High Steel_ The Daring Men Who Built The World's Greatest Skyline Part 7

As magazines provided the public with close-up views of life on the girders, daily newspapers published stories of off-the-steel escapades that seemed to confirm the ironworkers' reputation as daredevils and lunatics. In 1925, Joseph Maloney, an ironworker from the Bronx, bet his friends a dollar that he could climb the brick facade of an apartment building. He'd almost made it to the fourth floor when police reached out and hauled him in through a window. He didn't get to keep his dollar but he got his name in the papers. The kind of man who would climb a brick wall for a dollar was a man born for exaltation in the 1920s.

Probably no ironworker expressed the spirit of the age more dramatically, and more succinctly, than James Bennet. Bennet had been committed to the Manhattan State Hospital for the Insane on Wards Island after suffering delusions that he was a famous inventor. On an autumn morning in 1929, a few weeks before the stock market went into free fall, he escaped from the hospital and climbed up a pier of the h.e.l.l's Gate Bridge. "Stay where you are," the ironworker shouted at an attendant who tried to follow him. "I know what you are after. You want to lock me up so you can get my invention." For six hours, as a crowd of thousands watched from below, police chased Bennet through the steel superstructure of the bridge, but none of the officers could match his climbing skill. Finally, a policeman named Charles Saeger of the Marine Division snuck up on Bennet and grabbed him. The two men tussled for 10 minutes on a catwalk 135 feet over the deadly cross-currents of the East River. Several times, to the gasps of onlookers, they nearly tumbled off together, but at last Saeger managed to get the ironworker into an arm-lock and subdue him. Police tied Bennet up and lowered him from the bridge with a rope. "Gosh," said a woman spectator holding a baby, "that was better than a movie thriller."

In fact, the DeMille film company had already produced a movie about ironworkers in 1928, but it was more of a "farcical melodrama," as one reviewer put it, than a thriller. Skysc.r.a.per Skysc.r.a.per starred William Boyd as a riveter named Blondy working on a skysc.r.a.per with his best friend, Swede. They were "bang-'em and slam-'em rough neck riveters, flirting with death far above the street," according to the film's ad copy. The plot involved Blondy falling in love with a dancing girl, but the real subject of the movie was the high jinks of ironworkers. There were practical jokes and fistfights, harrowing close calls and, inevitably, death. It was not a good movie ("A wild attempt to glorify the steel riveter," is how the unimpressed starred William Boyd as a riveter named Blondy working on a skysc.r.a.per with his best friend, Swede. They were "bang-'em and slam-'em rough neck riveters, flirting with death far above the street," according to the film's ad copy. The plot involved Blondy falling in love with a dancing girl, but the real subject of the movie was the high jinks of ironworkers. There were practical jokes and fistfights, harrowing close calls and, inevitably, death. It was not a good movie ("A wild attempt to glorify the steel riveter," is how the unimpressed Times Times dismissed it), but that hardly mattered. The age of the ironworker had arrived, not only in New York but all the way across the country in Hollywood, in the very city where ironworkers had been convicted, not so long ago, of extraordinary crimes. dismissed it), but that hardly mattered. The age of the ironworker had arrived, not only in New York but all the way across the country in Hollywood, in the very city where ironworkers had been convicted, not so long ago, of extraordinary crimes.

HEROES.

A few weeks after the ironworker James Bennet climbed into the steel trestle of the h.e.l.l's Gate Bridge, the exuberance of the 1920s came to an abrupt end. The stock market crashed in late October and the economy tumbled wildly. In a matter of months, businesses shut their doors and thousands of workers found themselves on the street with nowhere to go and little to do but loiter on corners and watch the escapades in the air.

The ironworkers were lucky, at least initially. Many of the buildings conceived in the height of the boom were too far along to halt. Among these was the grandest and tallest of them all, the Empire State Building.

The Empire State Building was the brainchild of two immigrants' sons who rose to the height of power in New York. John Jacob Raskob was a prominent millionaire; Al Smith had been the governor of New York. The wisdom of adding 85 stories-2,158,000 square feet-of office s.p.a.ce to a city that needed exactly none was questionable, but when it came to the construction of the building, the decisions of Raskob and Smith were generally sound. Their best decision was to hire the construction firm of Starrett Brothers & Eken.

The Starrett brothers, William and Paul, were living biographies of the skysc.r.a.per age. Born in Kansas, they moved as children to Chicago with their three other brothers (two of whom also became well-regarded builders). They were young men in Chicago as skysc.r.a.pers began to rise there. Both Paul and William eventually went to work for the George A. Fuller Company and moved to New York in time to help build the Flatiron Building. Since then, a Starrett had had a hand in nearly every important skysc.r.a.per in the city.

The Starrett brothers had a reputation for working fast; these were the contractors, after all, who managed to erect the steel of the Bank of Manhattan Building in three months. Now they resolved to outdo every record of construction they or anyone else had ever set. The average rate for setting steel in those days-it's still true today-was about two floors a week. The Starretts, with Post & McCord as their steel erector, intended to set four floors a week at the start, then five floors a week as the building rose and narrowed, and they intended to do this without resorting to costly overtime. The only way to succeed was with planning and organization, and with a force of ironworkers willing to work like h.e.l.l.

