What Are Papers Being Read by Construction Workers on Lunch Atop a Skyscraper
How a Galway Pub Led to a Skyscraper
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 fine art-deco hawkeye of the Chrysler Building. And Lewis Hine's historic 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 past Hine. And it'due south not atop the Empire Country Building — despite mutual misperceptions, misrepresentations and an Internet that insists otherwise. Taken Sept. twenty, 1932, during the construction of Rockefeller Center, the well-known portrait of xi immigrant laborers, legs dangling 850 feet to a higher place Midtown, ran in the Oct. ii Lord's day supplement of The New York Herald-Tribune, with the caption "Luncheon Atop a Skyscraper." Everybody knows the flick. Nobody knows who took it. And for most of its fourscore years no one has known who's in it.
A flake of the mystery is resolved in "Men at Lunch," a documentary most the photograph that'due south featured in the electric current DOC NYC serial at the IFC Heart in Greenwich Village. Its director isn't making whatsoever exorbitant claims. "We just muddied the waters a fleck," Sean O Cualain said with a grin during a recent interview in New York. "It was already a complex story total of unknowns. And nosotros added a few more unknowns."
Paradigm
But "Men at Tiffin" does solve some of the puzzle created during a New York autumn when Babe Ruth's Yankees were winning the Earth Series and Franklin Delano Roosevelt was winning the presidency. Produced by Mr. O Cualain'due south brother, Eamonn, and made on a virtual shoestring, the film establishes the identity of at to the lowest degree two of the long-anonymous workers. Joseph Eckner, third from left, and Joe Curtis, third from right, were cross-referenced with other photos that the O Cualains were shown at Rockefeller Center. While the "Tiffin" print itself bears no identifications, Eckner and Curtis were certainly the same men named on other photos taken that 24-hour interval.
Two others — at each end of the row, one lighting a cigarette, the other holding a bottle and glaring at the camera — were traced to Republic of ireland, which is where the O Cualain brothers, natives of Galway, entered the story.
"Nosotros were in doing another documentary and were having lunch in Whelan's Pub, in Shanaglish," Sean O Cualain said, referring to a modest village in Canton Galway. "We saw the picture on the wall, and Mikey Whelan told the states the story." Equally Mr. Whelan, the publican, explained it, the framed copy had come from a Boston-surface area man named Pat Glynn, who was convinced that his male parent, Sonny Glynn, was the human being with the bottle at the far right, and that his uncle, Matty O'Shaughnessy, was at the far left with a cigarette.
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Comparisons with family unit photos seem to back him up. What Mr. Glynn knew for certain is that the men had emigrated in the '20s from Shanaglish, hence the prominent display of the photo in a pub there.
"With all the bear witness they've given united states of america and based on their own belief," Eamonn O Cualain said, "we believe them."
By the end of the motion picture, his brother added, "you desire to believe them also."
The popularity of the picture, which has been colorized, satirized, burlesqued with the Muppets and turned into a life-size sculpture by Sergio Furnari, is partly about the casual recklessness of its subjects: The beam on which they sit seems suspended over an urban abyss, with the vastness of Fundamental Park spread out backside them and zero, seemingly below. Simply in fact a finished floor of thirty Rockefeller Plaza was probably simply a few feet abroad. And it was certainly non casual. As the Rockefeller drove shows, it was among many such posed photos taken and distributed to the news media with the intention of promoting Depression-era real estate (albeit by photographers who were "absolutely mad," said the archivist, Christine Roussel).
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The defoliation over Hine'due south involvement stems from the incorrect assumption that the skyscraper was the Empire State Building, which Hine did photograph. The Rockefeller archive attributes the photo to "unknown" because no one was credited, though photos be of other photographers who were taking pictures that day. The suspects include Charles Ebbets, William Leftwich and Thomas Kelley.
The O Cualains have a re-create of a second shot, evidently taken just seconds after the famous original, the cracked glass negative of which is owned by the Corbis collection and kept in the Iron Mount storage facility, 220 feet below the surface of western Pennsylvania.
"Nosotros establish it on a poster site on the Internet, but pretty quickly after nosotros started asking questions the phone started going dead," Sean O Cualain said, regarding the site. "They didn't know who owned the copyright, you know what I hateful? So we couldn't use it in the motion-picture show, simply nosotros have it on our role wall, and it's taken three or four seconds afterward the original snap."
The cigarette has just been lighted, his brother said. "And the guy on the far side has a funny look on his face, as if the lensman said, 'Don't look at the bloody photographic camera!' "
The presence in the picture of Sonny Glynn and Matty O'Shaughnessy are another reason "Luncheon Atop a Skyscraper" long ago became a archetype: The synthesis of immigration, aspiration and determination, the vertical grasp of Manhattan at a time when jobs were scarce and men were drastic. As John Rasenberger, the author of "High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World'south Greatest Skyline," says in the documentary: "The pay was practiced. The thing was, you had to be willing to die."
All of which have obscured the merits of "Lunch Atop a Skyscraper" every bit a piece of work of art.
"Lewis Hine was hired to document the Empire Land Building, and as a body of piece of work that to me represents a greater artistic accomplishment, at least across the serial," said Sarah Meister, a curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, who put together the exhibition "Picturing New York" of 2009. "But there'south a difference between a picture that transcends its function for its ain intrinsic merits and i that has transcended it for other cultural reasons." She would, she said, be delighted if someone wanted to donate a good print of "Lunch Atop a Skyscraper" to MoMA. "Nosotros don't have one."
Whether its subject is a masterpiece or a novelty, "Men at Lunch" was a natural for DOC NYC, at present in its third year. "Needless to say, I am a fan," said the senior programmer Mystelle Brabbee, who called the picture show a "love letter," albeit i that takes a different tack from other films about architecture.
"We mostly hear near the famous architects and financiers, but this 1 iconic photograph shows the spirit of how Rockefeller Centre was built — the fulfillment of the promise of Manhattan," she said. "Dazzler, service, nobility and humour dangling 56 stories above the midstream blitz of the metropolis, all summarized in this moment."
The documentary invites the viewer to meditate on that moment, she added, "without trying to reveal all the answers surrounding it."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/11/movies/lunch-atop-a-skyscraper-uncovered.html
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