High Steel_ The Daring Men Who Built The World's Greatest Skyline Part 2

The New World

(2001).

Two weeks after they arrived at Columbus Circle to build the Time Warner Center-two weeks after Brett Conklin's fall 17 blocks to the south-the raising gang was high over the hole, enjoying a mid-morning coffee break on the machine deck of crane number 2. Last night a dusting of snow had fallen over the city, but the sun had come out strong and the sky was brilliantly blue and the snow was mostly gone. The men sat on the deck, smoking and gazing out at the multi-million-dollar view of Central Park. When their cigarettes burnt down, they flicked them over the edge and the b.u.t.ts fluttered 110 feet to the mud at the bottom of the hole.

Since that gray February day they first came-it was early March now-the men had been setting up kangaroo cranes. This was the first step in any major steel job in New York; until there were cranes, there could be no steel, and there would be no cranes until the raising gang a.s.sembled them, piece by piece, like giant Christmas toys. The gang had already completed crane number 1, to the east. Crane number 2 was well on its way, soon to be joined by number 3 and number 4, which would serve the southern tower of the building. For the next month, a temporary crawler crane in the hole would feed the raising gang prefabricated components of the cranes and the men would bolt these into place: box-shaped sections of the tower, one stacked upon the other like milk crates; then the rubella, a turntable-like collar on which the crane would pivot, or "slew"; then the machine deck, the drums and engine, the operator's cabin, the mast, and finally, the lacy 180-foot-long boom.

The cranes were called kangaroos not because they resembled the eponymous marsupial, but because they were first manufactured in Australia. If they resembled any living thing, it was the ornithological species that shared their name: cranes cranes. They rose on a single spindly leg, absurdly top-heavy, graceful and agile but also slightly ludicrous. What kept them from keeling over were the four 12-ton counterweights that hung from a rack under their rumps. As the crane's boom reached out and dipped to take a load, the counterweights, in a small miracle of weight distribution, slid in the opposite direction. As the boom lifted and strained under the load, they slid further out; as it rose, pulling the center of gravity toward the crane, the counterweights moved back home.

Before that miracle could occur, though, the raising gang would have to install the counterweights. At a nod from their foreman, the men slowly stood, their break ended. The connectors, Jerry Soberanes and Keith McComber-the blue-eyed Indian the others called Bunny-slithered through the hollow center of the rubella, then ducked under the machine deck and wriggled between the diagonals of the latticed tower. They hung onto the outside of the tower, a hundred feet over the hole, and waited. A moment later, the first of the counterweights swept in on the boom of the crawler crane. Along the bottom of the counterweight, welded to it, ran a slender horizontal terrace of grilled wire, just wide enough to accommodate a man's boot. The counterweight was still a yard off the stern when Jerry stepped across the open air and onto its terrace. The counterweight, with Jerry aboard and clinging to it, swung gently away from the tower, then gently back. Now it was Bunny's turn: he reached a foot out over the gap and stepped on beside Jerry. They stood there on the narrow ledge a hundred feet over the hole, swaying in the breeze.

A few minutes before noon, the raising gang started down a narrow metal ladder through the interior of the crane's tower. When they reached the bottom, they stepped out onto the mud, a treacherous topography of half-frozen divots and crags concealed under a few inches of boot-sucking paste. Bunny and Jerry led the way to the dirt ramp at the southwest corner of the hole. Like most connectors, they were fit and agile and didn't have much trouble high-stepping through the mud. Their wrenches and connecting bars clanged in the scabbards of their connecting belts, and with a little imagination-a pointed helmet instead of a hard hat, a long yellow beard instead of a clean-shaven face, a rocky beach instead of mud-they might have been Viking warriors arriving home after a season of berserking. They had the weary look of men returning from difficult work.

They walked shoulder to shoulder, side by side, matching strides. Bunny and Jerry had never connected together before this job but already they'd acquired the complementary rhythm of old partners. This would stand them in good stead. Over the next several months, nearly every move one of them made would depend on the timing and skill of the other. So, sometimes, would his life. Connectors routinely step out onto beams held aloft by a bolt on one end and the tapered end of their partner's spud wrench on the other. They make the step based on nothing but a slight nod from the partner's head, the nod that says: It's in the hole, trust me. It's in the hole, trust me. Trust is everything. Trust is everything.

For some reason, connecting, like love, tends to attract opposites. Bunny and Jerry's differences began with their backgrounds. Like many of the Mohawks, Bunny was a fourth-generation ironworker on both sides of his family. Ironwork ran deep in his blood. His father was an ironworker. His brother had been an ironworker, too, until a few years ago when his leg got caught and mangled under the counterweight of a crane. Bunny's cousins were ironworkers. His wife's family, too-they were all ironworkers.

