|
Higher and Higher
By Whistler P. McManus
A couple of weeks ago I went to have lunch at one of those chain pub-style restaurants. I can’t even think of the name of the place right now, but you know the type: dark wood, brass trim, faux antique junk hanging on the walls, overly cheery wait staff.
Anyway, before we were seated for our meal, my wife decided she needed to use the ladies’ room. So I was standing around in between the two rest rooms, holding the baby and trying to keep her entertained. Hanging on the wall was a huge, larger than poster sized print of Lunchtime atop a Skyscraper.
Among the most famous and iconic photographs of all time, Lunchtime atop a Skyscraper (New York Construction Workers Lunching on a Crossbeam) was taken in 1932 by Charles C. Ebbets during the construction of Rockefeller Center in New York City.
Of course, like most of you probably have, I have seen this photo many times over the years. It’s one of those things that’s so jarring in it’s dissimilarity to most of our lives that it stays with you. After that shock of first seeing it, though, if I noticed it again I never found a reason to linger over it.
Having nothing else to do at this particular moment, however, I took a really close look at the photo. I love the mist, and the river and park in the background. I love that you can just barely read the reversed sign for the Essex House hotel. I love the work clothes, the shoes, the hats on all the men. If you see a hat on a man today, nine times out of ten it’s a baseball cap, which I hate (probably because one-size-fits-all never fits my freakishly gigantic cranium).
I was the model for this sculpture.
11 men appear in the photo, eating lunch. The obvious kicker is that they are seated on a steel girder in an unfinished building. They appear to be quite high up, and a bit of research revealed that they were actually on the 69th floor when the picture was taken.
The two guys on the far left, the only bare-headed ones, are lighting up a smoke, and the one in the center has one dangling from his lips, which made me nostalgic for the festive days when one could still smoke on the job. The fourth guy from the left seems to be arguing with the third, probably about politics. I can read V O on the thing he’s holding. Perhaps it says, "VOTE"? He looks like a Hoover man, and the overalls and work gloves on the other guy are a clear indication that he was an FDR guy.
Continuing left to right, men five and seven seem intent on something inside man six’s lunchbox. Probably naked pictures of Joan Crawford. Eight and ten are looking inside nine’s lunchbox, which made me wonder what could be so intriguing about a sandwich that your own wasn’t enough. Nine looks a little light in the work boots, too, and eight is cleaner than everyone else, and has his hat pitched back at such a jaunty angle, or I’d figure the lunchboxes were where these guys all hid their porn stash.
It’s figure eleven, though, who really gave me pause. He’s the only one not interacting with any of the others. He stares off into, well, nothing, because there wasn’t anything else built up that high yet. He’s not quite looking at the camera, but somehow looking past it. His dirt-streaked face is neither happy nor sad, not quite grim, not yet resigned, more pensive than worried. He was an enigma to me. Until I noticed what he held in his left hand.
At least it's the flat type, and wouldn't roll off a girder.
Now I don’t judge. My history of alcohol abuse is well-documented, and I’ve already confessed here that I was high while driving a school bus filled with handicapped children. I can think of very few things that I’ve done in my life that I haven’t also done while drunk. But Holy. Shakespeare. A liquid lunch 69 floors above 50th Street? I bow to this man. First of all, he’s not even making an effort to hide the bottle. I guess that it’s a little tough to keep things on the downlow when you’re 850 feet up in the air. And yes, the photo pre-dates OSHA, and his employer probably wasn’t providing life insurance, but still. Second, even though I’m not afraid of heights, I do have a certain amount of respect for situations where a small slip-up might cost your life. In the worst days of my alcohol dependence, I guess I would have quit that job rather than go up there with a buzz on.
My maternal grandfather was in the paving contracting business, and he always told me that most of the steelworkers who built the New York skyscrapers were Iroquois. Not that they're the only people known for a predilection for drink, but supposedly the Iroquois are not afraid of heights. Looking at that picture, though, I don’t see anyone who looks even vaguely Native American.
Iroquois freezing in upstate New York, circa 1904.
So I did a little more research and found some indication that most of the men in the photo are either Irish immigrants or of Irish extraction. Big surprise there. Then I found evidence that two of the men (numbers nine and ten) were Hungarian. A man named Louis Friedman identified himself as nine when he saw the picture back in the 1980’s. He would have been 28 years old at the time of the photo. He identified man ten as his brother, and said that man eleven (our drink) was an immigrant from Slovakia, and not, as I so insensitively presumed, an Irishman.
The picture is a tribute to times gone by. Three years after it was taken, Dr. Bob Smith, an Akron, Ohio based proctologist, would meet a down on his luck New York stockbroker named Bill Wilson. Together they would form an organization that would eventually come to be known as Alcoholics Anonymous. And eventually, on-the-job drunkenness was recognized as something undesirable, and those who practiced it were shipped off to meet the wife of the U.S.’s 38th president.
Dr. Bob's house, an AA shrine and historic landmark in Akron, Ohio.
The observation deck at Rockefeller Center is now open to the public. It’s on the 70th floor, just one floor above where this luncheon took place. So the next time you’re in New York City, take a ride up to the observation deck, and, if you’re of a mind, bring a pint of your favorite distilled spirit and drink a toast to the men who made it possible.
Observation deck at "The Top of the Rock."
(Note that this photo is looking south, and the Ebbets photo looks north.)
Here’s a link to an image you can enlarge to see more detail.
|
141,402 
23 
Share on your site:
34,222 
10
