High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World's Greatest Skyline

By Jim Rasenberger

Book Overview

With the birth of the steel-frame skyscraper in the late nineteenth century came a new breed of man, as bold and untamed as any this country had ever known. These "cowboys of the skies," as one journalist called them, were the structural ironworkers who walked steel beams -- no wider, often, than the face of a hardcover book -- hundreds of feet above ground, to raise the soaring towers and vaulting bridges that so abruptly transformed America in the twentieth century.

Many early ironworkers were former sailors, new Americans of Irish and Scandinavian descent accustomed to climbing tall ships' masts and schooled in the arts of rigging. Others came from a small Mohawk Indian reservation on the banks of the St. Lawrence River or from a constellation of seaside towns in Newfoundland. What all had in common were fortitude, courage, and a short life expectancy. "We do not die," went an early ironworkers' motto. "We are killed."

High Steel is the stirring epic of these men and of the icons they built -- and are building still. Shifting between past and present, Jim Rasenberger travels back to the earliest iron bridges and buildings of the nineteenth century; to the triumph of the Brooklyn Bridge and the 1907 tragedy of the Quebec Bridge, where seventy-five ironworkers, including thirty-three Mohawks, lost their lives in an instant; through New York's skyscraper boom of the late 1920s, when ironworkers were hailed as "industrial age heroes." All the while, Rasenberger documents the lives of several contempor-ary ironworkers raising steel on a twenty-first-century skyscraper, the Time Warner building in New York City.

This is a fast-paced, bare-knuckled portrait of vivid personalities, containing episodes of startling violence (as when ironworkers dynamited the Los Angeles Times building in 1910) and exhilarating adventure. In the end, High Steel is also a moving account of brotherhood and family. Many of those working in the trade today descend from multigenerational dynasties of ironworkers. As they walk steel, they follow in the footsteps of their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers.

We've all had the experience of looking at a par-ticularly awe-inspiring bridge or building and wondering, How did they do that? Jim Rasenberger asks -- and answers -- the question behind the question: What sort of person would willingly scale such heights, take such chances, face such danger? The result is a depiction of the American working class as it has seldom appeared in literature: strong, proud, autonomous, enduring, and utterly compelling.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060004347
• ISBN13: 9780060004347
• Release Date: March 2004
• Publisher: Harper
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 1.47 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 1.3" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

Ironworker History and Life

Must read for anyone in the Ironworker family!! You will learn a lot about what it means to live the life plus you'll learn the roots and sufferings of the early sky-walkers.

Good book on Local 40 Ironworkers

A good book for reading about the history and stories of the Local 40 Structural Ironworkers of NYC.

Great Story for Iron Workers

Rasenberger brings awareness to the little known and aknowledged trade of Iron Workers. This is an excellent book for those who are in the trade and those who want a close to real life view of who Ironworkers are and what their life was and is like. The book gives a pretty accurate history of the trade going back to the early Bridgeman to the current International Associates of Bridge, Structrual, Ornamental and Reinforcing Iron Workers. Being a 3rd generation Iron Worker I found this a very pleasureable read and recommend it to anyone who wants to know more about what it is that we do as we build America on Beam at a time.

A great story

This story of iron workers is both extremely interesting and a really fun read. It provides beautifully crafted vignettes drawn both from the history of iron workers and from contemporary tales of today's iron workers at work in New York. A strong narrative thread connects these stories as the reader learns about the lives of a small group of iron workers today at the same time as Rasenberger deftly introduces the history of this trade and its daring tradesmen that brings this story to life and sets it in context. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in iron workers, in the history of our tall buildings and impressive bridges and to anyone looking for an accessible and fun read about real workers engaged in daring and dangerous work. It's beautifully written, a sympathetic portrait, yet one that is not afraid to highlight the faults and foibles of the people it describes, making the story one that resonates as accurate and, most of all, real.

A Book About the Working Society of Ironworkers

Being an Ironworker for the last 42 years myself, I found this book right on the mark about the lives of working Ironworkers. Mr. Rasenberger has identified the uniqueness of Ironworkers in his book and ties it all together with some very interesting historical events that occurred to the Ironworkers Union. I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys reading about real life people, their work and the dangers of that work.