Description

With the delivery of the steel-frame skyscraper in the late-nineteenth century came a brand new variety of person, as daring and untamed as any this nation had ever known. These "boys of the heavens," as you reporter named them, were the structural ironworkers who strolled metal supports -- no broader, frequently, compared to experience of the hardcover book -- countless feet above-ground, to boost the rising systems and vaulting links that thus suddenly changed America in the twentieth-century. Several early ironworkers were former sailors, fresh Americans of Irish and Scandinavian ancestry trained in the arts of rigging and familiar with hiking large ships' masts. Others originated from a little Mohawk Indian reservation to the banks of the Street.