"Tall buildings are an outmoded concept-this is Victorian thinking," wrote the renowned critic Lewis Mumford of the towers. "They are not economically sound or efficient-in fact they are ridiculously unprofitable...." The Trade Center"s fate, predicted Mumford, "is to be ripped down as nonsensical." This was a fate many seemed to wish upon the World Trade Center in those days. It was, as BusinessWeek BusinessWeek described it, "the colossus n.o.body seems to love." described it, "the colossus n.o.body seems to love."
Well, the ironworkers loved it. It was their their colossus. Many of them had spent two or three years of their lives building it. Not only had the towers provided them with steady employment and ample pride, but they"d kept them safe, too. Those same perimeter columns that carried the load of the building and buffeted the wind had enclosed them and protected them as effectively as palings on a crib. Five men died constructing the Twin Towers, but none of them were ironworkers. colossus. Many of them had spent two or three years of their lives building it. Not only had the towers provided them with steady employment and ample pride, but they"d kept them safe, too. Those same perimeter columns that carried the load of the building and buffeted the wind had enclosed them and protected them as effectively as palings on a crib. Five men died constructing the Twin Towers, but none of them were ironworkers.
There were injuries, of course, several of these quite serious. Two ironworkers fell and became paralyzed. And at the top of Tower One, George Doyle-Jack"s older brother-stepped on a plank that gave way under him, and fell 20 feet. The plank hit his head and cut a gash in it. He recovered but was out for several weeks.
It was George Doyle, not Jack, who was supposed to top out Tower One. Topping out is an ironworkers" tradition marking the setting of the highest piece of steel in a building or bridge. The beam is decorated with an American flag and frequently with a small fir tree as well. Despite the fact that the ceremony had long ago been seized by publicists and financiers as a photo-op, topping out was something ironworkers took seriously. To be the foreman whose gang raised the topping-out flag was an honor.
The day before the topping-out ceremony, George"s crane broke down. The honor went instead to Jack.
At 11:30 A.M. A.M. on December 23, 1970, a cold gray day, Jack Doyle gave the order to his signalman, who relayed it to the crane operator. As the crowd watched from the deck of the 110th floor, a 4-ton, 36-foot-high column rose into view, paused on the deck for the photographers, then rose again and settled into the core. Months of detail work remained before the ironworkers would leave the building and hand it over to the trades that followed, but the tallest steel frame in the world was now complete. Jack Doyle had made it to the top. on December 23, 1970, a cold gray day, Jack Doyle gave the order to his signalman, who relayed it to the crane operator. As the crowd watched from the deck of the 110th floor, a 4-ton, 36-foot-high column rose into view, paused on the deck for the photographers, then rose again and settled into the core. Months of detail work remained before the ironworkers would leave the building and hand it over to the trades that followed, but the tallest steel frame in the world was now complete. Jack Doyle had made it to the top.
The towers" position as the tallest buildings in the world was challenged almost as soon as they were finished. In October of 1972, the owners of the Empire State Building explored the possibility of adding 11 stories to the building and resurrecting it as the world"s tallest. That never panned out. But in 1974, Sears, Roebuck and Company completed the Sears Tower in Chicago, 1,450 feet of steel arranged in tubes by Fazlur Khan. The tallest in the world-for the moment.
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On a foggy December day, Jack Doyle (right) (right) tops out the north tower of the World Trade Center. tops out the north tower of the World Trade Center.
(Courtesy of Jack Doyle) On the night of August 7, 1974, a young French highwire walker named Philippe Pet.i.t rigged a ?-inch steel cable between the tops of the two towers by shooting an arrow across the 200-foot gap. The following morning, as thousands watched from below, he stepped out onto the cable and started across, as catty as a man can be. For one hour that morning, as Pet.i.t walked back and forth on the cable, the identical twins of the World Trade Center were combined into a single astonishing structure. They were the towers of the highest suspension bridge in the world.
ELEVEN.
Burning Steel
Later, of course, everybody would remember exactly what they were doing at 10 minutes to 9 that Tuesday morning. Chad Snow was on 60th Street with Ky Horn, unloading heavy columns from the back of an eighteen-wheeler. Joe Emerson and Kevin Scally were setting steel on top, on the northeastern corner of the Time Warner Center. Mickey Tracy was inside the building directing his gang to cut and weld deck angles onto beams. The news came at them from the street, from some teamsters who"d heard it on the radios of their trucks and shouted it out-The Trade Center! A plane!-and simultaneously from the highest point on the building, the cabins of the kangaroo cranes, where some of the operating engineers kept themselves company with small transistor radios.
They"re saying a plane hit the Trade Center, one of the operators called into his two-way. one of the operators called into his two-way.
Sixty feet below, the signalman looked past the boom of the crane into the clear blue sky. A plane? A plane?
A little single-engine job they think. Some idiot.