Post & McCord hired two companies to fabricate the steel, American Bridge Company and McClintic-Marshall. The order for 57,000 tons of steel-almost 50 percent more steel than had been used in the Chrysler and the Bank of Manhattan combined combined-was the largest in history. U.S. Steel milled the shapes at its plants near Pittsburgh, then s.h.i.+pped them to the fabrication shops, where the columns and beams were cut and hole-punched to specifications. The steel was then s.h.i.+pped by rail to Bayonne, New Jersey, stacked and sorted, floated by barge to docks on the East River, and finally hauled by truck to 33rd Street and Fifth Avenue. Enormous derricks bowed and lifted whole loads in a single pick. As the building rose beyond 30 stories, relay derricks lifted the steel partway, then erection derricks lifted it to the top. From the moment the rolled steel came out of the mill to the moment the raising gangs slipped in the first temporary bolts, the journey took as little as 80 hours.

None of the Starretts' methods of construction were exactly revolutionary; most were techniques that had been honed since they were young men in Chicago, and since that day long ago when William Starrett hired Sam Parks to push his riveting gang. The incredible speed they achieved, as Paul Starrett acknowledged, was facilitated by the simplicity of the structure. The frame of the Empire State was made up of cla.s.sic box-shaped grids, with lots of repet.i.tion from floor to floor. As a result, the builders could achieve an a.s.sembly linelike efficiency. In many ways, the Empire State was the ultimate triumph of Taylorism applied to construction. But this was a humanized version of Taylorism. The Starretts did not use men up and spit them out; indeed, they paid a good deal of attention to their employees' comfort and safety. Rumor had it that as many as 48 men died during the building's construction; in fact, just five men died, a remarkably low number for the day.

"[W]hile the theorists lament that the machine age is making robots and automatons of all men," wrote Margaret Norris after visiting the Empire State during its construction, "here is one type of workman, the steel man, the very spirit of the skysc.r.a.per, a direct product of the power age, whose personality the machine exalts." Ironworkers reconciled the two opposing ideas of a worker, one as an efficient automaton, the other as an autonomous individual of spectacular achievement. It was a combination that both capitalists and the proletariat alike could share, admire, and mythologize.

As it happened, the perfect mythmaker was on hand. He was Lewis Hine, a shy 56-year-old photographer who'd made his reputation years earlier photographing the poor and the vanquished inside coal mines, sweatshops, and overcrowded tenements. The a.s.signment to photograph workers on the Empire State Building was an odd one for Hine, as his employers were the capitalistic builders. In lesser hands, the job might have amounted to that of corporate flak. Hine turned it into exhilarating art. He climbed out onto the steel with the ironworkers and dangled from a derrick cable hundreds of feet above the city to capture, as no one ever had before (or has since) the dizzy work of building skysc.r.a.pers. His subjects sit or stand on minuscule purchases, the street a thin gray strip below. They hang off guy wires and catch forbidden rides on the steel b.a.l.l.s of derricks. To Hine, many of these men were "heroes," and he portrayed them in heroic poses, s.h.i.+rtless and musclebound, with strong jaw lines and sun-bleached hair.

One of Hine's heroes was a young connector named Victor Gosselin, known as "Frenchy." Born and raised in Montreal, Frenchy had been an ironworker for 15 years when he got to the Empire State Building. Before that, he'd been a sailor, a lumberjack, and a deep-sea diver. He'd traveled all over the country, and to France and Persia. He'd been everywhere and tried everything. In Hine's photographs, Frenchy is s.h.i.+rtless and wears cut-off blue jeans that reveal sc.r.a.pes and bruises on his legs. Why a connector, who slides up and down rusted steel columns all day, would wear shorts is beyond imagining, but there he is, riding the derrick ball, handsome and swashbuckling, a half grin on his face. In one shot, his cut-off shorts ride up his legs like a chorus girl's.

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"Frenchy" on the Empire State by Lewis Wickes Hine.

(Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York) "It's funny about this business," Frenchy said one afternoon while chomping a huge steak sandwich on the edge of the 84th floor. "Everybody seems to think you have to be a superman or something to work on steel. Of course, it ain't no picnic, but then there's lots of jobs I'd pa.s.s up for this. I wouldn't wanna be no taxi driver, for instance. Looka them down there, dodging in and outa that traffic all day long. A guy's apt to get killed that way."

Frenchy himself had come close to getting killed in falls several times. He'd seen dozens of men die. He'd seen many men lose their nerve. And what did his wife think of his work?

"She don't think nothin' about it," shrugged Frenchy. "You don't see Lindbergh's wife telling him he can't fly around in airplanes, do you? All she ever said about it was, 'Good-by, baby; don't get hurt.'"

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Sometimes t.i.tled "Lunchtime on a Beam" or simply "Men on a Beam," this famous photograph was shot in late September of 1932, 800 feet over Sixth Avenue during the construction of the RCA Building, as part of an elaborate Rockefeller Center publicity effort. It is often taken, incorrectly, for a Lewis Hine photo; in fact, it was shot by a publicity photographer named Hamilton Wright, Jr. As for the ident.i.ty of the ironworkers, many Mohawks are convinced that the fourth from the left is Joe Jocks of Kahnawake, while Newfoundlanders insist that the s.h.i.+rtless man in the middle is Ray Costello of Conception Harbour. Captions on other photographs taken that same day identify the three men on the far left as John O'Rielly [sic], George Covan, and Joseph Eckner. The s.h.i.+rtless man whom Newfoundlanders believe to be Ray Costello is identified elsewhere as Howard Kilgore (though people who knew Costello swear it's he) and the next three are identified as William Birger, Joe Curtis, and John Portla. The name of the man on the far right, drinking from a flask during Prohibition, is not recorded.

