Crowded

Back to the Empire State Building construction photos, with two from Lewis Hine, using his labels:

Putting aside Hine’s ability to turn construction into art, there are a few things going on here. First, again, is the relative lack of personal safety equipment of any kind. No harnesses, no hard hats, no eye protection, not everyone has gloves.

Second is the size of the steel on the human scale. The first picture was taken at a mid-height floor – we appear to be about level with the light-colored building in the background on the far right – and the built-up columns from the floor below, ready for the next sections up to be spliced in, are much bigger across than the workers. These are columns intended to carry a 1200-foot-high building.

The main thing that jumps out at me is the proliferation of cables. There were a lot of cranes used for steel erection – I forget if it was six or eight – and each had something like four guy wires to hold the main mast steady, and there were the cables from each mast to its boom arm, and the cables from each boom arm to its hook, and the cables from each hook to its carried load. I tend to think of the top deck of a tall-building construction site as airy, open to the sky¹, but the sky at the Empire State was crowded with steel cables.

1. based in part on my brief time working on such a site in 1988-1989 ↩︎