the building's summit in steel. So much for details. complete until more than a year later, when ironworkers returned to crown the building's summit in steel. So much for details.

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Time Warner Center, winter 2002. On the south tower (left) (left) the ironworkers use the kangaroo cranes to set the truss. The steel portion of the north tower the ironworkers use the kangaroo cranes to set the truss. The steel portion of the north tower (right) (right) is complete for the moment. The ironworkers will return a year later to crown the building, at 700 feet, with more steel. is complete for the moment. The ironworkers will return a year later to crown the building, at 700 feet, with more steel. (Photo by the author) (Photo by the author) The celebration, held in the steel cage of the jazz center, was a star-studded affair. The mayor gave a speech. Wynton Marsalis played trumpet. In late morning, on cue, the ceremonial beam, American flag and small fir tree attached to its flank, floated by the jazz center on its ascent to the top of the building, and everyone turned to applaud as if it bore some actual significance. A few moments later, out of sight from the crowd, the crane laid the beam on the 22nd floor of the south tower, where it would rest and rust and await removal to its final berth on the 24th floor. For the moment, there was no 24th floor.