(The Rockefeller Center Archive Center)

EIGHT.

Fish

Joe Lewis sat in the kitchen of the small row house in Park Slope, Brooklyn, resting his meaty forearms on the Formica tabletop. As his wife, Beverly, looked on beside him, he opened and closed the fingers of his right hand, clenching a fist, then letting it go. "I'll tell you what it's like," he said. "It's like you're playing ball, right? And the ball comes in and hits you on the fingers. Your hand goes all numb, right? That's how mine is all the time. It's not so bad. Just strange, really."

Outside the air was muggy and sooty, but here in the kitchen it was cool and dim and smelled faintly of Pine Sol. Seven men usually boarded in the row house without benefit of female company. They took turns cleaning and thought they did a pretty nice job of it. Then one of their wives would drop in, Snow Whitelike, and discover dirt in places it had never occurred to the men to look. Since Beverly arrived a few weeks earlier to visit her injured husband, the auto magazines were neatly stacked, the curtains were laundered, the floors were mopped, the windows were washed. To Joe, it was still a revelation that windows needed was.h.i.+ng. "Windows?" he would say to Beverly. "We don't wash windows. windows."

Joe and Beverly had the row house to themselves. The other men who boarded here-this included Joe and Beverly's three grown sons, Bob, Joe Jr., and Rickey-had gone back home to Newfoundland for the summer. Beverly would be returning home soon, too. Then Joe would be here alone in the doldrums of August, filling out endless paperwork, waiting for doctors and lawyers to tell him when he could get back to work. He'd already seen practically everything the Discovery Channel, his favorite, had to offer. Once a day he went on a walk, following doctor's orders, lugging his numb appendage through the borough of Brooklyn.

Nine months earlier, Joe had been working as a signalman in the raising gang on the Ernst & Young building on Times Square with Brett Conklin. The job had been going well, and the gang had shaped up nicely. They'd started several floors behind, but by Christmas they'd caught up and pa.s.sed the other gang. Then Jeff, the tagline man, got hurt; a beam hit him in the chest and his ankle twisted sharply and snapped in the corrugation of the decking. Two months later, Brett had his accident, falling from the column on that dreary February morning. Two months after that, it was Joe's turn-the third man in the five-man gang to be disabled within six months.

Joe's accident occurred on a May morning on the corner of 59th Street and Sixth Avenue, just east of Columbus Circle (and the Time Warner Center), across the street from Central Park. What remained of the old gang from the Ernst & Young building had come here to add a few floors to a luxury hotel. Joe's brother-in-law, Billy Moore, was superintendent. Joe's sons, Rickey and Joe Jr., were on the job, too. They'd all wake up in the row house in Brooklyn and travel to work together-a big happy family.

"So I'll tell you what happened," said Joe now, speaking in his thick Newfoundlander's brogue as he sat with his wife at the kitchen table in Park Slope. "We were finished up on top. We come down and we were s.h.a.gging around some stairwells. We had the stairwells planked over, but this weren't that really good plank. You'd put 'em across a long span and there'd still be a give to them, right? So we put plywood on 'em to make sure we wouldn't go through. Well, I walked toward the wall, and there was a couple planks with no plywood-and soon as I stepped on 'em, I was gone. They snapped in two, and I went through the floor. As I was going down, I grabbed onto a big brace. It was just luck, I guess. I was reaching to grab something and that's where I hung up. I held there. I couldn't get back up because my arms-the strength was gone. Below was the floor, a good 15 feet, easy, that. When I look up, the guys are looking down at me. They say, "You all right?" I say, "I'm all right, man, but I can't let go. If I let go, I'll break my legs."

There wasn't much the men could do but watch. Joe managed to work his way down the diagonal of the X brace and get to the column. He slid down the column to the floor. The other men insisted that he go to the hospital, but Joe refused. He felt fine. So he went back to work.

Ten days later, something strange began to happen to his arm. It felt tingly when he woke up that morning, and as the day wore on, it became increasingly numb, and by supper he could hardly feel it at all. The nerves had apparently been damaged. Joe was not a tall man, but he was stout, nearly 230 pounds, and as he'd reached out and grabbed the diagonal section of brace to stop his fall, his right hand caught first on the higher end. That arm had taken most of Joe's falling weight. The doctors subjected the arm to a battery of high-tech tests-MRI, nerve scans, CAT scans-and one rather medieval treatment that involved Joe dipping his hand in a bucket of hot candlewax. Joe had no idea what this was supposed to accomplish, but he was fairly sure it accomplished nothing, since he still could not feel a thing.

Beverly sat next to Joe at the table and listened to his story quietly. They had known each other most of their lives, since they were children in Newfoundland. But, like many Newfoundlander couples, they had spent more of their lives apart than together, in different countries and different environments. You could see it in their complexions. Hers was pale and smooth, evidence of a life spent on an island that was moist and foggy most of the time. Joe's face was tanned and lined, his cheeks ruddy. As Joe spoke of his accident, Beverly's expression remained placid. Men getting hurt at ironwork was something she knew all too well.

"I was used to it," she said when Joe got up to leave the kitchen for a moment. "My father was at it, and my brothers. Both my grandfathers. My father broke both his legs once. The only thing that saved him was he fell onto another guy. Then my brother Terry got hurt. How many floors did Terry fall, Joe?"

"Terry didn't fall, toots," said Joe, returning. "Terry got jammed up with a column. It was wintertime. One big huge column lying on top of another, and the skids-those wood pieces between them-must have been frozen. The column slid and it happened he was close by. It almost cut his leg off."

