High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World's Greatest Skyline

From Publishers Weekly
Inspired by a New York Times article Rasenberger wrote on ironworkers in early 2001, this historical overview of skyscraper construction in New York City and elsewhere traces the erection of such structures as the Flatiron and Chrysler buildings, the Empire State Building, the George Washington Bridge, the World Trade Center and the lavish new Time Warner Center. This last building is the narrative column around which Rasenberger builds his book, which is largely devoted to "the men who risked the most and labored the hardest"—the ironworkers who put the high-rise steel columns in place. Though his admiration at times seems compulsory rather than genuine, Rasenberger emphasizes the often heroic, death-defying feats ironworkers perform. He also takes account of far-flung communities that breed ironworkers, such as the Mohawk Indians of upstate New York. The chronological history is broken up by alternating sections on the Time Warner Center and often feels less like a single narrative than a collection of vignettes. Rasenberger's principal claim, that ironwork's days are numbered because of the growing reliance on concrete, is often lost in the telling. Even the Time Warner Center was built more with concrete than iron, which is costlier and more vulnerable to heat in events such as the World Trade Center attacks. This recounting, while less than fully absorbing, serves as a valuable history for building enthusiasts and a thoughtful testament to a dying craft that has helped fuel the American economy for more than a century. 21 b&w photos. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From Booklist
Journeying through the past century of New York City's ironworking trade, Rasenberger recounts signal events in its labor history while developing a powerful impression of its unique occupational culture. The latter he absorbed from close ground- and sky-level observation of ironworkers at two mid-Manhattan construction sites, and at the World Trade Center site. Raising steel for bridges and skyscrapers is extraordinarily hazardous. Several of the workers profiled sustained severe and, in one instance, permanently disabling injuries--painfully proving ironwork's annual 5 percent death-and-injury rate. Why any man would court its dangers is a tantalizing question to which Rasenberger advances a multitude of answers. One is generational continuity, which Rasenberger discerned from his trips to the homes of Mohawk Indians and Newfoundlanders who've worked in the trade for decades. Another is the autonomy on the job that ironworkers enjoy, and the pride they derive from being the first colonists of a square of air. With ironworkers' social prestige elevated in the aftermath of the WTC calamity, Rasenberger's muscular portrait deserves an outsize audience as well. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


From Book News, Inc.
Writing for a general audience, New York Times contributor Rasenberger profiles ironworkers past and present, offering a window into a dangerous occupation that has earned ironworkers the nickname, "cowboys of the skies." Along the way he describes the construction of early iron building of the 19th century; explores the risky lives of past ironworkers, exemplified by the tragic 1907 collapse of the Quebec Bridge; and provides a contemporary portrait of ironworkers engaged in raising new skyscrapers in New York City in the 21st century.Copyright © 2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR


Ottawa Citizen
"[Rasenberger] is as engaging a writer as Sebastian Junger and HIGH STEEL is a fast-paced read."


New York Post
"Introduce[s] us to the romance and adventure of hard hats….men [who] make their living courting danger every day."


Chicago Sun-Times
"[A] riveting historical work."


New York Newsday
"Fascinating... A breezy, anecdotal history of... the daredevils of the skies... who built New York City’s bridges and skyscrapers."


New York Sun
"Mr. Rasenberger’s sharp eye... his sympathetic imagination, and his graceful prose make for an engaging read... Beautifully written."


Wall Street Journal
"Rasenberger’s compelling book ... Reveal[s] as much about the human spirit as about technological progress."


New York Magazine
"Fascinating."


Daily News
"HIGH STEEL is a testament to an incredible group of workers [that] ranks ... with Gay Talese’s classic THE BRIDGE."


Kevin Baker, author of Paradise Alley
"A thrilling, fascinating story of men, steel, and extreme height."


Terry Golway, author of So Others Might Live--A History of New York's Bravest: FDNY from 1700 to the Present
"Jim Rasenberger tells a story of everyday courage and drama that will change the way you look at tall buildings."


Book Description

With the birth of the steel-frame skyscraper in the late nineteenth century came a new breed of man, as bold and untamed as any this country had ever known. These "cowboys of the skies," as one journalist called them, were the structural ironworkers who walked steel beams -- no wider, often, than the face of a hardcover book -- hundreds of feet above ground, to raise the soaring towers and vaulting bridges that so abruptly transformed America in the twentieth century.

Many early ironworkers were former sailors, new Americans of Irish and Scandinavian descent accustomed to climbing tall ships' masts and schooled in the arts of rigging. Others came from a small Mohawk Indian reservation on the banks of the St. Lawrence River or from a constellation of seaside towns in Newfoundland. What all had in common were fortitude, courage, and a short life expectancy. "We do not die," went an early ironworkers' motto. "We are killed."

High Steel is the stirring epic of these men and of the icons they built -- and are building still. Shifting between past and present, Jim Rasenberger travels back to the earliest iron bridges and buildings of the nineteenth century; to the triumph of the Brooklyn Bridge and the 1907 tragedy of the Quebec Bridge, where seventy-five ironworkers, including thirty-three Mohawks, lost their lives in an instant; through New York's skyscraper boom of the late 1920s, when ironworkers were hailed as "industrial age heroes." All the while, Rasenberger documents the lives of several contempor-ary ironworkers raising steel on a twenty-first-century skyscraper, the Time Warner building in New York City.