The operator reached for a pair of high-powered binoculars he kept on hand inside the cab. The binoculars were a tool of his trade. He was perched so high above the derrick floor that he sometimes needed the lenses to see what the ironworkers were doing below. But in idle moments, when the ironworkers were mucking around with a choker or a turnbuckle and the operator had a few minutes to kill, he amused himself by scanning the faraway windows of neighboring skysc.r.a.pers. Extraordinary visions appeared within his grasp. Beautiful women strolled naked through sunlit rooms at the top of the city. Had they never heard of blinds? Had they never heard of high-powered binoculars and idle crane operators?
This morning, the crane operator wasn"t looking for beautiful women. He was looking for a flickering television set. He found one almost immediately.
Jesus Christ, he said to his signalman. It"s burning. I"m looking at it. It"s burning. I"m looking at it.
You can see it?
I"m watching it on the TV. Christ!
As the facts piled on-second tower hit! Pentagon hit! Tower Two down! Tower One down!-the ironworkers gathered in the dirt courtyard at the front of the building. Joe Kennedy descended the metal staircase from the sidewalk bridge. He spoke gravely. "The Trade Center has collapsed. You"re all welcome to stay here if you can"t get home. The trains are all stopped. Call your wives, call your families. Tell them you"re all right."
The men dispersed slowly. They made their calls. Then, in cl.u.s.ters, they started their long journeys home. The bridges had closed to traffic, the subways and trains were frozen. They walked, like hundreds of thousands of other people that day, over the steel bridges that ringed the city.
Mickey Tracy decided to stay put. He figured there was no sense trying to go home, since he lived an hour and a half north of the city and the roads were already at a standstill. He dialed his wife from the trailer but couldn"t get through to his home in Connecticut; the lines were jammed. He tried a few other numbers, eventually reaching his sister-in-law in Ma.s.sachusetts, who then tracked down Mickey"s wife, Karen, at a lawyer"s office and gave her Mickey"s message: he was alive and well and would be home as soon as possible. Karen had gone to the lawyer that morning to discuss the will Mickey and she were drawing up.
After hanging up the phone, Mickey sat in the trailer with the other men who had stayed behind. They listened to the radio, n.o.body saying much. Then the phone rang. It was Eddie Walsh, one of Local 40"s business agents, calling from the shape hall on 15th Street. The fire department had put out a call for ironworkers. Anybody who wanted to volunteer should get over to the Armory on 68th Street and Park Avenue, Walsh said. The National Guard would take it from there.
Mickey stood up, said good-bye to the men in the trailer, and walked out into the stunning day. The message he had left for his wife-that he was fine and would be coming home as soon as possible-was only half true. He had a hunch, even as he spoke the words, that he wasn"t going home anytime soon. A few blocks down Broadway he turned into the lobby of a hotel, a place he"d stayed a few times in the past. After checking in, he returned to the street and found a small store around the corner, where he purchased three pairs of socks, three pairs of underpants, and three T-shirts. With his bag of undergarments, he walked back to 59th Street. He stood by the eastbound lane and stuck out his thumb. A moment later, a van halted. "I"m going to Park and 68th," he told the driver. "Gimme a ride?" The driver nodded, and Mickey climbed in.
Stepping into a stranger"s car in the middle of Manhattan on a day the world seemed to be coming apart was not for everyone, but Mickey thought nothing of it. He was blessed with a quick, puckish wit and could always talk his way out of trouble; and where his mouth failed him, he trusted his fists. He was only 5"4" but thickly built and strong. "It doesn"t take much," he once explained, "for us ironworkers to crack a guy." Mickey was given to such p.r.o.nouncements about ironworkers. "We"re physical guys, but we take care of people," he would say. "The ironworker is a generous person." Or: "Bad ironworkers have bad ironworker kids." Or: "Ironwork is a series of moves; every day you learn a new move; miss a day, you miss a move."
Mickey was a fourth-generation ironworker and had been at it himself for 22 years. He was Bronx-born but a Newfoundlander by heritage. He had no idea where on the Rock his family originated but he did know a story about three brothers who got drunk one night and stole a boat from Newfoundland and sailed it down to Boston. They sold the boat, drank the proceeds, and took up ironwork to support themselves. One of the three brothers was Mickey"s great-grandfather, who later fell and died in Boston. Mickey"s grandfather, Jack Tracy, then moved to New York and worked out of Local 40, until he fell, too. As part of the operation to save Jack Tracy, surgeons inserted a metal plate inside his head. "We think maybe it was a lead plate," said Mickey, ""cause he started acting a little strange after that."
By the time the van deposited Mickey at the Armory, the place was crawling with ironworkers. They stood or sat about in cl.u.s.ters, smoking cigarettes and waiting for clearance to go downtown. "There were guys there I hadn"t seen in years. There were guys there I used to connect with, men who broke me in when I was a kid. I tell you, there was so much ironworking talent in that room it humbled me."