Joe Lewis was not a man to complain. The way he saw it, most ironworkers got injured sooner or later, and he had managed 37 years in the business without so much as a-well, come to think of it, there was that one time he fell fifteen feet from a ladder. Then there was that time a beam rolled over onto his fingers and cut the tips off, but the tips had all been collected and sewn back on, good as new. Those injuries were hardly worth mentioning. Even this newest affliction, this numbness that began in his hand and crawled up his forearm, wasn't so bad, not compared to what happened to some.

Joe tried not to think too much about the worst part of it, what it meant to his music. He was a gifted musician who played nearly every stringed instrument-fiddle, banjo, guitar. He was fairly good on accordion, too, and could make his way around a piano keyboard. For much of his life he'd played in bands after work, all over Canada and America. Country, Irish, rock. Joe liked all of it. Here in Brooklyn, he and his brothers-they called themselves the Lewis Brothers-had played regular gigs at a few pubs and clubs. That would have to end now, at least temporarily. Joe could still bow and he could strum rhythm, but he could no longer pick or finger the strings. Everything felt off, strange, like it wasn't quite him doing the playing. This was a cruel irony. Music was the thing he'd always relied on to take his mind off his troubles. Now, when he really could have used it, it was unavailable to him.

And here was another irony: For the first time in his adult life, Joe had an opportunity to be home in Newfoundland for a long stretch. He'd yearned for this for years. What better time to go back than now, since he could not work anyway? But the doctors and lawyers, the endless appointments and paperwork, stuck him here in Brooklyn in August. That was especially cruel.

THE ROCK.

Newfoundland is a place out of whack with the rest of North America. Separated from the continent by the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Cabot Strait, the island is closer to Europe than to most of Canada or the United States. By car, Brooklyn to Newfoundland is a three-day journey, east-by-northeast along the seaboard of New England, then eastward across New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, then due east by 16-hour ferry across the North Atlantic. By the time a traveler arrives in the port of Argentia, he has covered almost 1,400 miles, is as near to Greenland as to Brooklyn, and is one and a half hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time. Newfoundland is one of a handful of places on earth where the time, relative to Greenwich Mean, runs on the half.

Guidebooks call the landscape of Newfoundland "rugged." Newfoundlanders themselves call their island the Rock, because that's essentially what it is, a raw convulsion of ocean crust punched up by the same tectonic forces that gave rise to the Appalachian Mountains to the southwest. Newfoundland is a hard, unforgiving land, the poorest province in Canada, but it is also a profoundly beautiful place. Sheer cliffs drop off into the icy green North Atlantic. Rivers tumble out of the highlands into the bays. Saltbox houses cling to rocky sh.o.r.es. All of this makes for dramatic and stunning vistas. Unfortunately, visitors to the Rock seldom get to enjoy these vistas. Newfoundland comes with a few catches, and one of them is fog. The fog comes in wisps, in scrims, in shrouds and blankets. Newfoundlanders have many words and phrases to describe its varieties. "Mauzy" means warm and foggy. "Capelin weather" means foggy and drizzly and cold. "RDF" means rainy-drizzly-foggy.

Newfoundland English is filled with colorful locutions, all p.r.o.nounced in a brogue that is a frequent source of puzzlement and amus.e.m.e.nt to off-islanders. The vowels are thick, and whole sentences are often mashed into a single extended diphthong climaxing in a contraction. So, for instance, instead of a straightforward query like "How is he doing?," you might get something like "Owsee gettin' on, b'ys?" ("B'y" being the Newfoundland equivalent of "man" or "dude" in American slang.) Newfoundlanders may be frequently unintelligible to off-islanders, but they have an admirable way of saying exactly what they mean. This practice is conveyed in the names their ancestors chose for the bays and coves around which they live, a geographic index of regret and resignation: Bay of Despair, Chance Cove, Cuckold's Cove, Deadman's Bay, Gin Cove, Mistaken Point, Mosquito, Stinking Cove, Useless Bay, Witless Bay.

Joe Lewis comes from the more auspiciously named Conception Bay near the northeastern tip of Newfoundland, on the Avalon Peninsula. Conception Bay is surrounded by hills of black spruce and b.u.t.te-like humps of rock that Newfoundlanders call tolts (p.r.o.nounced "towts"). Compared to much of Newfoundland, the topography of Conception Bay is gentle, even soothing. The bay is almost 20 miles across at its mouth, but narrows at the head to small coves that appear as enclosed and protected as mountain lakes. Six small towns cl.u.s.ter around the coves. The names of these towns, east to west, are Chapel Cove, Harbour Main, Holyrood, Avondale, Conception Harbour, and Colliers. Most of these six towns are furnished with a white Catholic church, a red brick post office, a tavern, and not much else. Any one of them you could careen through on the curvy two-lane coastal road, Route 60, and experience only the dimmest sense you'd pa.s.sed a town at all. Avondale is the second largest of the towns. It's got a white Catholic church, a red brick post office, and a tavern, but it also boasts the only restaurant for miles around. The restaurant is a small diner in a railway car next to the old train depot. The specialty of the house is fried cod tongue.

The largest of the towns, and the most picturesque, is Conception Harbour, Joe Lewis's town. Conception Harbour is set on the western sh.o.r.e of a cove. The church, Our Lady of Saint Ann, marks its center. Everything north of the church is known as Up-the-Bay. This includes the old fis.h.i.+ng hamlets of Bacon's Cove and Kitchuses and the high fields of bush and gra.s.s beyond. Standing on these hills on a rare clear summer day, you can often see schools of pilot whales-Newfoundlanders call them potheads-knitting in and out of the water below, chasing capelin fish.