Bunny had intended to become an ironworker since he was a boy. More precisely, he'd intended to become a connector. He remembered the respect people accorded his uncles, Robert and Gerald McComber, who connected together for many years. "I'd always heard stories about them, how good a name they had," he said. "It gave me a goal. I wanted to live up to the name." At 18, Bunny purchased a union book from the Montreal local and started booming down to New York as a journeyman. A few years later, he transferred into No. 361, the Brooklyn local to which most of the Kahnawake Mohawks belonged. He was connecting by the time he was 21. Now he was 31, an old hand. To his colleagues, Bunny gave off an air of c.o.c.ky a.s.surance. He was known as a talker, a boaster, a swaggerer, a young man who thought he knew pretty much all there was to know about ironwork. Which was a pretty fair description of most connectors.

Not, though, of Jerry Soberanes. Jerry had a wry smile but didn't say much, at least not when he first met you. His trajectory into ironwork had been more like Brett Conklin's than Bunny's. A friend's father was an ironworker and steered him into it. A daredevil kind of kid, Jerry had started connecting soon after he finished his apprentices.h.i.+p. Now, at 31, he cruised the steel with the unflappable cool of an airline pilot in a storm. A fallen beam, a surprise gust, a near miss-nothing much got a rise out of Jerry. He'd smile and shrug and keep working, and wouldn't mention it unless somebody asked. Then he'd say, "That? Nah, that wasn't too bad. Coulda been worse."

Trekking through the mud behind Bunny and Jerry were Matt Kugler, the tagline man, and John White, the hooker-on. Matt, at 29, was the youngest of the gang. His father had been an ironworker, which was reason enough for Matt to try something different. He served three years in the Marines, then realized he wanted to do what the old man did after all. He still looked like a marine. He had the broad square shoulders, the ramrod bearing, the crewcut, the biceps, the tattoos. Before this job was over, some of the ironworkers would nickname him Rambo. It wasn't just the way he looked; it was his att.i.tude about ironwork. He was so gung-ho you weren't sure sometimes if he was kidding. "Let's go build this thing," he'd announce. "I'd like to build this thing myself. Christ, give me a chance, I'll build the whole G.o.ddam thing, I swear it!"

John White was the least likely man to be in a raising gang. He was an apprentice, and it is rare for an apprentice to gain admittance to a raising gang. But John White was not your average apprentice. He was 35, which made him the second oldest man in the gang. Until a few years earlier, he'd built racecars for a living. He'd never met an ironworker and had only the vaguest inkling of what one did when he took the apprentices.h.i.+p test on a whim. He pa.s.sed with flying colors, enrolled, and two years later he'd worked his way, against all odds, into a raising gang. He loved the work and planned never to leave it.

The fifth man down, Chett Barker, didn't even bother trying to keep up with the other four. He was 55 years old and, like most ironworkers over 50, even those who have never been seriously injured, he was hobbled. Most of his joints were arthritic. His legs bowed slightly, an orthopedic anomaly common to veteran ironworkers whose knees have grown to accommodate the steel f.l.a.n.g.es that so often come between them. His face was youthful but shot through with blasted capillaries from days spent straining in wind and cold and sun. Chett's career had begun with his apprentices.h.i.+p 37 years earlier on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, the last great bridge job in New York-and 60 feet longer, Chett liked to point out, than the Golden Gate. "People should know that," said Chett, "because it's the G.o.dd.a.m.ned truth."

Chett lurched slowly through the mud. As a young man, after his apprentices.h.i.+p on the Verrazano, he had served a tour on the front lines in Vietnam with the First Air Cavalry. Between the war and work, he had seen more than his share of death and injury. His own father, a bridgeman, fell badly three times, nearly dying the third time. Chett, at 55, could hardly walk, but things, he knew, could be worse.

Chett was still only halfway to the ramp when Bunny and Jerry climbed out over the rim of the hole onto the street and stamped their boots. An attractive young woman stood near the gate, waiting to cross the street. Bunny took a step toward her and lifted his arm. When she saw the hard hat, she scowled, but then she saw the smile, the dazzling blue eyes, and accepted the proffered arm. Bunny escorted her to the opposite sidewalk, tipping the brim of his hat as they parted. As the woman walked off, Matt, who'd never met Bunny until two weeks ago, chuckled. "Bunny," he said to no one in particular. "What a f.u.c.kin' piece of work."

The men had been coming to the Coliseum Bar and Grill for lunch since that day Bunny purchased his shamrock two weeks earlier. The bartender had already committed their tastes to memory, and now, as they filed in and straddled stools along the bar, their beer bottles were open and down on cardboard coasters before their elbows touched wood. Chett shuffled in and sat down next to Bunny. The bartender set him up with a shot and a chaser.

The Coliseum was narrow and low-ceilinged, down a few steps from the sidewalk. This was a bar entirely lacking att.i.tude or gimmick: no light-stained wood or fancy sconces, no amber beers from the Pacific Northwest. What it did have were shamrocks two months of the year and Christmas lights year round, two televisions, one jukebox, an oak bar worn smooth by decades of touch, and a capable Irish bartender named John. In all likelihood, the Coliseum was doomed to the same fate as its demolished namesake across the street. Rents in the neighborhood were already skyrocketing in antic.i.p.ation of the $1.7 billion Time Warner Center. It was difficult to see how a no-nonsense watering hole like this one fit into the new picture. For the moment, though, the Coliseum had hit upon a piece of luck: ironworkers.

