It captures eleven ironworkers casually eating lunch, chatting, and lighting cigarettes while perched on a narrow steel beam. They are dangling 850 feet (260 meters) above the ground on the 69th floor of the near-completed RCA Building (now 30 Rockefeller Plaza) in Manhattan.
It was meticulously arranged by the Rockefeller Center’s publicity department to promote the real estate development and John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s vision during the bleakest years of the Great Depression.
While the height and the lack of safety harnesses or nets were 100% real, the danger was slightly less extreme than it appears. The camera angle was carefully chosen to obscure the fact that a fully constructed, solid floor stood just a few meters beneath the beam, meaning a fall would have likely resulted in injuries rather than a lethal plunge to the streets below.
The photograph acts as a dense historical mirror of the American working class during the Great Depression. The 40,000 laborers hired to construct the Rockefeller Center were often young immigrants or Native Americans willing to take on deadly high-altitude construction work out of pure financial necessity.
For over eighty years, these eleven men remained entirely nameless, corporate flattened symbols of labor. However, intensive archival research and documentary work managed to verify a few identities (from left to right)
- Matty O’Shaughnessy (Irish)
- Natxo Ibargüen Moneta (Basque-Spanish)
- Joseph Eckner
- Unknown
- Unknown
- Sonny Glynn (Irish)
- John “Big Daddy” Johansson (a native American Mohawk ironworker, member of the famous “Sky Walkers” who specialized in high-altitude steelwork)
- Unknown
- Joe Curtis
- Unknown
- Gustáv “Gusti” Popovič (Slovakia)
The Immigrants & Indigenous: The men on the beam include Irish immigrants (such as Sonny Glynn and Matty O’Shaughnessy) and Native American Mohawk ironworkers, including a famous specialist nicknamed “Big Daddy”.
There was a Natxo Ibargüen Moneta from Euskalherría (Spain).