South of the church-Down-the-Bay, that is-Church Street crosses Route 60, forming an intersection that locals call the Cross. This is the practical, if not the spiritual, focus of the town. Just beyond the Cross, Route 60 rises sharply up Lewis's Hill. Larrasey's general store and the small red brick post office are on the right. Higher up the hill is a funeral home, and a little beyond it, the Conception Harbour Tourist Inn, a bed-and-breakfast run by the town's mayor, Marg O'Driscoll, and her husband, Paul. Locals refer to the crest of the hill as the Pinch, probably because it rises like a fold of pinched skin. On the other side of the Pinch, at the bottom of a long steep grade, is the town of Colliers.

Across the street from Larrasey's store-heading back down toward the Cross now-is the tavern. It used to be Doyle's but is now Frank's, though pretty much everybody still calls it Doyle's. It is a cavernous, windowless hall, room enough for hundreds if there's a band playing or a dance. On most nights, though, half a dozen patrons mill around the small bar at the front. The bartender is a pretty, soft-spoken woman named Lorraine Conway, who happens to be Joe Lewis's sister. Lorraine is somewhat famous around the head of the bay for having gone to Nashville a few years back and cut a country-western alb.u.m. Some evenings she gets up on the little stage near the back of Frank's and sings about found love and broken hearts in a sweet soprano. Her husband is often away in Alberta, 2,500 miles to the west. Like so many absent men from around here, he's an ironworker.

Until you step into Frank's and listen to the conversation and notice the Local 40 decals on the wall behind the bar, there are few signs around the head of the bay to tell you of the remarkable link between this place and New York City. There is little outward evidence to suggest that this tiny speck on the map, these six towns, a few square miles with a total population of several thousand, have produced a huge percentage of the men who erected the steel infrastructure of Manhattan, not to mention other American cities. Indians from Kahnawake may have gotten most of the attention from the press, but Newfoundlanders and their offspring-other ironworkers call them "Fish"-have made up the backbone of the New York local for many years.

You don't have to go into Frank's to recognize this fact. You could, alternatively, walk up to the cemetery at the top of Colliers Hill, behind the church. Much of the cemetery is overgrown with wildflowers, but if you push them aside you can see the names on the gravestones: Burke, Cole, Conway, Costello, Doyle, Kennedy, Kenny, Lewis, Moore, St. John, Wade. Stop by any steel job in Manhattan and you will hear these same names today. They belong now to the grandsons and great-grandsons of the earlier Newfoundlander ironworkers. Most of these younger men have never seen Conception Bay, having been born and raised in Park Slope or Bay Ridge or in the suburbs around New York. Once their fathers and grandfathers left Newfoundland, they never really came back. This was just another of Newfoundland's catches. The island was a kind of paradise. But the only way to live here was to go away.

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Conception Harbour, Newfoundland.

(Photo by the author) JIGGING AND SWILING.

John Cabot, the Spanish-born English explorer, was among the first Europeans to see the rocky fogbound island when he sailed across the Atlantic in 1497. He was hoping to find a western route to Asia. What he discovered instead, and promptly claimed for England, was this "newe founde lande." Though the island looked austere and desolate from his s.h.i.+p, he immediately noted the attraction that would draw people here for the next several centuries. "The sea is swarming with fish," Cabot reportedly claimed on his return, "which can be taken not only with the net, but in baskets let down with a stone." The fish were cod, and by the middle of sixteenth century fleets from France, Portugal, and Britain were making frequent summer trips to the Grand Banks near Newfoundland to scoop them up. While the shoals off Newfoundland became the world's premiere fishery, the island itself served mainly as a convenient place to dry the fish. n.o.body seemed to seriously entertain the idea of living there.

The first true immigrants to Newfoundland came from the British Isles near the end of the eighteenth century. Some of them came from rural England, but the great majority came from the southeastern counties of Ireland. They were a seafaring people who probably arrived as crewmen on English fis.h.i.+ng vessels, then remained out of some brave and foolish notion they could sc.r.a.pe a living out of these rocky harbors and exquisitely cold waters. They settled the outlying coves around St. John's, the "outports," as they are still called, on the Avalon Peninsula. Among these early outports was Cat's Cove, probably named after a cougar who lived in the area. In 1870, the people of Cat's Cove changed the name of their small outport to Conception Harbour.

It's an indication of the hards.h.i.+p these people must have come from that this-this rock rock-seemed to offer something more promising. Farming wasn't really an option in Newfoundland. The land was too rocky, the soil too shallow, and the growing season too brief to cultivate anything more elaborate than a vegetable garden. The only way to earn a living here was by fis.h.i.+ng.

The cod fishery was summer and autumn work, from June to October. The men would sail out to the Grand Banks in schooners, then lower themselves to the water in small dories, two men per boat, and "jig" for fish with a small lead ball and hook. They would jig until the dory was filled with as much fish as it could hold. Then it was a matter of gingerly making the trip back through the swells to the schooner without sinking-a.s.suming the fishermen could find the schooner. Getting lost in a squall was easy. Fog, too, was a constant danger. Every time a man went out to the Grand Banks, he stood a good chance of never coming home.