It's arguable whether bars were good for ironworkers, but there was no doubt that ironworkers were good for bars. At every job site, the same thing happened: a certain bar was anointed, then colonized. From the bar's usual noontime clientele of two or three old men sipping alone, the population of the place suddenly swelled, at 12:05 P.M. P.M., to dozens of ironworkers, laughing and swearing and bellying up, drinking one, two, maybe a third for the road-and then, suddenly, 20 minutes later, they were gone and the two or three old men were sitting there in the quiet under a haze of smoke. Those were a lucrative 20 minutes.

For the moment, the men of the raising gang and the three old men at the bar were pretty much it. A young family of tourists-dad, mom, adolescent son-quietly ate hamburgers over at one of the vinyl-covered tables by the wall, having somehow chosen the Coliseum, of all places in Manhattan, for lunch. The boy glanced over at the raising gang. His mother spoke quietly to him and he turned back to his food.

"A raising gang is like a wheel," Chett was saying as he sipped his beer. "You got five men, six if you count the operator-"

"Seven if you count George-"

"Why would anyone count George?"

George was the foreman of the gang. The men called him King George. He'd grown up in the same New Jersey town as Matt and Jerry. They were old friends. But George was their foreman-their pusher pusher. "We grew up with the guy," said Matt. "You'd think he'd let us go five minutes early for lunch. No way. He's by the book." George also happened to be younger than any of them, even younger than Matt, and happened to be married, by all accounts, to a beautiful woman. So he deserved what he got when he wasn't around to defend himself.

"-six guys, three of them up in the sky, three down on the floor, and the boom keeps moving. I'm talking to the operator-"

"Tommy-"

"A wheel wheel?" This was Matt, grinning. "What the f.u.c.k is Chett saying down there-?"

"So I'm talking to Tommy on the phones," continued Chett, "he's way up in the operator's cab. He booms down to where the steel is shook out and lowers the hook. John wraps the choker around the piece we're lifting. I tell Tommy, 'Boom up,' 'Boom up,' he booms up, and Matt bears down on the tag line so it don't hit nothing on the way up. It's got to come up level and straight, 'cause if it doesn't it could snag up on something and pop the choker-" he booms up, and Matt bears down on the tag line so it don't hit nothing on the way up. It's got to come up level and straight, 'cause if it doesn't it could snag up on something and pop the choker-"

"-Somebody gets hurt."

"Somebody definitely definitely gets hurt. So it goes up straight, then I tell Tommy to swing over to where Bunny and Jerry are waiting, then 'Boom down, boom down,' and I bring it right into their hands, on a dime." gets hurt. So it goes up straight, then I tell Tommy to swing over to where Bunny and Jerry are waiting, then 'Boom down, boom down,' and I bring it right into their hands, on a dime."

"We hope."

"They hope. Or I might just tell Tommy to knock 'em off the side, depending on how they're treatin' me. Their lives are in my hands." n.o.body laughed at this. It was true. "And then it goes around all over again. Like a wheel."

"Wow. That's deep," said Matt. He chuckled. "Like a wheel. I gotta think about that one."

"Let me tell you something," said Chett. "Most of these guys I don't know. George I know, he was on a gang with me once, but most of these guys, like Bunny-I never met Bunny before. But I've worked with a lot of raising gangs, and you know something?"

Chett paused. He took a sip. The other men waited for the punch line. Chett put his beer down. "These guys are good," he said simply. "This is a good gang."

How good was mostly theoretical at this point. The truth was they wouldn't really know until they started setting steel. Putting up tower cranes was interesting and challenging, but it wasn't what raising gangs are about, which is setting steel. Then a good raising gang starts to move like a wheel, like clockwork, like a machine-like a well-oiled cliche. The hooker-on finds dead center with exactly the right choker, not an eighth of an inch too thick or too thin. The boom of the crane dips and lifts, the choker pulls snug over the f.l.a.n.g.es, the piece jumps up, the tag-line man bears down and it levels off into a smooth, easy rise. It swings a hundred feet overhead, then starts down again, dipping right into the gap between the columns. The holes practically align themselves. Zing- Zing-the first connector makes his hole with a connecting bar. Zing Zing-the second man makes his hole. In go the bolts; a few flicks of the wrist and they're tight. "Hot Wrench," they call a connector who's in a groove like this; he's moving so fast, goes the joke, that sparks are leaping off the metal, his spud wrench is conducting heat, he is on fire. on fire.

