We Built This City

When it was completed in 1897, the Gillender Building was one of the tallest in New York, soaring to 273 feet with its three-story baroque cupola. Thirteen years later it was on the ground, razed to make room for the Bankers Trust Company skyscraper, which nearly doubled the height of its predecessor at 14 Wall Street. The Gillender Building had taken one year to construct and just forty-five days to tear down—“the most rapid house-wrecking feat ever performed” the eminent demolitionist Jacob Volk boasted to The New York Times. Roughly 140 workers in Volk’s employ labored day and night on the edifice’s demise, stripping it down to its once-novel steel frame. Eighty-five men were injured in the process, and a steady flow of ambulances arrived at the site day after day, with one writer observing that it was “like a real battle.” One of  Volk’s crew was killed, victim to a falling girder.

Such casualties, we learn in Building the Metropolis, were not unusual in the half-century of urban transformation between 1880 and 1930, when new technologies and exploitative labor practices enabled firms to build and destroy at ever increasing speeds. “In the 1880s, building a ten-story building within a year was considered an astonishing achievement,” author Alexander Wood writes, “but by 1930 a hundred-story building could be built within roughly the same time space.” Once finished, structures became obsolete at startling rates; huge swathes of the historic cityscape were obliterated to make way for new construction. In addition to the Gillender, there was the nine-story Pabst Hotel, leveled in 1902—just three years after it went up—to clear space for The New York Times’ new headquarters in the square that would soon bear its name. There was also the Mills Building, at 15 Broad Street, once one of the largest and costliest office towers in the United States; it was completed in 1882 and felled in the 1920s to erect the forty-three-floor Equitable Trust Building on the same plot. Tall buildings were not the only structures to face the wrecking ball; the mansions of Gilded Age financiers such as Darius Ogden Mills and Cyrus W. Field were also demolished, rendering the landscape of midtown Manhattan almost unrecognizable.

Across more than three hundred lucid, densely researched pages (excluding endnotes and other back matter), Wood vividly recounts three “building booms” that made, unmade, and remade the metropolis: the rise of the first skyscrapers and public works projects before the consolidation in 1898 of what was briefly called the City of Greater New York; the period of rapid construction and speculative development in the first two decades of the twentieth century; and the building craze in the 1920s—the biggest of the three—that came to a screeching halt with the Great Depression. Wood’s expansive interest in the built environment opens his purview beyond tall buildings and stately homes to consider a wealth of case studies at street level and below. Trade unionism is a through-line in the book, from bricklayers going on strike for a nine-hour workday in 1884 to the formation of the Union Mechanics’ Association (UMA) in 1930 to represent African Americans in the building trades. Wood tackles the culture of “speed-up” that made the industry increasingly hazardous over the decades, as well as organized labor’s opposition to the pressures placed on its rank and file. While the architect Cass Gilbert wrote that the skyscraper was “a machine to make land pay,” many workers were keenly aware of their own value—and of the collective power they could wield to make bosses pay.

In Wood’s telling, buildings themselves serve as construction sites of labor relations: They are places where workers learn their power in a business that exploits them, where union leaders call on members to join strikes in solidarity with other locals, and where bosses move to form rival organizations to advance their own interests. Characters from these struggles jump off the page. Take the leader of the House Wreckers Union, William Zaranko. A Russian tailor enlisted by the wreckers because of his facility with Slavic languages, Zaranko doubled wages for his membership and helped win them an eight-hour workday. Or Enrico Arrigoni, an Italian anarchist bricklayer who had taken part in the Spartacus uprising in Berlin, attempted to assassinate Benito Mussolini, and found building houses in Brooklyn to be a comparatively peaceful occupation. Or Joseph A. Moore, a Black carpenter of the UMA who wrote and fought against the Jim Crow logic that governed the New York District Council of carpenters, which ensured that the worst work went to “colored” locals. These union leaders and members were the engines of change, securing hard-won victories over the wages, hours, and conditions of work.

Wood’s account joins a growing body of scholarship that reminds us of the limits of an architectural history focused solely on architects. “Comprehending how a city is built,” Wood writes, “means studying the whole process by which structures are erected in a competitive market.” This process involves not only architects but “engineers, and their draftsmen; speculative builders, general contractors, and subcontractors; building material dealers, manufacturers, and other suppliers; skilled craftsmen working in more than fifty distinct trades, as well as an army of laborers.” Consider the urban villas of the Tiffany family, the merchant William H. Fogg, and bankers Henry H. Cook, Alfred M. Hoyt, and Augustus C. Downing. In Wood’s telling, we learn less of their architects than of the militancy of the workers who built them. On August 28, 1883, union delegates called for a strike at the Cook house because John J. Tucker, the mason in charge of construction, had tried to prevent the bricklayers from unionizing. Every worker walked off the job. Then they made their way down Fifth Avenue, convincing men of different trades to put down their tools and join them. By the time they reached Union Square, they had “stopped work on ten of Tucker’s projects collectively worth more than $3 million, pulling several hundred union members off the job, and throwing nearly a thousand more out of work.” This marked the first major “sympathy strike” in the city, and it coincided with work stoppages at the Dakota, the Metropolitan Opera, and twenty houses owned by the Astors, flexing the muscle of organized labor in New York’s burgeoning construction sector.