Early spring was the seal fishery. Sealing, or "swiling," as Newfoundlanders call it, was an even more treacherous business than cod fis.h.i.+ng. The men would sign on for a berth on a schooner out of Conception Bay or St. John's and sail "down to the Labrador"-actually, hundreds of miles to the north. Starting out in early March, the schooners battered their way into the loose ice pack flowing south out of the Baffin Islands. For a short season, no more than a few weeks, mother seals gave birth to their young on the moving pans of ice. The baby seals, called whitecoats, were the prey of the hunt.

Once the schooners were lodged in the ice pack, the men went over the side and hiked for miles on a rough landscape of pressure ridges and slushy troughs, jumping from ice pan to ice pan, often venturing beyond sight of the s.h.i.+p. Finally, they would spy the seals, thousands of whelping pups grouped together in herds-"whelping ice," it was called. Killing the whitecoats was a matter of walking up to them and whacking them on the head with a gaff. That was the easy part. Afterward, the men gutted the carca.s.ses with sculping knives, then hauled the hides back to the boat as the sun fell and the sky turned dark, with the prospect of sleeping on a s.h.i.+p oozing seal blood and grease. The s.h.i.+p would have tens of thousands of pelts stowed aboard before the trip was done, as many as 50,000 in a b.u.mper season.

The seal hunt was a gory and brutal business, and it did little to enrich the men who partook in it, since most of the profit went to the s.h.i.+p owners and the captains. Sealing was also, on the face of it, ludicrously risky. s.h.i.+ps routinely got locked in the ice. When this happened, the crew would try to tow the s.h.i.+p by rope and hand to freedom, exploding dynamite to loosen the surrounding ice. This failing, they might abandon the s.h.i.+p and try to walk to land, many miles over drifting ice. Sometimes they made it, sometimes not.

Men died on the seal hunt even barring these larger calamities. A storm might come up and they would lose their way back to the s.h.i.+p and freeze to death out on the ice field. Or they might find themselves on a pan of ice that had broken free from the pack, surrounded by dead seals, floating out to oblivion. Altogether, it was a hard, dangerous, ruthless business. It was also excellent training for an ironworker.

THE HIGH LIFE.

No one knows exactly when the first Newfoundlander left the water and took to ironwork, but the turn of the last century is a good bet. A s.h.i.+p from Conception Harbour or St. John's probably sailed down the New England seaboard, to the "Boston states" with a catch of fish to sell. Aboard that s.h.i.+p was a restless young man from the head of Conception Bay. When his s.h.i.+p docked in Boston, or perhaps it was New York or Philadelphia, he jumped off during sh.o.r.e leave, took a stroll around the city, and marveled at the tall buildings and sweeping bridges. He found his way to a skysc.r.a.per under construction, watched the men work, inquired how much they earned, and liked the sound of it. He let the s.h.i.+p sail home without him.

The Newfoundlander would have been a natural for the work. Like the Scandinavians who were already common in the trade by 1900, he would have possessed the sea legs and the rigging skills that were so important to the job. He also would have been accustomed to working hard under risky circ.u.mstances and not fretting too much about it. Compared to hauling seal carca.s.ses across a s.h.i.+fting ice field in the Labrador, or climbing a s.h.i.+p's mast on a stormy sea, the feat of balancing on a steel beam several hundred feet above the streets of New York was a cakewalk.

The lore around the head of Conception Bay has it that the original Fish ironworker was Frank "Red" Treahy (p.r.o.nounced Treddy) from Conception Harbour. Those who later worked with Treahy say he was a tireless and prodigious ironworker, the kind of man who would show up an hour early at a job site and leave an hour late; the kind of man, in other words, employers love. According to lore, Treahy sent word back home of this new lucrative trade, and other men followed him to the States. When he vouched for a fellow Newfoundlander, contractors took his word.

Whether on Treahy's invitation or their own initiative, other Newfoundlanders were working steel in the States by the turn of the century. Evidence of this hangs on a living room wall in Bayside, Queens, at the home of a retired ironworker named Jack Costello and his wife, Kitty. Like Joe Lewis, Jack Costello was born and raised in Conception Harbour. Unlike Joe, he moved to New York as a young man and has lived there as an American citizen ever since.

When a guest visits, Jack and Kitty steer him to a wall on which hang three framed photographs. Jack points to an old black-and-white print of two serious-looking young men posed formally in a photographer's studio. They sport thick moustaches and identical uniforms, probably in antic.i.p.ation of a Labor Day parade. Badges on their lapels read "International a.s.sociation of Bridge and Structural Ironworkers." The men appear to be in their late 20s.

"His name was Tim Costello," says Jack. "He was my grandfather."

"And the taller man on the right was Charles Newbury," says Kitty. "He was my grandfather."

"My grandfather," continues Jack, "was born in Conception Harbour in 1869. He can't be older than thirty there." Meaning the photograph must have been taken around 1900.

"Your grandfathers knew each other?"

"Oh, they were good friends," says Kitty, clearly relis.h.i.+ng her guest's astonishment.

"Now look at this," says Jack, pointing to another studio photograph. Two different young men, some years later. "This was taken in the twenties, we think in New York. These are our fathers."

"So your fathers were friends, too?"

"Best friends," says Kitty, grinning. friends," says Kitty, grinning.

Finally, hanging between these two old black-and-white photographs, is a color photograph from the mid-1990s. This one shows Jack and Kitty's three sons, two of whom are currently ironworkers. A concise history of Newfoundland ironworkers-four generations, including Jack himself-is contained in that living room in Bayside.