It made no sense, really, to be in a raising gang. Every union ironworker officially earned the same wage. When times were good, like now, men in raising gangs took in a little extra under the table-contractors were willing to pay it to secure good gangs-but the money hardly justified the additional danger and hard work. Men who chose to be in the raising gang chose it because there was no other life, because they thrived on the hard work, the pace, the thrill, and the compet.i.tion.

Raising gangs, and the men who joined them, were naturally compet.i.tive. Contractors used this disposition to their advantage. In the old days, they'd put an Indian gang on one derrick and a gang of Newfoundlanders on the other, just to promote a little fighting spirit. It made the men work harder and the building went up faster. Again, this made no real sense from the ironworker's point of view-the faster the building went up, the sooner the ironworker was out of a job. But they did it anyway. It was more important to be good than to be employed.

"Who's gonna set the first two floors, who's gonna be first to jump their rig, who's gonna be last? Everything's speed, timing, speed, timing," Bunny explained. "There's ways you do things that'll save you seconds, and at the end of the day, it'll end up being minutes, maybe half an hour. Then you'll be ahead of the game the next morning. You're constantly trying to save time and bank time." One of the attractions of this job at Columbus Circle was the promise of four raising gangs instead of the usual two. "When we get four cranes going, oh, G.o.d, that's gonna be a blast," said Bunny. "That's when we'll know if we've got a good gang that can work together."

Working well together wasn't just a matter of speed. It was also a matter of trust. Each man here would at some point hold one of the other four men's lives in his hands. Everyone knew it. If John calculated the tolerance of the choker incorrectly and the cable snapped, somebody might die. If Matt lost control of a piece of steel, somebody might die. If Chett failed to stop the crane from booming up, or down, or if Bunny or Jerry made one of the countless small mistakes that connectors occasionally make-there were so many ways for these men to injure each other. Trust was everything. Trust was why raising gangs were often made up of brothers and cousins and old friends. Trust is what brought George, Jerry, and Matt into this gang. They'd grown up together; they knew and liked each other. Trust was what Bunny didn't quite feel at the start of this job, having never connected on an all-white gang before. When you were with your own people, your kinsmen, you naturally tended to feel the trust. When you were with people you hardly knew, it came harder. Trust, and the need to feel it, partly explained what these five men were doing in the Coliseum at quarter past noon on a Tuesday, and why ironworkers, on the whole, spent a good deal of time drinking together in bars. They were building the camaraderie they needed to do their job.

"The consumption of alcohol is an intentionally enacted ritual, which reinforces an occupational community's basic a.s.sumptions and strengthens members' communal bonds," wrote the sociologist William Sonnenstuhl in his 1996 study of "occupational drinking cultures." As defined by Sonnenstuhl, an occupational drinking culture is a closely knit group of men brought together by work that is physically demanding and dangerous, such as longsh.o.r.emen, coal miners, and railworkers. Sonnenstuhl focused on tunnel workers-sandhogs-but his conclusions apply equally to ironworkers. Both trades are dangerous and both put great value on feelings of kins.h.i.+p among members. And both have tended to consume great quant.i.ties of alcohol. "The drinking rituals," concluded Sonnenstuhl, "underscored the duties they owed to one another."

"This is a good gang," said Chett one last time. He drained his beer and paid up. "I need some time to get back." A few minutes later, at 12:29, the others set their bottles on the bar and hopped off their stools. They filed out into the sunlight.

"Let's build this thing," said Matt.

THE BUILDING.

The building they meant to build was a Siamese twin, joined-at-the hip structure. It was huge and mind boggling, if not downright schizophrenic. I'm an office building! I'm a hotel! I'm an apartment building! I'm a Center for the Performing Arts! I'm the Center of Everything! I'm the Center of Everything!

First and foremost, the building would serve as corporate headquarters of Time Warner-or AOL Time Warner, as the company called itself back then. Including offices and studios for various branches of the entertainment and news divisions, the company would occupy about 854,000 square feet of s.p.a.ce, most of this on the lowest 10 floors of the building. The merger of AOL and Time Warner in January of 2000 had sp.a.w.ned the largest media company in the world, instantly worth 342 billion dollars. These conjoined towers would represent more than office s.p.a.ce: they would represent corporate dominance. That was the idea, anyway, back in that heady time, before the conglomerate foundered and jettisoned AOL from its name.

For the moment, the business of AOL Time Warner-communications-was the red-hot center of the American economy, very much as steel had been a hundred years earlier. "Global media," said Gerald Levin, then CEO of Time Warner, "will be and is fast becoming the predominant business force of the twenty-first century." AOL Time Warner, much like that corporate behemoth of a century earlier, U.S. Steel, aspired to vertical integration of its industry, only now the plan had a new name: "synergy." Instead of iron ore, the raw material would be human ideas. Rather than manufacture and s.h.i.+p steel ingots, the new company would produce and distribute "content" in the form of images, words, and sounds. But the goal was the same: to control the product from one end to the other.