National Guardsmen swarmed around them nervously. "The G.I. Joes were talking about chemical things, nerve gas, anthrax, smallpox," remembered Mickey. "They couldn"t clear us to go because they didn"t know what was down there. So we just waited around. A few of us helped load some tents and supplies onto army trucks. We wanted to be busy and do something." The ironworkers had to fill out paperwork while they waited. NEXT OF KIN NEXT OF KIN, read one entry. Mickey wrote down his wife"s name and his home address.
Several hours had pa.s.sed at the armory when it dawned on Mickey and a number of the ironworkers that they were going to spend all afternoon here unless they made a move. Without a word to the G.I. Joes, and lacking proper clearance, they slipped out to Park Avenue, boarded a fleet of pickups and four-by-fours, and took off. The convoy headed west, then sped south along the river. Mickey sat in the back of one of the pickups, trying to antic.i.p.ate what he was heading into. Fatality statistics of fifty or sixty thousand had been discussed at the Armory. Airborne chemical and biological weaponry had not yet been ruled out. Mickey thought about his wife and son and said a prayer. He was, he later admitted, apprehensive. But he never doubted that he was doing the right thing. "I decided that I was going to try to do something. They needed ironworkers. Cutting steel, moving steel. This is what we do every day. There was n.o.body more equipped to do it."
The sun dipped over the high-rises across the river. It was a beautiful afternoon, crystal-clear and warm. Then Mickey saw what appeared to be snow swirling up in the breeze, a blizzard of concrete powder and paper. The gray snow covered the ground with a thin dusting at first, but as they drove on it became a blanket, as much as two inches deep. Further on, huge hunks of steel lay scattered over the highway as if they"d fallen from the sky. Which, of course, they had.
Those who went to the site in the first few days kept returning to the same two images to describe it. "It"s like a war zone." Or: "It"s like a movie." Or they said nothing, they were silent. What television could not convey, they all agreed, was the total overwhelming vastness of the obliteration. "You gotta be able to turn your head around and look," said John White. "I can"t even explain it, that"s how f.u.c.ked up it is down there." Mickey, who generally had a word for every occasion, found little to say about his first vision of h.e.l.l. He just shook his head and grimaced. "It was bad," he said. "I"ll tell you that. It was bad."
Black, gritty smoke billowed off the wreckage. Mickey saw a few cops wearing respirators, but the ironworkers had only flimsy paper masks, which proved so useless against the fine particles of smoke and dust that many of the men pulled them off and tossed them aside. A few sections of the external walls of the towers stuck up from the rubble, appearing as fragile as eggsh.e.l.ls. The rest was a tangled heap no higher than two or three stories. The most obvious features of the heap-"the pile" as rescue workers would soon name it-were the prefabricated triads of columns jutting out from it at obscene angles. Firemen clambered over the mess, spraying hoses or shoveling or clawing at it.
For all the activity, the place was strangely quiet. The hum of the generators and the engines of cranes and backhoes drowned out voices under a dome of white noise. n.o.body was saying much anyway. The men went into a state of numbness and worked quietly for the most part, speaking only when they had to.
Mickey did not get very close to the pile that first night. The immediate critical task was to clear the roads so the cranes and other heavy equipment could gain access to the site. Cranes had been lumbering toward lower Manhattan almost from the moment the first tower collapsed, but until rescue workers cleared a path to the pile, all of the cranes in the world were useless. Mickey fell in with a gang of ironworkers under one of the cranes. They were lifting and removing the crushed fire trucks and ambulances that littered the road, walking the crane in toward the pile one lift at a time. The ironworkers lacked the most basic rigging to do the work until they discovered some cables and other rigging stowed away inside the fire trucks. They used the trucks" own rigging to lift them and set them aside. They slowly worked their way toward the smoking jagged heap where an untold number of people-hundreds? thousands?-were buried alive, they a.s.sumed, and waiting for them.
Mickey tried to keep himself focused on the work and prevent his eyes from wandering. "I did not want to gawk at anything," he said. "I was there to do ironwork, and that"s what I did." There were occasional interruptions, as when 7 World Trade Center collapsed around 5:30 P.M. P.M. and everybody turned and ran. But as soon as the dust cleared, they got back to work. and everybody turned and ran. But as soon as the dust cleared, they got back to work.
Mickey left after midnight, utterly exhausted and depleted. He invited a blond kid named Justin, an apprentice he"d gotten to know at Time Warner Center, to come back to the hotel and crash on the floor. The two men hitched a ride on a garbage truck, Mickey in front with the driver, the kid perched on the fender in back, and jumped off on Broadway near the hotel. They must have been a sight as they came through the revolving door into the hotel lobby. Their arms and faces and shirts were caked in dust. More dust clotted their eyebrows and hair. Their jeans were soaked with water from the firehoses. Their boots were heavy with mud, their socks drenched. Their throats were raw from the smoke and dust they"d been inhaling for hours.