Jack Costello's grandfather, Tim Costello, deserves as much credit as anyone for stocking the trade of ironwork with Newfoundlanders. Even as he worked steel in New York, he returned home often enough to sire nine children. Seven of the nine were boys, and every one of them grew up to be an ironworker. Each of these seven sons then had a large family, and all of their their sons-Jack and his many first cousins-became ironworkers in the 1940s and 1950s. By the time Jack and Kitty married in 1960 and started raising little ironworkers of their own, the name Costello was ubiquitous among ironworkers in New York. sons-Jack and his many first cousins-became ironworkers in the 1940s and 1950s. By the time Jack and Kitty married in 1960 and started raising little ironworkers of their own, the name Costello was ubiquitous among ironworkers in New York.

This same pattern of proliferation occurred in other large Catholic families from the head of Conception Bay. They sent five or six boys at a time to Boston or Philadelphia or New York to become ironworkers. Whichever city the men settled in, they tended to lodge near each other. In Brooklyn, young men who had grown up a mile or two apart at the head of the bay pressed into rooming houses around Ninth Street and Fifth Avenue. Many of the married men had left their families back home, but others brought their wives and children along, and together they made a Little Newfoundland neighborhood in Park Slope: the bars where the men gathered after work, the living rooms and kitchens where they socialized on weekends, St. Thomas Aquinas church on Sundays. One of the peculiarities of the arrangement was that men who left their families back in Newfoundland came to know their fellow Brooklyn Newfoundlanders better than they knew their own wives and children. So while young Kitty Newbury, born and raised in Brooklyn, saw her future father-in-law nearly every weekend-she called him Uncle Willie-Jack Costello, growing up in a house on the Pinch, saw his own father but once a year.

The married men must have experienced occasional carnal temptations, 1,400 miles from home and wives 11 months of the year, but the presence of other Newfoundlander families, and the ties to home they represented, tended to keep the men on even moral keels. As for the wives back home, there was little chance of their straying from the bonds of matrimony. Their workloads, as they singlehandedly raised large broods in small houses without benefit of electricity, running water, oil heat, or refrigeration-while also tending vegetable gardens, caring for livestock, and making nearly every financial and parenting decision alone-would have made the very idea laughable. In any case, there were few men around other than the priest, who must have been pleased knowing that when s.e.x did occur, it was demonstrably procreational. You could plot a man's visits home by his children's birthdays.

At mid-century, as post-war America marched steadily toward its modern destiny of steel and automobiles and electronics, the people of Conception Harbour continued to live a kind of rural existence most Americans had left behind in the nineteenth century. Cars were rare and roads were dirt. Fires and kerosene lamps provided indoor light, and the only radio in town was a battery-operated device owned by Master Keating, the school headmaster. Electricity was ten years off. So was plumbing. Medical care was rudimentary. Doctor O'Keefe from Avondale, the only physician for miles around, doubled as the dentist, pulling teeth without novocaine. Babies were delivered at home by Agnes Walsh, the midwife.

It was Agnes Walsh who delivered Joe Lewis on July 4, 1945, in an upstairs bedroom of a small white saltbox, just down the street from the house where Joe's mother lives today. At the time of Joe's birth, his mother, Bride, was a pretty young woman, barely 20. His father, Moses, was a 28-year-old ironworker.

Joe began his education in a one-room schoolhouse on the Pinch. Older boys attended Master Keating's Academy near the church, while older girls attended the convent school. Discipline was strict and harsh, the slightest infraction met by a sound strapping. Greater infractions were handled by the priest, Father Casey, the voice of patriarchal cert.i.tude in a place where adult men were scarce.

For all the punishment and privation, life was hardly dour. On the contrary, people who grew up in Conception Harbour remember it as an idyllic place. Children were free to wander as they pleased, to fish and swim and climb trees in search of robins' eggs. In August, the annual garden party drew people from all over the head of the bay to the church lawn. Winters were magnificently cold and snowy and brought different excitements. There was skating on Healy's Pond and sledding down Lewis's hill or over the other side of the Pinch into Colliers. At Christmas, gifts were rare but fathers came home and pigs were slaughtered, so for once there was meat instead of tiresome fish.

Joe Lewis, like most of the children in town, did not see much of his father. Even when Moses Lewis was home from ironworking he spent most of his time cutting firewood for the long winter. Two hundred years of human habitation had stripped the sh.o.r.e clean of trees, so Moses and the other men woke before dawn and rode horseback inland for several hours to the forest. By the time they cut the wood and hauled it back home, the December sky was well past dark.

But the moments Joe spent with his father he would not forget, for Moses Lewis-Mose, everybody called him-was one to leave an indelible impression. He was a high-spirited, fun-loving man, "always jolly and laughing, steady-go," as Joe recalls. "And everybody that knew him, they'd say, 'Oh, your father, he was something else, he was some fellow to be around.'"

One of Mose's friends had a car, among the first in town, and Joe remembers how as a small boy he'd squeeze into the rumble seat in back with his father and they'd drive out to Bacon's Cove, where his father was born, speeding along the church road on the high bluff above the sea, laughing and singing. There was always singing when Mose Lewis was around. He loved to sing, and was much admired for his voice. One ballad Joe recalls his father singing, called "Babe in the Woods," told the story of a mother searching for her lost children. It was 46 verses long and took over half an hour to complete. His father knew every word.