The parallels between Big Steel and Big Communications went only so far. Steel, for one thing, was manifestly physical. You could see steel rising, you could actually watch it transform real s.p.a.ce from your vantage on an actual street corner. You could, if you got close enough, reach out and touch its rough skin. The business of AOL Time Warner, by contrast, was largely invisible. Ghostly integers whipped through fibers and cables. Apart from the glow of television sets and computer monitors and glossy magazines, there wasn't much that was tangible about it.

The world had become a far more conceptual place than it had been a hundred years earlier. As a result, it demanded a better-educated worker. In 1901, fewer than 13 percent of Americans graduated from high school, while only one in 50 graduated from college. Seventy percent of the workforce was devoted to manual labor. A century later, the numbers told a very different story. Almost 90 percent of young Americans were high school graduates, and a quarter were college graduates. The majority of the workforce, nearly 60 percent, was engaged in occupations that required little, if any, physical exertion.

For all these changes, the Time Warner Center would be built much as the Flatiron had been built a hundred years earlier. There would be differences-bolts instead of rivets, kangaroo cranes instead of derricks-but still the work would involve men braving heights to join steel. The white-collar college-educated workforce that would eventually sit in the building's climate-controlled, ergonomically correct workstations while sipping lattes from the place across the street-the place that may once have been the Coliseum Bar and Grill-would owe its habitat to ironworkers whose education had ended, in most cases, with high school graduation.

It was a nice irony, except that it wasn't completely true. The ironworkers, as it turned out, wouldn't actually build all of the Time Warner Center. They would not even build half of it. Most of the building was not going to be steel. It was going to be that other material, despised and reviled by all self-respecting structural ironworkers: concrete. concrete. The ironworkers would only go as high as the 23rd floor on the north tower and the 24th floor on the south tower, and then- The ironworkers would only go as high as the 23rd floor on the north tower and the 24th floor on the south tower, and then-concrete. Here was the largest steel job New York had seen in years and it wasn't even a steel job. If there was any dark lining in the silver cloud in the great boom of 2001, this was it: Here was the largest steel job New York had seen in years and it wasn't even a steel job. If there was any dark lining in the silver cloud in the great boom of 2001, this was it: concrete! concrete!

The New York offices of the Cantor Seinuk Group, structural engineers for the Time Warner Center, were located on the third floor of a 17-story building on the east side of midtown Manhattan. The building was typical of the steel-frame, wedding cakeshaped towers of the 1920s. It rose eight stories, then "stepped back," ascending in ever-smaller boxes. It was a functional building if not an especially imaginative one, a straightforward steel-frame high-rise conforming to New York City zoning laws and building codes of its time. The skeleton design was so simple a first year engineering student could probably pull it off.

The firm's offices were plainly tailored, lacking the architectural flourishes one might expect to find in, say, an architect's office. As a rule, engineers don't like to spend more money than is strictly necessary; miserliness is practically part of the job description. Over the receptionist's desk hung the one decorative extravagance in the lobby, a four-by-six-foot collage displaying Cantor Seinuk's many projects, including a stadium in Phoenix, a high-rise in Israel, a riverfront complex in London, and dozens of skysc.r.a.pers in New York.

On a stormy March morning two days after the raising gang convened in the Coliseum Bar and Grill, Ysrael Seinuk, the leading partner of Cantor Seinuk (Cantor having departed some years earlier) stood by a round table in his office, looking crisp, trim, and a good 10 years younger than his 69 years. Outside, the rain stopped and started again, was.h.i.+ng dirt over the windows. Pedestrians hurried along on the street. The wind turned umbrellas inside out. It was on days like this that the works of engineers were tested.

"If we had used steel instead of concrete, that building would have been another forty feet higher," said Seinuk, speaking in a clipped Cuban accent and gesturing through the window to the top of the Trump World Tower, the firm's latest achievement. "Those forty feet would have been nothing but a big sail on a day like this."

He was pointing to the top of a new building looming to the east, a brown gla.s.s sliver. As architecture, the building was perhaps of dubious distinction, but as engineering it was noteworthy. Seventy-two stories tall and just 25 yards wide at the northern and southern walls, the building's height-to-width ratio placed it among the slenderest high-rises in the world. And it was made of reinforced concrete.

By conventional definition, a skysc.r.a.per is a tall building supported by a steel frame. "By skysc.r.a.per is meant a building that exceeds in height the practical limit of solid masonry construction," is how a 1939 report on the origins of the skysc.r.a.per put it. "The absolute and first essential in the structural creation of a skysc.r.a.per is the metal (ferrous) skeleton." But looking up through Seinuk's window at the gla.s.s facade soaring into the fog, there was no denying that the building was a skysc.r.a.per, even if it was made primarily of concrete.

