Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
Lunch Atop a Skyscraper Photograph: The Story Behind the Famous Shot
{edited for updated link to photograph}
I've had a copy of this hanging in my cubicle since my second week on the job. I found it thrown out in the trash as I was shopping for groceries during my first weekend off.
Lunch Atop a Skyscraper Photograph: The Story Behind the Famous Shot
For 80 years, the 11 ironworkers in the iconic photo have remained unknown, and now, thanks to new research, two of them have been identified
Bettman/Corbis
By Megan Gambino
smithsonian.com
September 19, 2012
On September 20, 1932, high above 41st Street in Manhattan, 11 ironworkers took part in a daring publicity stunt. The men were accustomed to walking along the girders of the RCA building (now called the GE building) they were constructing in Rockefeller Center. On this particular day, though, they humored a photographer, who was drumming up excitement about the project’s near completion. Some of the tradesmen tossed a football; a few pretended to nap. But, most famously, all 11 ate lunch on a steel beam, their feet dangling 850 feet above the city’s streets.
You’ve seen the photograph before—and probably some of the playful parodies it has spawned too. My brother had a poster in his childhood bedroom with actors, such as Tom Cruise and Leonardo DiCaprio, photoshopped in place of the steelworkers. The portrait has become an icon of 20th century American photography.
But how much do you know about it?
For the Irish filmmaker Seán Ó Cualáin, the mystery surrounding the photograph is a large part of its appeal. “There are so many unknowns,” he says. Who was the photographer? And who are the men? ... “They could be anybody,” says Ó Cualáin. “We can all place ourselves on that beam. I think that is why the photograph works.”
Ó Cualáin did not plan to tell the story of the photograph, but that’s exactly what he has done in his latest documentary, Men at Lunch, which debuted {in September 2012} at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Bettman/Corbis
By Megan Gambino
smithsonian.com
September 19, 2012
On September 20, 1932, high above 41st Street in Manhattan, 11 ironworkers took part in a daring publicity stunt. The men were accustomed to walking along the girders of the RCA building (now called the GE building) they were constructing in Rockefeller Center. On this particular day, though, they humored a photographer, who was drumming up excitement about the project’s near completion. Some of the tradesmen tossed a football; a few pretended to nap. But, most famously, all 11 ate lunch on a steel beam, their feet dangling 850 feet above the city’s streets.
You’ve seen the photograph before—and probably some of the playful parodies it has spawned too. My brother had a poster in his childhood bedroom with actors, such as Tom Cruise and Leonardo DiCaprio, photoshopped in place of the steelworkers. The portrait has become an icon of 20th century American photography.
But how much do you know about it?
For the Irish filmmaker Seán Ó Cualáin, the mystery surrounding the photograph is a large part of its appeal. “There are so many unknowns,” he says. Who was the photographer? And who are the men? ... “They could be anybody,” says Ó Cualáin. “We can all place ourselves on that beam. I think that is why the photograph works.”
Ó Cualáin did not plan to tell the story of the photograph, but that’s exactly what he has done in his latest documentary, Men at Lunch, which debuted {in September 2012} at the Toronto International Film Festival.
How a Galway Pub Led to a Skyscraper
By JOHN ANDERSON NOV. 8, 2012
WHEN they don’t involve sailors kissing nurses, the symbolic photographs of New York City usually involve skyscrapers: Alfred Stieglitz’s snowy shot of the Flatiron Building; Berenice Abbott’s electric “Night View”; Margaret Bourke-White perched atop an art-deco eagle of the Chrysler Building. And Lewis Hine’s celebrated portrait of 11 Depression-era ironworkers, lunching along an I-beam on the unfinished Empire State Building.
No?
No, on several counts.
The shot isn’t by Hine. And it’s not atop the Empire State Building — despite common misperceptions, misrepresentations and an Internet that insists otherwise. Taken Sept. 20, 1932, during the construction of Rockefeller Center, the well-known portrait of 11 immigrant laborers, legs dangling 850 feet above Midtown, ran in the Oct. 2 Sunday supplement of The New York Herald-Tribune, with the caption “Lunch Atop a Skyscraper.” Everybody knows the picture. Nobody knows who took it. And for most of its 80 years no one has known who’s in it.
WHEN they don’t involve sailors kissing nurses, the symbolic photographs of New York City usually involve skyscrapers: Alfred Stieglitz’s snowy shot of the Flatiron Building; Berenice Abbott’s electric “Night View”; Margaret Bourke-White perched atop an art-deco eagle of the Chrysler Building. And Lewis Hine’s celebrated portrait of 11 Depression-era ironworkers, lunching along an I-beam on the unfinished Empire State Building.
No?
No, on several counts.
The shot isn’t by Hine. And it’s not atop the Empire State Building — despite common misperceptions, misrepresentations and an Internet that insists otherwise. Taken Sept. 20, 1932, during the construction of Rockefeller Center, the well-known portrait of 11 immigrant laborers, legs dangling 850 feet above Midtown, ran in the Oct. 2 Sunday supplement of The New York Herald-Tribune, with the caption “Lunch Atop a Skyscraper.” Everybody knows the picture. Nobody knows who took it. And for most of its 80 years no one has known who’s in it.
19 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
There isn't enough money to get me on it 
. K&R
between 50th and 51st Streets so they were waay up over 51st, not 41st Street. And to update the name (although to me and anyone I know here in NYC it's always Rockefeller Center no matter what they put up on top) - It's now the Comcast building (yecch).
Besides the trivia - I don't know how the hell they could do that job. Hat's off to them. 