In the room Mickey pulled out a couple of self-heating army rations he"d managed to grab before leaving Ground Zero. They sat on the bed and shoveled the food, a mysterious but edible stew, into their mouths. Their throats hurt when they swallowed, but they were famished. When they were done, Mickey reached into the plastic bag he"d managed to hold onto since early that afternoon. He handed the apprentice a package of clean underpants and socks and a T-shirt, then took one of each for himself. These were the last clean clothes he"d see for a while.
Wednesday was the day tens of thousands of Americans woke up, having never really fallen asleep, possessed of the same powerful urge: to get down to the site of the fallen towers and help. New Yorkers were not alone in fixating on this idea; sheriffs from Maine and home health-care workers from Nebraska, paramedics from Wisconsin, ballerinas from Georgia-people from all over the country shared the obsession. It was as if that grave prediction made by the French savant about the Eiffel Tower over a hundred years ago-that its iron would spontaneously polarize and suck Paris into it-had come to pa.s.s at the World Trade Center. Devastation and grief had transformed the towers" steel into a giant magnet.
What distinguished the ironworkers from the ma.s.ses who responded to the disaster in those early days was the skill they possessed. It was as Mickey said: There was n.o.body more equipped to do it. There was n.o.body more equipped to do it. The most important project of those early days-and indeed for months to come-was the careful but speedy removal of structural steel. Cutting steel. Rigging steel. Hoisting steel. The most important project of those early days-and indeed for months to come-was the careful but speedy removal of structural steel. Cutting steel. Rigging steel. Hoisting steel. This is what we do every day. This is what we do every day.
If their chosen trade placed a moral obligation on them, it also gave them an intimate connection to the fallen buildings. The dead were not their dead, but the buildings had been their their buildings. ironworkers put them up, raised their 192,000 tons of steel, and loved them even when most of the city found them unlovable. "These were buildings you were proud to look at," said Matt, the broad-shouldered ex-Marine fellow ironworkers called Rambo. "They were beautiful buildings. Now it"s lying all over the place. You wanna cry ten times a day. And that"s not even the human toll. Just looking at the structural damage you wanna start crying." buildings. ironworkers put them up, raised their 192,000 tons of steel, and loved them even when most of the city found them unlovable. "These were buildings you were proud to look at," said Matt, the broad-shouldered ex-Marine fellow ironworkers called Rambo. "They were beautiful buildings. Now it"s lying all over the place. You wanna cry ten times a day. And that"s not even the human toll. Just looking at the structural damage you wanna start crying."
The ironworkers funneled into lower Manhattan by the hundreds that Wednesday morning. They were structural ironworkers from Local 361 and Local 40, as well as non-structural ironworkers, as well as ironworkers from beyond the New York City jurisdiction. They arrived in torn blue jeans and decal-smothered hard hats, in large groups but also in pairs or alone.
About a hundred men came down from Columbus Circle that morning. They came en ma.s.se after convening briefly at the Time Warner building. A large segment of that group came by subway, while another "hijacked" a city bus, persuading its driver to abandon his a.s.signed route and take them straight to 14th Street. They covered the last two miles on foot, pausing at police checkpoints along the way to flash their union cards. They were still half a mile away when they began to see the dust, the fluttering paper, the smashed cars.
Joe Emerson was among the group that arrived by bus. Joe was a great big lumbering man, 6"2", well over 200 pounds, who turned graceful the moment he stepped onto steel. He was easygoing and good-natured, 32 years old, married to his grade school sweetheart, father of two young children. As they closed in on the site and the smoke thickened and darkened, he drew alongside his two older brothers, Tommy and Mike, and the three of them walked together down Broadway. A fourth brother, Jimmy, the youngest, was already down there with a gang from another job.
The Emersons were bred-in-the-bone New Yorkers. One grandparent came out of Little Italy, another from the old Irish stronghold of h.e.l.l"s Kitchen. But the Emersons" bloodlines also reached back, on their father"s side, to the ironworking dynasty of Kahnawake. Their great-grandfather, Louis Lee, was among the Mohawk riveters who died on the Quebec Bridge in August of 1907. The Emersons had given a lot of themselves to building this city. The three brothers walking down Broadway that morning had set thousands of tons of steel and fallen a dozen times. Their father, a highly regarded connector and pusher in his day, was on early retirement, with two replaced knees, his own having worn out from repet.i.tive stress and too many clashes with steel.
The Emersons pa.s.sed City Hall and the Woolworth Building. They pa.s.sed St. Paul"s Chapel, its graveyard blanketed in the awful gray snow, then turned west toward the pit-and there it was. Or, rather, was not. "Where in the h.e.l.l is the building?" said Mike Emerson, second oldest of the brothers. "Where did it go?"
"I just could not believe it," Mike said later. "I couldn"t believe that was two hundred and twenty stories of steel."