Ysrael Seinuk understood the potential of concrete as well as any engineer in New York. He attributed this to his Cuban education. In the early 1960s, when Seinuk, a Jew, immigrated here to escape the grip of Fidel Castro, America was still a country built largely of steel, and steel is what American engineers knew best. At the same time, Seinuk and his fellow Cubans, having no steel industry to speak of, were making a virtue of necessity and learning to stretch concrete to its limits. "In Cuba we were using eight-thousand PSI concrete; here they weren't using anything over four thousand," said Seinuk, referring to the pounds-per-square-inch standard of measuring concrete's strength. "We had completed in Cuba three hundred thirty-threefoot post-tension single span bridges. And the largest in the United States was a hundred feet."

All this had changed over the last 40 years. American concrete was now as strong as any in the world. The concrete in the new Trump building was 12,000 PSI, and 16,000 PSI concrete was at hand.

Concrete has many advantages over steel as a structural material. For one thing, it significantly lowers the distance between floors, so that a 70-story concrete building will be shorter, much shorter, than a 70-story steel building. Floors in concrete buildings are six-inch thick slabs laid flat on concrete pillars. Even after wiring and ceiling fixtures are added to the bottom of the slab, and after floorboards or carpet are added to the top, the total s.p.a.ce between ceiling and floor will be eight or nine inches. Steel beams, f.l.a.n.g.e to f.l.a.n.g.e, are generally eight or nine inches deep by themselves. On top of these come corrugated sheets filled with cement, and below go ceilings. Altogether, the s.p.a.ce between a ceiling and the floor above is about 15 inches on a steel-frame building, or seven inches more than it would be for concrete. A small difference in itself, perhaps, but multiplied by 70 stories this comes to about 40 feet. That's 40 fewer feet of facade to cover the perimeter of the building; 40 fewer feet of wires and pipes running inside the building; 40 fewer feet to brace against wind pressure; several million fewer dollars spent on construction.

There are other advantages to concrete. It goes up faster than steel, typically three floors a week compared with steel's pace of one or two floors. And during construction, it's easier to manipulate-to mold, to modify-than steel. A single imperfectly fabricated piece of steel can turn into a contractor's nightmare, holding up the building's erection as ironworkers burn or pummel it into place. No such problems arise with concrete. It is cast on site in plywood forms. Mistakes can be fixed with a hammer, a sheet of wood, a few nails.

No wonder concrete has taken such a large bite out of the construction market in recent decades. Until the middle of the twentieth century, tall buildings in America, office and residential both, were inevitably steel. Concrete structures seldom exceeded 20 stories until 1960. By the mid-1970s, though, the architect John Portman, among others, was designing huge opulent reinforced concrete hotels in places like Las Vegas and Miami. And by the 1980s, any large residential building or hotel built in America was likely to be concrete.

Given all of concrete's splendors, wasn't steel doomed? Seinuk frowned. "Of course not. That is silly-silly talk. There are buildings that want to be concrete and you have to do them in concrete, and there are buildings that want to be steel. If you try to do a building that wants to be steel in concrete, it's going to be very foolish."

Steel buildings are more difficult to build than concrete buildings, but, once completed, they are far more pliable. They are easier to renovate, an important advantage in buildings that will see many tenants with different s.p.a.ce requirements over the course of their lives-office buildings, for instance. Bas.h.i.+ng a hole through a floor or trying to move a column is an expensive and elaborate procedure in a concrete building but is easily achieved in a steel building. Also, steel is better suited to longer spans, the kind of long spans you are likely to encounter in office building lobbies and television studios. And because steel, at 50,000 PSI, is still much stronger than concrete, steel columns and beams take up less s.p.a.ce than concrete structural members.

"The building always tells you what it wants to be," said Seinuk. "Whoever designs the building trying to tell the building what it wants to be is going to have a very expensive design." The Time Warner building, then, would be concrete where it wanted to be concrete and steel where it wanted to be steel. And where it wanted to be steel was on the bottom.

Determining precisely how the steel would be arranged was a task that fell to Mr. Seinuk's partner and second-in-command, Silvian Marcus. Like Seinuk, Marcus was a Jewish emigre from a communist regime, in Marcus's case Soviet-dominated Romania. Also, like Seinuk, he had been at the firm for a long time, almost 30 years. Otherwise the two men could not have been more different. Whereas Seinuk was trim, elegant, and reserved, Marcus was rumpled and sleepy-eyed. He gave the impression of a large but kindly bear awakened from a nap: a grumpy mensch. When the phone rang, he picked it up, closed his eyes and held the receiver an inch or two from his ear, as if he knew it could only transmit a headache. Suddenly, his eyes would widen and twinkle, and he'd break out in delighted laughter, tickled by something. In the spring of 2001, nothing tickled Silvian Marcus more-or caused him more headaches-than his design for the Time Warner Center.

This was the most complicated building Marcus had ever engineered. As Marcus was fond of pointing out, it really wasn't one building but half a dozen different buildings pressed together, each having a different function and different structural requirements. The most obvious distinction, of course, fell between the parts of the building that were steel and those that were concrete. The towers, which contained the hotel and the condominiums, would be made of concrete. (They would be topped by a steel crown, so ironworkers would, in the end, have the last word on the building.) Beneath the towers, steel would rise only as high as the 23rd floor. But those 23 floors would consume almost twice the amount of steel required by a typical steel-frame skysc.r.a.per, and its arrangement would be at least twice as complex.

