Construction workers in New York worked at dizzying heights to build mammoth structures
IT’S enough to give you vertigo. In the middle of the Great Depression workers didn’t have much choice when it came to safety. See the precarious pictures.
THINK you’ve got it tough in the of the office? Is your boss bringing you down? Co-workers causing chaos? Secretary giving you strife?
Before you begin to complain about your knifing co-workers, spare a thought for these brave souls, dubbed the “Cowboys of the Sky”, who worked with newly-developed technology such as the hydraulic lift and electric lighting to build the first skyscrapers.
These men not only built the future with their bare hands, but risked their lives in incredibly extreme environments with little guarantee of safety and security. There were no harnesses or hard hats. And it was all in a day’s work.
They were the forefathers of modern-day extreme sports; they didn’t do it for the fun or the thrill, they did it because they had to.
By the early 1900s the The Industrial era was in full swing and thanks to the development of the hydraulic elevator and the invent of electrical lighting, the building boom was beginning to rethink the way modern man constructed commercial buildings. Previously, construction in big cities in the United States were made of vast, low-rise buildings, but economic growth and urban expansion was calling for a new era of construction that would lead to the invent of the skyscraper.
But someone had to build them.
And without the luxuries of modern day regulations we’re now used to, workers had to do it the hard way. For that, they were paid four dollars a day, twice the average wage for manual labour at the time.
The wages added to the enormous expense of building the Empire State, which in total cost $40,948,900 to build (equivalent to $635,021,600 in 2015).
“Building skyscrapers is the nearest peacetime equivalent of war. In fact, the analogy is startling, even to the occasional grim reality of a building accident where maimed bodies, and even death, remind us that we are fighting a war of construction against the forces of nature,” said William Starrett, a foreman at the time.
While it was said that one man died for every $1 million spent on skyscrapers at the time, miraculously, official records show only five workers died during construction of the Empire State Building. According to 20th century history expert Jennifer Rosenberg, one worker was struck by a truck; a second fell down an elevator shaft; a third was hit by a hoist; a fourth was in a blast area; and a fifth fell off a scaffold.
But the low death rate didn’t take away from the danger that construction workers felt. One admitted “the thing I hate worse than poison is to take on a new man when we’re near the top. “They all get used to it, or get killed.”
But construction of the Empire State Building wasn’t the only threat to workers at the time, as these death-defying pics show.
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