This is a fast-paced, bare-knuckled portrait of vivid personalities, containing episodes of startling violence (as when ironworkers dynamited the Los Angeles Times building in 1910) and exhilarating adventure. In the end, High Steel is also a moving account of brotherhood and family. Many of those working in the trade today descend from multigenerational dynasties of ironworkers. As they walk steel, they follow in the footsteps of their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

With the birth of the steel-frame skyscraper in the late nineteenth century came a new breed of man, as bold and untamed as any this country had ever known. These "cowboys of the skies," as one journalist called them, were the structural ironworkers who walked steel beams — no wider, often, than the face of a hardcover book — hundreds of feet above ground, to raise the soaring towers and vaulting bridges that so abruptly transformed America in the twentieth century.

Many early ironworkers were former sailors, new Americans of Irish and Scandinavian descent accustomed to climbing tall ships' masts and schooled in the arts of rigging. Others came from a small Mohawk Indian reservation on the banks of the St. Lawrence River or from a constellation of seaside towns in Newfoundland. What all had in common were fortitude, courage, and a short life expectancy. "We do not die," went an early ironworkers' motto. "We are killed."

High Steel is the stirring epic of these men and of the icons they built — and are building still. Shifting between past and present, Jim Rasenberger travels back to the earliest iron bridges and buildings of the nineteenth century; to the triumph of the Brooklyn Bridge and the 1907 tragedy of the Quebec Bridge, where seventy-five ironworkers, including thirty-three Mohawks, lost their lives in an instant; through New York's skyscraper boom of the late 1920s, when ironworkers were hailed as "industrial age heroes." All the while, Rasenberger documents the lives of several contempor-ary ironworkers raising steel on a twenty-first-century skyscraper, the Time Warner building in New York City.

This is a fast-paced,bare-knuckled portrait of vivid personalities, containing episodes of startling violence (as when ironworkers dynamited the Los Angeles Times building in 1910) and exhilarating adventure. In the end, High Steel is also a moving account of brotherhood and family. Many of those working in the trade today descend from multigenerational dynasties of ironworkers. As they walk steel, they follow in the footsteps of their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers.

We've all had the experience of looking at a par-ticularly awe-inspiring bridge or building and wondering, How did they do that? Jim Rasenberger asks — and answers — the question behind the question: What sort of person would willingly scale such heights, take such chances, face such danger? The result is a depiction of the American working class as it has seldom appeared in literature: strong, proud, autonomous, enduring, and utterly compelling.

SYNOPSIS

The most terrifying picture in the whole history of photographs was taken one September day in 1932 by someone in the employ of Rockefeller Center, which was then under construction. It shows 11 hard-hat workers (except in those days they wore soft hats, or none at all) contentedly eating their lunch. Nothing terrifying about that, right? Except that they are sitting on a steel beam 800 feet above Sixth Avenue. The buildings of the city below them look like a tiny model-train display. Yet from the looks on their faces and their relaxed body language, they might as well be in a couple of booths at the Corner Deli. Acrophobia, the fear of heights, is second only to ophidiophobia, the fear of snakes, among Americans, according to Jim Rasenberger in �High Steel.� Well, if it�s a choice between sitting (not to mention standing!) on a steel beam with nothing visible below you except (very) thin air, or spending a day in the snake pit, bring on the copperheads and rattlers and mambas. Rasenberger also reports that it�s possible to cure acrophobia through gradual exposure to ever-greater heights and other ways of easing the pain, but like the girl in the famous old cartoon, I say it�s spinach and I say the hell with it. Yet for generations a handful of men (and today a very few women) have walked on steel beams in the air with as much nonchalance as you and I walk on the sidewalks of Washington�probably more, considering the behavior of Washington motorists. It�s a good thing they do, for without them the modern skyscraper, and thus the modern city, would not exist. They are known as ironworkers, though the material they work with actually is steel, and they are a breed apart. By legend they are �fearless, careless, defiant.� Though little celebrated outside their own ranks, in the development of the American skyline they are �the men who risked the most and labored the hardest to make it happen.�

FROM THE CRITICS

Chicago Sun-Times

Rasenberger writes about the 'wow of the beam,' the feeling an ironworker has while walking and sometimes running on a piece of steel ... the reader shares that 'wow' feeling throughout this riveting historical work as the author offers up descriptions of the enormous projects, the great heights and the precarious workspaces.

Maxim

In a dizzying look at a world hundreds of feet above New York's mean streets, Rasenberger recounts the heroic labor of the ironworkers who built legendary skyscrapers like the Empire State Building and the Twin Towers, foot by treacherous foot.(4 Stars)

Vanity Fair

In HIGH STEEL, Jim Rasenberger immortalizes the daring ironworkers who erect the world's most spectacular skylines.

New York Newsday

Fascinating....A breezy, anecdotal history of...the daredevils of the skies...who built New York City's bridges and skyscrapers throughout the 20th century. No previous author has put together the big picture as Rasenberger has. He gives us a sense of who ironworkers are, what they actually do and why they love their jobs.

New York Post