The difficulties began with the columns. The function of columns is to transfer the load, or weight of the building, to the ground. In most buildings, this is accomplished by vertical columns running in a straight line from the top of the building to the bottom. The path of transference is clear and well marked. Not so in the Time Warner Center.

"Because of the way the building functions, a column cannot go straight," said Marcus. "He has to move and change places every few floors. After he finishes his function on a particular floor, then he's going to a different usage, where the column layout doesn't fit him anymore. So we have inclined columns, hanging columns, columns that terminate all of a sudden. This makes the building totally different than a conventional building." The shopping arcade needed one column layout, the offices another. The television studios for CNN required very long spans, 40 to 65 feet, uninterrupted-and unsupported-by columns. Amidst all of the canted columns and strangely transferred loads, just a dozen columns would run straight up from the bottom of the building. Marcus called these columns "boomers." They were enormous, between 30 and 45 tons apiece, and very important. It was their job to support the enormous trusses that would top the steel section of each tower.

The trusses were the most audacious part of Marcus's design. They would support not only the concrete columns rising up from them, but also a number of steel columns, called "hangers," hanging down from them. The trusses would serve, too, as the central system of wind-bracing for the concrete towers, acting like huge outriggers to prevent them from swaying. No one, as far as Marcus knew, had ever asked quite so much of a truss before.

No one had ever asked quite so much of a steel fabricator either. In a conventional wedding-cake or gla.s.s-box skysc.r.a.per, where floors replicate each other as they go up, many pieces of steel are the same, so that a beam on the fifth floor is interchangeable with a beam on the ninth floor. That would not be the case in this building. Nearly every piece of steel, all 18,000 of them, would be unique. The steel design alone would generate about 26,000 shop drawings to specify the shape of each piece of steel, about four times the usual number of shop drawings for a skysc.r.a.per. The drawings took up so much s.p.a.ce that Cantor Seinuk had rented a room in Long Island City to store them all.

Why so much complexity? The short answer is economics and computers. Building owners wanted flexible, multi-use, tenant-pleasing s.p.a.ces, and they wanted to build them as cheaply as possible. This is how they made their profits. Architects and engineers naturally wanted to satisfy their clients. Computers helped them do this by allowing them to measure loads and strains before any material was raised. They gave engineers freedom to experiment and innovate in ways that would have been inconceivable back in the 1920s. But if computers were facilitators to innovative engineers, they were also enablers to capricious and needy clients. The more complicated a building could be, the more complicated, inevitably, it would would be. be.

Trying to keep track of all 18,000 pieces of steel, to make sure that each piece did what it was supposed to do, was enough to keep Marcus awake at night. Everything had been thoroughly considered and calculated, run through the computers and simulators, double-and triple-checked by hand. But only one test really counts for a design that has not been tried before, and that test must wait until the building begins to rise: Will it work? Will it function? Will it stand? These questions were not academic. Three weeks earlier, a steel truss had collapsed during the construction of a convention center in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C. The accident occurred at 11:30 at night. Twelve hours earlier, or twelve hours later, it would have killed dozens of ironworkers.

A structural engineer is an odd creature who must temper the hubris of a Master Builder (how would he or she dare build without it?) with the self-doubt of a neurotic. Lying in bed at night and brooding over grim hypotheticals-what if we got it wrong? what have we failed to consider?-is what drives engineers to design sound buildings. The moment an engineer stops doubting the design, he or she puts the structure, and human lives, at risk.

Marcus was confident his building would function exactly as he meant it to, but he also knew he carried an enormous burden of responsibility to the men who would erect it and the tenants who would someday inhabit it. "It's a pressure that you go to sleep with and you wake up with," he explained. "It's not the life of one person, but of so many people. Take a doctor, a surgeon, a very responsible position. But if he makes a mistake, he kills one person. If I make a mistake, or one of my a.s.sistants or colleagues makes a mistake that it's my responsibility to be sure he will not make, then my life ends with a question mark.

"I pray, although I am not a religious man, for everything to be O.K.," said Marcus. "Because there are so many things, so many complicated things. We check and re-check. But we also need to be lucky."

FOUR.

The Walking Delegate

(1903).

I'm a peaceful, law-abiding, simple citizen-that's Sam Parks. I've been played for a rowdy, but the tag don't fit and I don't pose for that picture. Of course, if there's a fight, I don't run away. No man has got any business in the labor movement that gets cold feet as soon as there's a sc.r.a.p.

-SAM P PARKS.

...the shameful truth must be confessed that relief can come only from the capture and impounding of Sam Parks as one would a mad dog.

-HENRY H HARRISON L LEWIS.