The Emerson brothers, along with Kevin Scally and a number of other men from the Time Warner job, found their way to one of the cranes on West Street. "Everybody put their game faces on," said Mike Emerson. Again, n.o.body said much; they just got down to work. The work was tricky and rife with hazards. One of the most hazardous things about it was the surfeit of men. Dozens of ironworkers swarmed around the base of every crane, everyone trying to lend a hand but mainly getting in each other"s way. At each crane, 15 men shared a job that required perhaps 5. Crane operators would look out into this riot of good will and see three or four different men giving conflicting hand signals, some of these would-be signalmen obviously not even ironworkers. The operator had to locate an ironworker he knew and trusted and ignore the rest. Gangs from Time Warner and other jobs around the city tended to reconst.i.tute at the site and follow the direction of their pushers, but outside of these small chiefdoms the chain of command was uncertain and inchoate.
"It felt very dangerous," said Mickey Tracy, who had hitched a ride down early that morning in a police car. "Everybody was nervous, trying to do the right thing." But in their ardor to help, said Mickey, "the younger guys were being aggressive, they were fighting for the hook. They weren"t even letting the metal land-they wanted to get right on it."
Matt described it more pithily: "It was a big cl.u.s.ter f.u.c.k."
After a few hours of grappling with the cranes and trying not to decapitate fellow ironworkers with twisted beams, the Emerson brothers and Kevin Scally decided to move on. "We thought, what the h.e.l.l, we don"t have to be some hero with a crane," said Kevin Scally. "Let"s go burn some iron." They found a few acetylene torches and picked their way onto the pile to a.s.sist the firemen in a more immediate capacity. The pile may not have been high but it was steep and difficult to scale, a jagged terrain of steel columns, twisted joist, and rebar, all madly knotted together by 50 miles of elevator cable. It took half an hour just to climb out into the middle of it, as the ironworkers tested each foothold, watching for snares and shifting debris, often going down on all fours. Fire smoldered under the surface, making the steel hot to the touch and turning the rubber soles of their boots sticky.
The terrain and the heat were nothing compared to the ghastly vapor-"the nasty fog," John White called it-that vented from the pile and pa.s.sed easily through the masks the men wore, clawing at the back of the throat and leaving a strange sweet metallic residue on the tongue. The smoke contained molecules of burning plastic and paper, of office furniture upholstery and fiber optic cable, of steel and human remains-of physical things returning to elemental states. "We"re used to smoke," said Joe Emerson. "We burn things all the time. But this was different." Later, respirators would be standard equipment for anyone working on the pile, but such precautions were rare in those early days. Many men clambered over the pile lacking even a rudimentary facemask, sucking gobs of potentially toxic fumes and particulates into their lungs. As many as 500 fire-fighters would eventually consider early retirement as a result of chronic lung problems brought on by that smoke in the early days after the disaster. But n.o.body was concerned about any of that on Wednesday, September 12. Most of the men were just trying to stay focused on the work, trying not to think too much about what all of it meant.
"It had to be over a hundred degrees out there," said Mike Emerson. "It was hot as h.e.l.l. And I got out there, and there were a lot of bodies-pretty much unrecognizable body parts-and I took a couple deep breaths, almost like a little panic attack. I didn"t know that I could handle it." Here, Here, a fireman called. a fireman called. Over here. Over here. He"d found a crevice under the steel where several dead comrades lay. The ironworkers lit their torches and started to burn. He"d found a crevice under the steel where several dead comrades lay. The ironworkers lit their torches and started to burn.
The work broke down into three distinct stages. The first of these was "burning"-sawing through the steel with the 2,000-degree flame of an acetylene torch to cut out sections, piece by piece. The second step was hooking the cut pieces onto crane cables so they could be hoisted and removed. The third step was loading the steel onto an awaiting truck.
Subtract the heat, smoke, and urgency, each of these steps-burning, hoisting, loading-was rote procedure for an experienced ironworker, albeit in reverse order of the normal work of building. But there was one other critical difference beyond the heat: the ironworkers had little way of judging how a piece of steel would react when it was cut free. Nor could they predict how the pile around it might shift when they extracted it. "When you have iron bent and buried like that," explained Mickey, "you don"t know what it"s going to do. It stores energy. So how"s the energy going to release when you lift it?" Would the piece simply drop or would it pop up? Without knowing what strains the piece was subjected to under the pile-and there was no way to predict this since much of the piece was likely to be covered up-the ironworkers had to guess, then get ready to jump if they guessed wrong.
Before the gang burned a piece, they la.s.soed it with a choker and hooked it onto a crane. They signaled the crane operator to lift the load a hair, putting enough tension on the line, they hoped, to hold the piece when it broke off but not so much tension that the piece would leap off the pile like an arrow from a bow. It was very important to burn the piece evenly and cleanly. "If you don"t know how to burn," said Kevin Scally, "and you leave a sticker"-that is, you don"t make the cut clean through-"and you get up on the piece and it"s hung up because of that stupid sticker, you"re gonna be the nitwit that"s gotta go cut it, and it"s gonna go flying while you"re right there."
