Men on Iron

Lewis Hine and the Workers Who Built the Empire State Building

One morning in 1930, a man appeared at a construction site on 34th Street, Manhattan.

He was nearly sixty years old. He carried a heavy camera. He wore no helmet, no harness. He stepped into the construction elevator.

When the elevator stopped, he climbed further — up the iron ladders, hand over hand, until the streets of Manhattan were far below.

He was Lewis Hine — the photographer who had exposed child labor and changed the law. Now he was here to document something else entirely.

The Race to the Sky

Construction of the Empire State Building began on March 17, 1930 — in the opening months of the Great Depression.

The project had been born from a personal rivalry. Two wealthy men had been competing throughout the late 1920s to build New York's tallest skyscraper: Walter Chrysler of the Chrysler Corporation, and real estate developer John Jakob Raskob.

When asked how tall the building would be, Raskob placed a pencil upright on his desk.

"About that."

The target: 102 floors, 1,454 feet to the top of the antenna mast. It would tower above the newly completed Chrysler Building — which had itself claimed the world record only eleven months earlier — by more than 200 feet.

Time, however, was the enemy. The Depression had begun. Financing was precarious. The building had to rise at a pace no one had ever attempted.

4.5 Floors Per Day

The numbers were staggering.

Average daily progress: 4.5 floors of steel framework
Fastest single day: 14 floors of steel erected
Peak workforce: 3,400 workers on site simultaneously
Steel used: 60,000 tons
Bricks laid: 10 million
Windows installed: 6,514
Miles of telephone wire: 17

The logistics operated with military precision. Steel components were fabricated off-site and delivered by truck. The average time between a piece of steel arriving at the site and being permanently installed in the building: 80 minutes. Manhattan had no room for a storage yard. Everything had to flow.

Seven million man-hours of labor. Four hundred and ten days from groundbreaking to completion.

The Mohawk Ironworkers

Most of the men in Lewis Hine's photographs were Mohawk from Kahnawake — a community on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River near Montreal, Canada.

Their story on the high steel began in 1886, when the Dominion Bridge Company was constructing a railway bridge across the St. Lawrence. Mohawk men from Kahnawake worked as laborers, moving materials. The company noticed something: the men showed no fear of heights whatsoever. They walked the high beams as casually as other men walked sidewalks.

From that bridge, word spread. Within a generation, Kahnawake Mohawk ironworkers were the most sought-after high-steel workers in North America. They helped build the Québec Bridge, the Hell Gate Bridge, and dozens of Manhattan skyscrapers.

By the time the Empire State Building was under construction, Mohawk ironworkers had been at this for forty years. They came to New York, worked the steel season, and sent money home to Kahnawake. Many lived together in Brooklyn boarding houses, traveling up to Kahnawake on weekends.

They were the backbone of the building's steel frame. And Hine photographed them with the respect they had earned.

How Riveting Worked

In 1930, high-steel connections were made with rivets — a process that required four men working in tight choreography.

The Heater: Placed rivets in a coke furnace until they glowed orange-red at roughly 1,600°F
The Thrower: Grabbed the glowing rivet with tongs and threw it — sometimes 15 feet through the air — to the next man
The Catcher: Caught it in a small metal can and inserted it into the waiting hole
The Bucker and Riveter: One held a heavy iron bar against the back of the rivet while the other drove the head flat with a pneumatic hammer

A four-man team drove hundreds of rivets per day. Missed catches meant a glowing chunk of metal falling hundreds of feet. The hammering was constant. The heat was everywhere. And all of it happened on narrow steel beams above an open city.

Lewis Hine's Equipment — and His Method

Getting the photographs was its own engineering problem.

Hine's large-format camera, including the tripod, weighed more than 20 pounds. He carried it up iron ladders in his sixties.

For the most dramatic shots — images from outside the building's steel frame, looking across at workers — he used the cranes. He would have himself lifted in the crane's hook, camera in his lap, swung out into open air beyond the structure, and photograph from there.

He also simply walked the beams alongside the workers.

The resulting photographs capture something unusual: they are shot from inside the work, not from outside looking in. The camera is at the same height, the same angle, the same exposure to wind and void as the men being photographed. That intimacy is why the images feel so immediate.

The Most Famous Photographs

Lunch atop a Skyscraper Eleven workers sit on a steel beam at the 69th floor, their legs dangling over the edge, eating lunch. The Manhattan skyline stretches below them. This photograph — the most reproduced image from the construction — is attributed to Hine, though some historians credit photographer Charles Clyde Ebbets. The debate continues.

Icarus A single worker sits on a beam against the open sky. Hine named this photograph himself, after the figure from Greek mythology who flew too close to the sun. The man in the photograph is looking away from the camera. He is simply there, between the iron and the sky.

Old Timer A portrait of an experienced ironworker, his face carrying decades of the trade. Hine could not record the man's name. Only the face remains.

Bolting Up Workers driving rivets into the frame. The smoke, the sparks, the concentration on their faces. Hine titled it for the verb — the act of bolting the bones of the building together.

Men at Work

Lewis Hine produced approximately 1,000 photographs during the construction project.

He selected the best and published them in 1932 as Men at Work: Photographic Studies of Modern Men and Machines. In the introduction, he wrote:

"Cities do not build themselves, machines cannot make machines, unless back of them all are the brains and toil of men."

The book was his argument: that the workers who built the modern world deserved to be seen. Not as anonymous labor, but as people — with skill, courage, and dignity.

The Empty State Building

The Empire State Building opened on May 1, 1931.

President Herbert Hoover pressed a button in Washington, D.C., and the lights at the top of the building came on across the New York skyline.

But America was in the depths of the Depression, and the building had almost no tenants. Eighty percent of the office space stood empty. New Yorkers renamed it the "Empty State Building."

The dirigible mooring mast at the top — designed to allow transatlantic airship passengers to step off directly at the 102nd floor — proved completely impractical. Strong updrafts made mooring a zeppelin dangerous. The mast was used exactly twice before being abandoned.

It would take twenty years for the building to turn a profit.

Lewis Hine's Last Years

After the Empire State Building project, Lewis Hine descended into poverty alongside his country.

Depression-era commissions dried up. He had saved nothing across a career of photographing working people. He lost his house in Hastings-on-Hudson. In 1939, he applied for a position with the Works Progress Administration — and was rejected.

He died in November 1940, alone and largely forgotten.

But the photographs survived.

Lunch atop a Skyscraper and Icarus became two of the most reproduced images of the twentieth century. For decades, Hine's name was often omitted from the credits. The photographs were labeled "photographer unknown."

His authorship was restored by art historians in the 1970s, as his archive was rediscovered and catalogued.

What They Built

The official death toll for Empire State Building construction is five workers.

The actual number was almost certainly higher — though precise records were not kept in 1930 the way they would be required today.

Lewis Hine photographed 3,400 people who built one of the most recognized structures on earth. He did not record their names. The photographs didn't demand names. They demanded only that you look.

Men on iron, above a city, doing the thing that needed doing.

The building they raised still stands above Manhattan today.

Men on Iron — Lewis Hine and the Workers Who Built the Empire State Building