Harper's Weekly, October 17, 1903 Lutheran All-Faiths Cemetery lies on a bluff in Middle Village, Queens, about four miles east of Manhattan. The cemetery grounds cover 225 acres and contain the remains of roughly half a million dead. A hundred years ago, the cemetery was surrounded by open farmland. Today, shopping outlets and gas stations encroach at every end and jets from the nearby airports roar overhead. Still, it is a pleasant, almost pastoral place, wooded with elms and oaks and cedars of Lebanon, smelling of cut gra.s.s and damp earth. Here, among the Teutonic names-the Grimms and Geissenhainers and Knolls and Schoensiegals-an Irish-born ironworker named Sam Parks lies in eternal rest.

Or maybe he doesn't.

"There is no one named Sam Parks in our files." The woman behind the desk of the cemetery office declares this with a finality that brooks little discussion. She has been to the files-twice-and she is certain that no Parks, Sam or otherwise, was buried in Lutheran All-Faiths Cemetery. Not in 1904; not in any years around it. "If he was here, we'd have a record. And there is no record. Who Who did you say he was?" did you say he was?"

Sam Parks was an ironworker who rose to become one of the most powerful, beloved, and reviled figures in New York City at the start of the twentieth century. He was a union walking delegate for Ironworkers Local 2 who managed in a few years to take control of the entire building industry in New York City and dictate its operation. With a few choice words-Hit the bricks, boys!-he could shut down construction in the city, putting tens of thousands of men out of work and bleeding millions of dollars of capital from the booming building industry. Hundreds of newspaper articles were devoted to him during his brief reign, along with feature articles in many of the leading magazines of his time. The fierce attention continued unchecked through his death in the spring of 1904, when 1,500 mourners marched in his funeral procession and 10,000 spectators crowded the streets to glimpse his hea.r.s.e. The procession wended a circuitous route around the Upper East Side of Manhattan, arriving at a pier at the foot of East 92nd Street. From here, Parks' casket was ferried across the East River, then taken by carriage to Middle Village, and there interred-according to the newspapers-in Lutheran Cemetery.

Then the articles ceased. Sam Parks promptly vanished into an oblivion so thorough that not even his grave-not even a record record of his grave-survives. of his grave-survives.

WAR.

Samuel J. Parks was born in County Down, Ireland, in the early 1860s. Around the age of 10, he emigrated to Canada, and by 14 he was working in the northern forests as a lumberman. He crossed the border into the United States and worked variously as a river-driver, a coal-heaver, and a sailor on the Great Lakes. He also spent time in western railroad camps. It was here, probably, that he first acquired the trade of bridge work. He later worked as a bridgeman in Wisconsin, where he earned a reputation as a riveter of Bunyanesque prowess. It was said that Sam Parks could drive more rivets per hour than any bridgeman alive.

Sometime in the early 1890s, Parks moved to Chicago. He went to work on the skysc.r.a.pers that were rising from the prairie city, but by the time he left a few years later, he'd gained something more important to him than employment: an education in union politics. Chicago was the labor capital of America, boasting more unions, and more powerful unions, than anywhere in the country. The only way to deal with employers, the labor bosses of Chicago believed, was to be stronger than they were. Parks learned this lesson well.

The contempt that labor unions and employers felt for each other in late-nineteenth-century America is difficult to appreciate today. Labor and capital were engaged in a sustained cla.s.s war, and "war" was no metaphor. On one side of the divide, riotous workers armed with fists and cudgels and dynamite fought for better working conditions, better pay, and shorter hours. On the other side, businessmen who controlled America's largest a.s.sets-railroads, oil wells, coal fields, and, of course, steel plants-did everything in their power to stamp out agitation that might diminish profits and productivity.

The employers had the upper hand in most disputes. They were often supported by local and federal government, which supplied them with police or military protection. In the courts, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, intended by Congress to limit corporate monopolies, was more often applied against unions. Even lacking government help, employers, particularly large corporations, were better positioned to wage war than workers. They had the financial resources to survive long strikes, and they had a pool of hundreds of thousands of immigrants arriving in the country every year from whom they could draw fresh workers to replace strikers. Many businesses hired small armies of Pinkerton "detectives" to provide additional protection against proletarian incursions.

Nowhere was the deck more unevenly stacked against workers than in the steel industry. The kind of corporation that Andrew Carnegie and his fellow steel magnates envisioned controlled every aspect of production and distribution, much of this carried out by subsidiaries. The concept of total control was called "vertical integration," and the steel-frame skysc.r.a.per was its soaring triumph. From the raw iron ore deposits of the Mesabi Range in northeastern Minnesota, Big Steel's reach extended to the coalmines that supplied the c.o.ke needed to fuel the furnaces that converted the iron ore into steel. It included the plants along the Monongahela River near Pittsburgh, where the ore was melted down, swept clean of slag, and molded into steel ingots. It included, too, the plants where the steel was fabricated-soldered, hole-punched, riveted-and many of the rail lines that ran between its various components. Finally, it extended to the building contractors and ironworkers who erected the steel columns and beams that had begun their journeys as bits of earth.