12/27/2023 0 Comments Workers eating lunch on beamThe Empire State Building officially opened on May 1, 1931, forty-five days ahead of its projected opening date, and eighteen months from the start of construction. This was lower than the $60 million budgeted for construction. The Empire State Building cost $40,948,900 to build, including demolition of the Waldorf–Astoria (equivalent to $564,491,900 in 2019). Notice the “Toy” cars and the ant-sized pedestrians walking about Herald Square almost a quarter of a mile below.” The cameraman risked his life climbing a derrick to snap this unusual photograph. When complete the highest man-made structure in the world will rise 1,222 feet above the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street. “Carl Russell waves to his co-workers on the structural work of the 88th floor of the new Empire State Building. Many of the workers were Irish and Italian immigrants, with a sizable minority of Mohawk ironworkers from the Kahnawake reserve near Montreal.Īccording to official accounts, five workers died during the construction, although the New York Daily News gave reports of 14 deaths and a headline in the socialist magazine The New Masses spread unfounded rumors of up to 42 deaths. The project involved more than 3,500 workers at its peak, including 3,439 on a single day, August 14, 1930. When it rained, there was a danger of slipping when it was bitterly cold, stiff, or numb hands could not hold onto anything.Įmpire State Building, steel-framed skyscraper rising 102 stories that was completed in New York City in 1931 and was the tallest building in the world until 1972 when it was surpassed by the World Trade Center building. London’s Daily Mail compared the workers to classical heroes: “They were right there, in the flesh, outwardly prosaic, incredibly nonchalant, crawling, climbing, walking, swinging, swooping on gigantic steel frames.”Īs fearless as the riveters and ironworkers seemed, there was one danger they heeded: weather. Or maybe the fellow pictured here is just issuing an invitation to the cameraman to come a little closer.”Īlong with the steelworkers were the intrepid teams of riveters, who drove red-hot rivets into the beams, fastening them into place to create the building’s steel skeleton. With the oncoming of the warmer weather our skyscrapers begin to look like giant ant-hills as these washers clamber over the faces of the structures calmly doing their nerve-tingling work. An unusual picture of one of the intrepid window washers working on the Empire State Building, as he pauses in his task to draw a lung-full of clean air at his height. They rode into the air on top of a steel beam that they maneuvered into place as a crosspiece by hanging to the cable rope and steering the beam with their feet, then strolling on the thin edge of nothingness.” The New York Times wrote that they “put on the best open-air show in town. The gravity-defying ironworkers balanced on narrow beams or hung from derrick lines hundreds, and even thousands, of feet above the city’s streets. The Empire State’s construction work and its workers were a magnet for press and magazine photographers, which is how many of these iconic images of the construction work were created. They worked with minimal harnesses (sometimes without any), walked nonchalantly along beams suspended hundreds of feet above the street, swung on cables, sometimes they even took short naps on the metallic beams. The hardworking men way up high who were moving girders, riveting, painting, and even just eating lunch or resting earned a reputation for being daredevils. The only thing as impressive as the Empire State Building are the men who built it and during that time rules for construction workers were a lot laxer than they are today. The daredevil sky boys who built the Empire State Building, 1930-1931
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