In retrospect, the fact that no one died in those early days was a small miracle. Thousands of people flung themselves into one of the most perilous environments imaginable, making it all the more perilous by their teeming presence. But still they came. The Wades and the Doyles and the Jacobses and the Collinses and the Beauvais and the Diabos and the Costellos; the Mohawks from Kahnawake, Akwesasne, and Six Nations; the Newfoundlanders from Conception Bay and Placentia Bay and Brooklyn; the Rebs from down south and the boys from New Jersey-they all came. Some of those who came had started their careers building the towers over 30 years earlier, which made this return visit especially grim and poignant. "I connected that steel there," Willie Quinlan, 54, murmured to his gang one evening on the pile. "I don"t believe I"m here cutting it up and taking it apart. It"s strange, a strange feeling."
Joe Gaffney had strange feelings of his own down there. Joe Gaffney was an ironworker in his mid-30s who"d worked many months earlier at the Ernst & Young building on Times Square-the ironworker whose mother watched him through binoculars from her office window on Sixth Avenue. After leaving the Ernst & Young building (and his mother"s sightlines) in the early winter of 2001, Joe Gaffney had gone to work at the World Trade Center. He"d joined a gang of about a dozen ironworkers to install a radon ice shield around the television antenna atop Tower One. Every night for several months that winter he"d climbed a ladder that ran through a narrow tube inside the 350-foot antenna at the top of the tower, to a point 250 feet or so above the roof. The work had to be done late at night, after Letterman went off the air, to avoid disrupting television signals. The wind whipped fiercely and wind-chill factors dipped into single digits, but in order to squeeze through the narrow mesh tube he had to remove his coat. When he got to the top of the ladder and walked out onto a catwalk at 1,600 feet, nothing above him but dark winter sky, Joe Gaffney was the highest man in Manhattan-the highest earthbound man for miles in any direction-freezing and exhilarated.
But it wasn"t upon that experience that Joe dwelt as he worked on the pile in the days after September 11. Nor was it upon the eerie fact that he was meant to have been back at the Trade Center on the morning of September 11, working a new job-a daytime job-that would have placed him on the summit of the north tower when the first plane struck. (The job, by some fluke, had been postponed by several weeks.) Rather, what Joe Gaffney thought about down there now was his dead father. Joe"s father was a small-time hood from Bay Ridge who was "into the rackets," as Joe put it. His nickname in the Ridge was "The Enforcer" because he had a knack with his fists and a tendency to use them. "People used to tell me there was no one tougher. When it was time to collect book, he always got his money."
Joe"s father had one legitimate job in his life. He was an ironworker on the World Trade Center. His brother-Joe"s uncle-was a Local 40 man who arranged it with the hall. For a few months, it looked as if Joe"s father had turned over a new leaf, that he"d put his criminal past behind him and settled into a regular domestic life with his wife and three sons. The illusion lasted only briefly before Joe"s father quit work and went back to the rackets. But Joe would never forget what it meant to him as an eight-year-old kid to look up at the Twin Towers from across the river and think: My Dad. He built those. He built those towers. My Dad. He built those. He built those towers.
Wednesday was a day of spontaneous heroics at the site, but it was also a day of rampant chaos. And so, on Thursday, two days after the attack, the machines of order, the giant bureaucracies of the city, began to impose a makeshift structure onto Ground Zero. The city divided the site into quadrants and contracted four building companies, including Bovis Lend-Lease (builders of the Time Warner Center) to handle the physical removal of steel. Ironworkers who wanted to work at the site were to report to the union shape hall. Local 40 would limit the number of ironworkers to about 400 men cycled over three shifts: 84, 412, 128. The ironworkers had been working without pay since Tuesday, but starting on Friday they would be compensated at normal union wages. Any man not chosen for Ground Zero was urged to report back to his regular job Friday morning.
Those men tapped to return to Ground Zero enjoyed a peculiar kind of honor. They had the job everyone wanted-and now they were getting paid for it-but it was an increasingly grim job. The sour odor of death wafted over the pile on Thursday. Decay had set in. Everybody still desperately wanted to find survivors, unwilling to accept that there were none. Instead of survivors they found shoes, stuffed animals, wallets, gym bags, photographs, many tons of paper, wedding rings, and lots of small body parts. Most ironworkers of any experience had seen someone die or get severely injured. But there is no preparation for the experience of finding a human foot in the middle of a field of rubble, as Joe Emerson did one afternoon.
Friday was the worst day. Friday was the day it rained. And the day the president came to town.
Mickey Tracy was standing in the basket of a cherry picker, burning a piece of steel under a cold drizzle, when a cop told him to come down at once. No one was permitted to have any height on the president. Mickey was initially reluctant to go anywhere near the commotion attending the president"s arrival. He"d noticed that the police were behaving skittishly, "nervous and sweating," and he planned to avoid getting shot by an overwound cop. On the other hand, he had some time on his hands now. He cleaned up his tools, then strolled over toward the sea of police and firemen that had gathered to greet the president.