Both of Joe's parents were gifted musicians, so it was no surprise that their children proved to be quick studies. Moses taught Joe, the eldest of the ten children, how to play the fiddle. He started him on a simple jig, "Maple Sugar." Joe picked it up effortlessly and he, in turn, helped the younger ones learn. On Sat.u.r.day evenings, Mose would chug up the hill to Doyle's tavern and return home with a dozen friends, men and women, and they would gather in the kitchen around a pot of soup and sing. Much of the singing was a cappella, but when the adults wanted instrumental accompaniment, they turned to Joe and his siblings. The children would take turns playing fiddle or accordion, and afterward one of the men would say, "Come here, little fellow, 'tills I give ya some money," and hand Joe or one of the others a coin. Joe loved music, and he liked the idea of making money from music. He thought that instead of becoming an ironworker, like his father, perhaps he'd be a musician when he grew up.

On a summer day in 1958, Joe and two friends walked out to the great blueberry patch at the Cat Hill Gullies, about seven miles inland from the sea. Joe, now 13, had recently become interested in girls, and he and his friends had taken to hanging out in the shadows of the big stone tolt that jutted up along the road between Avondale and Conception Harbour. Teenagers would congregate and stroll along the lane under the tolt, flirting and teasing. Joe and his friends had set their sights on a few pretty Avondale girls they'd met under the tolt. When the boys caught wind of the girls' plan to go blueberry picking in the Cat Hill Gullies, a cl.u.s.ter of ponds and thickets, they conspired to try a little blueberry picking themselves.

"Oh, jeez, they had big buckets already full with a few gallons by the time we got there," recalls Joe 43 years later. "We only had little cans, little bean cans, probably not even a pint. We were just going to chase 'em, that's all. We started chatting and following them around in the berries. Well, I guess they knew what we were about, and told us to go on back home. 'Go on and get a bucket,' they said, 'never mind your bean cans.' Before we goes, though, I spoke to her. I don't remember what I said. Probably something foolish." The girl to whom he uttered his foolish words had auburn hair and freckles, and her name was Beverly Moore.

Joe wasn't sure he was in love-he was just a kid, after all-but he would never regret that walk to the blueberry patch at Cat Hill Gullies. He had his sweetheart, he had his music, and for the next two years, he was as contented as a boy could be.

Joe was visiting his friend Frankie Mahoney's house on a June afternoon in 1961, sitting on the couch and watching the Mahoneys' new television, one of the first in town, when the front door opened and the priest walked in. Not Father Casey, who was on vacation, but his stand-in, young Father Hearn. "Joe, I got bad news for you, son," blurted out the nervous priest. "Your father has died." Joe did not hear any more. He got to his feet and ran out through the Mahoneys' front door onto the street. He ran all the way home, tears streaming from his face, then ran up the stairs into his room-the room he shared with three of his brothers-and cried without pause for two days.

Joe's father had been working up north in Labrador on a steel-enforced dam near Churchill Falls. A poorly moored derrick toppled and fell onto him, killing him instantly. He was 43 years old. His widow, Bride, was 35. The 10 children ranged from a baby girl of 8 months to Joe, at 15.

"Oh, man, it was something. I think music is what kept us together through that," Joe recalls. "There's something about music, when you're playing it, your mind thinks of nothin' else. It just goes into the music. We all got together in the kitchen, and we played and played, until my mother begged us to stop."

There wasn't much time for grieving. Joe, as eldest, was the man of the family now. Money would come later from the union and from a settlement with the steel company, but even then it would be hard going for a family of 11. So a few months after his father died, Joe boarded a plane and flew to Labrador City to find a job at the iron ore mines. A man who knew Joe's father hired him to clean the miner's bunkhouse. Joe did that for a few months, got lonely and went home, then returned to Labrador. The spring he was sixteen he signed on for the seal hunt-still active in the 1960s-but found he had no heart for the brutal work. "I let 'em go," says Joe. "I didn't want to kill 'em. They were too cute to kill, like little puppy dogs."

While Joe was shuttling back and forth to Labrador, Beverly Moore had moved to New York, where her father was an ironworker. There was nothing in Conception Harbour for Joe now. It was time to make a move and earn real money. So he got on a bus and traveled 1,300 miles west to Toronto. He kicked around at a few jobs there, none of which paid well or gave much satisfaction. All along Joe knew what he wanted to do. It was the last thing on earth he should have wanted to do, but he wanted to do it anyway. One evening he sat down and wrote a letter to his mother telling her that he'd made up his mind: he was going into ironwork. She wrote back at once. You will do no such thing, she instructed him. Your father was an ironworker. Don't you know he got killed? Don't you know the danger? You'll probably end up the same way he did.

Joe read the letter through a few times, and then wrote his response. It was already decided, he told his mother. The money was good, and they needed it. He would be all right. He would take good care of himself.

He neglected to tell her how afraid he was. He knew very well the dangers of the job, and was none too fond of heights, either. Yet there was something about it that drew him, something other than the money. "I don't know how to explain it. It's a rush is what it is. It's like driving fast. You know there's danger there, but you push yourself to see if you can do it. People say you're crazy, and maybe you are in a way."

He was lonely one evening in Toronto and picked up the phone, but instead of calling home to his family, he dialed a number he'd been holding onto for a while. It was a Brooklyn number. Beverly Moore picked up the phone. Joe hadn't seen her for a couple of years and he didn't know what made him call her now, but they spoke for a long while, and by the time they hung up, she'd promised to come up to Toronto to see him. A few months later, in the fall of 1965, they were married in a small church downtown. Joe was 21 years old. Beverly was 20.