Unsung Heroes of the Skyline, The Real Men Behind the Empire State Building

01 December 2025

Don’t look down … ironworker Neil Doherty at work over Manhattan. Photograph: Lewis W Hine

The soaring majesty of the Empire State Building has long stood as a testament to ambition, architecture, and the audacity of human vision. But behind its gleaming Art Deco façade and record-setting 102-story height lies a far more human story, one of thousands of laborers who risked their lives high above Manhattan to build the tower in just 13 months during 1930–31. A recent account shines light on those “roughneck” ironworkers, immigrants and migrants whose names were lost to history even as their sweat and courage helped raise one of the world’s most iconic skyscrapers.

The construction unfolded at breakneck speed. Each day, roughly 3,000 men, many of them immigrants from Ireland, Scandinavia, and among them Indigenous Mohawks from Kahnawà:ke stepped onto narrow steel beams hundreds of feet in the air, often with nothing more than a rope to steady them. It is said that if one fell, it would take eleven seconds to hit the ground.

Some were immortalized in a series of striking black-and-white photographs by Lewis Hine, capturing the raw daring and fragile balance of their work faces etched with grit, bodies leaning into the void, fingers tightening bolts against the sky. The most famous is known simply as “The Sky Boy,” an image so emblematic it has shaped public memory of the era and of those who built the city upward.

But until now, the men behind those images remained almost entirely anonymous nameless silhouettes framed against steel, recognized only as archetypal icons of hardship and heroism. That begins to change with the new work of author Glenn Kurtz, whose painstaking research attempts to restore identity to these faceless figures. His book traces tens of thousands of census entries, immigration documents, union rosters, press clippings, and oral histories to reconstruct real lives behind the legend.

One such figure is Victor "Frenchy" Gosselin, an ironworker whose job was to guide suspended beams into place amidst the chaos of rising steel columns. Hine’s camera caught him casually perched on a hoisting ball high above the city in shorts and work boots, a striking snapshot of calm amid danger. Kurtz uncovers that Gosselin died only decades later in an automobile accident, leaving behind two young sons and a widow. His was not a heroic death but a tragic, unremarked-upon ending to a life spent defying gravity daily.

Another man, Ferruccio Mariutto, was a terrazzo craftsman from Italy whose toil contributed to the building’s internal finishings. He, too, faded into obscurity, a quiet detail in a grand architectural ledger until Kurtz’s research pieced together shards of a story: the immigrant life, the skilled trade, the eventual lonely death, likely from asbestos-related illness, before his 64th birthday.

Kurtz goes further, speculating matter-of-factly that the anonymous figure in Hine’s most iconic photograph might have been a Brooklyn Irish-American named Dick McCarthy, who died in 1983. The resemblance is not certain Hine left no record but the conjecture challenges the myth that these men were faceless. It posits instead that they were real human beings with names, families, hopes, and endings.

Official records show five deaths during construction; Kurtz argues that the real number likely was closer to eight. Among those lost were seven workers and a passerby struck by falling debris. The discrepancy reflects the era’s neglect of those whose lives seemed too ordinary for detailed record-keeping.

The result of this effort is more than a catalogue of names. It is a re-imagining of history, one that resists the tendency to reduce people to symbols or to monumental architecture. It reframes the Empire State Building not as a triumph of capital and design alone, but as the summed product of countless individual acts of daring, fatigue, skill, fear, and perseverance. As Kurtz writes, architecture is not made by architects only, but by workers whose training, labor, and risk are often invisible to history.

For many visitors today the building is a tourist attraction, a landmark lit in different colors, an Instagram backdrop. Inside its lobby hangs a small plaque listing some 32 names marked for craftsmanship, a modest hint of the many hands that built it. But hundreds of thousands remain unnamed. This new work insists they be remembered, not as faceless laborers walking on beams far above the earth, but as human beings who once had names, fears, families, and legacies worth preserving.

In an age when headlines celebrate the powerful, the wealthy, the visible, this reclamation of identity matters. It restores dignity to lives once obscured. It reminds us that history is built from more than blueprints from real flesh, real stories, and real heights reached by ordinary people doing extraordinary work.