"Stop right there!" a cop called as Mickey started to slip under the police tape.
"The president"s here," said Mickey to the cop. "I"m going to see the president."
"You can"t get any closer."
This offended Mickey. "Hey, he"s not just the cops" and firemen"s president. He happens to be my president, too."
A big burly cop approached Mickey. He glanced at the nametag above the brim of Mickey"s hard hat. "You wanna see the president, Mickey?"
"Yeah," said Mickey. "I wanna see the president."
The big cop grabbed Mickey and pulled him into a bear hug. He held Mickey tight for a second, so close Mickey could feel the cop"s beard scruffing his cheek, then let him go. "All right," said the cop, "let him in." Only after Mickey was through on the other side of the tape did he realize he"d just been frisked. "But he did it really nice," said Mickey later. "It was a cla.s.s act."
Mickey, at 5"4", could hardly see a thing over the heads of the firemen. He maneuvered his way into the crowd. A few of the firemen in front of him parted, and there, suddenly, was the president, standing right before him, his hand thrust out. Mickey shook it.
"He says, "Mickey, thanks for being here." I said, "Thank you for coming, Mr. President, I think you needed to see this." I didn"t want to take too much of his time, even though I am a pretty good talker. I didn"t want to start crying. I think he was on the brink of crying, to tell you the truth."
The president"s visit, while welcome, proved a mixed blessing to the workers at Ground Zero. The Secret Service, in an effort to secure the area, refused to allow a new shift of men to enter the site and replace the men already down there. Which meant that every ironworker had to work a double shift of 16 hours in the cold rain. By the end of the day, the men were shivering and exhausted and accident-p.r.o.ne. After Mickey cut a small piece of steel with an acetylene torch, another ironworker picked up the piece and brushed the burnt end of the steel against Mickey"s arm, branding a permanent scar into his bicep. "I could hardly blame the guy," said Mickey. "Still, I had a word with him about it."
That night, after 16 hours of work, Mickey was too exhausted to go anywhere. He fell asleep on a floor between two elevator shafts on the second story of the World Financial Center. The smashed-out windows let a cool breeze flow in from the river, free of the smell of death from the nearby morgue. The next morning he woke up and went back to work, "a bad decision," in retrospect. He was spent, drained, wasted. He"d had enough. That night, after 10 more hours, he left for good. He made his way back to Columbus Circle, paid his hotel bill, and got his car out of the parking garage on 58th Street where it had been sitting for the last five days. He started for home.
"That was a terrible drive, being in the car alone for one and a half hours. I never felt so lonely in my life. I had never been away from my family for five days."
He pulled off the highway and drove down the suburban streets, then turned into his neighborhood. American flags flew on every mailbox. He pa.s.sed the local firehouse, and waved to a fireman he knew. And then he saw the banner at the end of the street. "Thank You, Mickey. G.o.d Bless America." Everybody in the neighborhood had signed it. It took Mickey a second to realize the sign was intended for him. He turned into his driveway and saw a big flag flapping on the front lawn. His wife, Karen, he later learned, had spent the day hunting down the flag. American flags were scarce by the end of the week. She went to the hardware store. The owner told her he was sold out. "Well, you have one in your window," observed Karen.
"Yes, but that one is for the store."
"But I need a flag."
"I"m sorry, I can"t give you that flag."
"You don"t understand," she pleaded. "My husband is coming home tonight."
The owner finally relented. He let her have the flag. "My wife," said Mickey, "is a very convincing woman."
The dog ran up to greet Mickey as he stepped out of his car. He walked up to the door and opened it, feeling as if he"d been away for months. His wife hugged him, and then his son flung his arms around him. "My son is fifteen years old," said Mickey. "It"s hard to get hugs. But he hugged me."
There was a great deal of hugging of ironworkers in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Ironworkers, like firemen and policemen and other rescue workers, found themselves thrust into the role of heroes, a role they had not played convincingly since the glory days of the late 1920s and early 1930s. The word "heroes" was devalued by overuse after 9/11, but the ironworkers really were heroes of a sort. For no pay (in those early days) and at no benefit to themselves, they risked their lives to help in a very fundamental way. All those qualities that had seemed odious about "hard hats" in 1970-the unreformed maleness, the brawny toughness, the jingoism-were recast overnight as courage, valor, and patriotism. "The men who normally power this city, the lawyers, brokers, financiers, are useless," wrote a New York corespondent for the Washington Post Washington Post that Friday. "The term "laborers" has earned a new respectability among their fellow citizens.... And no one is calling them Larry Lunchpail and Joe Six-pack either." that Friday. "The term "laborers" has earned a new respectability among their fellow citizens.... And no one is calling them Larry Lunchpail and Joe Six-pack either."
At the end of every shift, crowds of well-wishers stood along the West Side Highway or at the police barricades and applauded the men as they drove out from Ground Zero in trucks. "All those people out in front when you go past the barricades," said Kevin Scally. "That"s why you go back. That"s the best feeling I"ve probably ever had in my life." The Mohawk ironworkers who arrived home at Kahnawake that weekend were hailed as local heroes. As they gathered that Friday night at the Legion hall and the Knights of Columbus and at the bar of Old Malone"s Restaurant, people crowded around to hear their stories of Ground Zero. "Even the French are treating us like heroes," said Chad Snow, who went home that weekend after a few days on the pile. "And the French hate us."
In the weeks to come, ironworkers would be lauded almost continuously in the press. People who had no idea what an ironworker was or did before September 11, were suddenly aware of these men in hard hats doing extraordinary things at Ground Zero. On September 25, two Local 40 ironworkers, James Beckett and Mike Grottle, would ring the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange, a sure indication of ironworkers" new status. Meanwhile, signs of appreciation began appearing in windows near construction sites around the city, including a very large one in a window across from the Time Warner Center: "THANK YOU, IRONWORKERS!" Kevin Scally predicted that all this grat.i.tude and adulation would not last. "We"ll be popular for a while," he said without rancor. "And then we"re gonna disappear."
MONDAY REVISITED.
That first Monday back at Columbus Circle sucked. It sucked even more than Mondays usually sucked, and no amount of good press could cure that. The men returned to Columbus Circle drained and distracted, many suffering hacking coughs brought on by the smoke at Ground Zero. For the Mohawks, the Sunday night good-byes had been even more difficult than usual. New York had never seemed so dangerous and so far from home.
Many of the ironworkers had broken down over the preceding weekend. The stress and the sadness they"d managed to keep at bay throughout the week let loose in torrents and nightmares. It hit Kevin Scally the night before, Sunday night, after he came back from working on the pile all weekend. Joe Emerson was driving home on the Long Island Expressway when tears began to stream from his eyes. Nearly every ironworker who had spent any time at Ground Zero broke down that weekend. "I think it was knowing that I wasn"t going back," said Kevin. "I just lost it."
As it turned out, Kevin and Joe were not done yet. Monday evening they got a call from the hall asking them to return to Ground Zero that night. This would entail putting in a full shift overnight-having already worked a full day-then going straight to work at Columbus Circle the next morning to put in another full shift. They both accepted without hesitation. "You hate it when you"re there," Kevin explained, "but you hate it more when you"re not."
What pulled the ironworkers at the Time Warner Center out of their collective funk was the work. Almost immediately the job hit a new stride. Those four days the building stood stock-still had given the steel fabricators a chance to produce a backlog of shapes for the first time. After a miserly midsummer trickle of five or six trucks of steel per day, trucks now began arriving at a rate of 15 or 17 per day. To make up for lost time, Bovis decided to b.u.mp the ironworkers up to 10-hour days.
In September, two kangaroo cranes, working in tandem, lifted 10 parallel, 92-foot headers over the courtyard to form a portico over the main entrance. Jerry and Matt on one side, Kevin and Joe on the other, the connectors bolted the headers in, then walked out onto the steel to join them crosswise with narrow beams. The headers were about a foot and a half wide, veritable turnpikes, and a safety crew had already hung a net about 30 feet below them. But net or no net, going out onto a strip of steel 70 feet over the ground and 45 feet from the nearest structure was dizzying. The strange part wasn"t looking down-looking down was nothing-but rather standing out in the middle of the header and looking straight up at the sky as a load of beams floated in from above. "That was a little hairy," allowed Jerry.
The raising gangs turned their attention to the jazz center at the end of the month. The jazz center was a proscenium-style auditorium that would roost in the middle of the Time Warner building, between the haunches of the two towers. When complete, it would be one of the premium music venues in the city, acoustically, ergonomically, and visually. But the pleasures of the future jazz fans would come at the cost of great effort and peril to the ironworkers. The steel in the jazz center was light but it was also extremely narrow, some beams barely wider than a man"s boot. It wowed and wiggled underfoot as the men set it. The connectors spent days walking around on this steel, often 60 feet over the floor, a trial of focus and nerves for the most hardened ironworker.
One day in November, Jerry and Matt set a couple of cantilevered beams at the southeastern corner of the building, where it tapered into a sharp prow. The first beam stuck out 15 feet from the body of the building, parallel to 58th Street. Matt stepped onto it and walked halfway across it to where the crane hook attached to the choker. Seventy feet below to his right a cement truck idled on 58th Street, waiting for the light to change. Matt unbuckled the choker, slung it over the hook, made a cutting motion with his hands, and the crane hook shot off.
Once the hook cleared, Matt walked on to the far (unsupported) end of the beam, where he stepped down onto the lower f.l.a.n.g.e and sat. He pulled out a pack of Marlboros and tried to light one. The wind blew out the first match, but the second took, and Matt perched at the end of the beam, looking out over Central Park, holding smoke in his lungs.