Spooked by this display of worker power, the bosses were quick to respond. Anticipating another strike wave during the following building season, they created a trade group called the Mason Builders’ Association, with Tucker at the head. While employers had made huge gains in the aftermath of the Civil War, workers saw wages stall and housing costs rise. Bricklayers led the strike wave, calling for a nine-hour workday with no wage cuts. The firms behind the Standard Oil and Cotton Exchange Buildings immediately acceded to their demands, but other bosses tried to skate through with replacement laborers from nearby towns. That April, the unions and the Mason Builders’ Association hammered out what Wood calls “the first trade agreement in the history of the city’s building industry.” In return for pledging to submit all future grievances to arbitration before striking, the unions were recognized by the builders, who agreed to only employ organized labor and acquiesced to the shorter hours without a reduction in wages. The bricklayers, as one labor newspaper reported, could now “take a trip to the briny seas around Coney Island whenever they have a mind to, after the day’s work is over, at 5 o’clock.”

Wood also shows how city officials used public infrastructure to pave their reputations as caretakers of the city, even as they exploited the workers who built it. A Democratic political machine notoriously greased by graft, Tammany Hall counted many contractors among its membership and earned popular support in part by asphalting the city’s dirt, cobblestone, and macadam roads. A main character in this story is Thomas Francis Gilroy, the Tammany-backed commissioner of the Department of Public Works who, “by most accounts … ran the most aggressive, efficient, and honest Public Works Department the city had ever known.” Though reporters noted that one early bid went to a notorious Tammany Hall associate and speculated that Gilroy was paying off the party, even his critics agreed that he stamped out the worst corruption during his tenure. For his part, Gilroy touted his achievements as commissioner and boasted that he had created “an intercommunicating network of firm, hard, and durable pavements,” providing his tenement-dwelling constituents “a smooth and noiseless means of communication with the Central Park and upper sections of the city.” Gilroy’s populist rhetoric and commonsense regulations—he cracked down on public nuisances such as the storage of building materials on city sidewalks—masked his disinterest in improving working conditions on public infrastructure projects. Many were supplied with labor through the so-called padrone system, wherein contractors would win a bid and then hire a broker to gather the men needed. These brokers would pay the workers as little as half the industry standard, and charge them to stay in shantytowns hastily erected near jobsites. Italian immigrants made up the majority of this exploited labor force, and while the most extreme abuses were curtailed in the private sector, they flourished in Tammany Hall’s public works. Gilroy’s indifference to labor did little to tarnish his reputation as a pragmatic and productive commissioner, and he was elected mayor in 1892.

Building the Metropolis carefully attends not just to divisions between workers and bosses but to those within the workers’ movement itself. “Traditionally, the trades have been portrayed as the ‘aristocracy’ of wage workers,” Wood stipulates in his introduction, “and to a degree that was true compared with the extreme poverty of many laboring people.” He later explains that “the trade union hierarchy was run with a machine-like philosophy that privileged well-connected workers and promoted ethnic solidarity.” This more collusive and conservative aspect of trade unionism came to the fore when ground was broken on the Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT) subway line, the first underground rail in the city, in the summer of 1900. John B. McDonald, a contractor cozy with Tammany, won the bid and hired subcontractors for the sections running from city hall to upper Manhattan. The project called for a number of different occupations—such as steelworkers and bricklayers—but the majority of workers were diggers, an Irish, Italian, and Black workforce that was completely unorganized. That changed in 1903, when the Rockmen and Excavators’ Union announced itself with a May Day strike against “cheating, fraud, and bossism.” Led by Tito Pacelli, an Italian immigrant who lived in East Harlem, it joined the Asphalt Workers’ Union as one of the first multiethnic and multiracial construction unions in the city. Opposition came both from bosses and from craft tradesmen who wanted to uphold the hierarchy that put so-called unskilled labor, often carried out by newer immigrants, on the bottom rung. At one meeting leading up to the strike, a delegate from the Electrical Workers Union gave ugly voice to this nativist ideology. “These men are not American citizens; everyone knows that!” he bellowed. “Some of them are the very scum of the earth.”

The diggers’ strike went off regardless, and members of the new union did their best to hold down a ten-mile picket line along the subway. “I was thrilled by the imagination that here were the historic proletarii of Rome,” wrote a progressive economist who witnessed the scene, “after twenty centuries of suppression, with starved faces, bent shoulders, meager bodies and ragged clothes, coming up at last out of the ground into the freedom of America.” But America being what it is, the union lost the strike, and many workers returned to substandard wages and long workdays. A year and a half later, the subway project was completed ahead of schedule.

Later sections of Building the Metropolis detail the increasing deadliness of construction during a period celebrated for its soaring achievements in art deco architecture. Before the 1920s, machinery was largely used to aid work rather than eliminate it, but starting that decade, “a booming speculative market, the use of new construction equipment, and ruthless cost-cutting combined to threaten the culture of craftsmanship in several trades.” This dizzying new velocity caused many experienced workers to quit, and a relatively inexperienced workforce became the norm. Wood recounts how ever more dangerous conditions provoked state investigation and led to the establishment, in 1923, of New York’s Division of Building Construction, which tried to regulate the industry, to disappointing results. Just a few years later, the same agency declared construction to be “the most hazardous industry in the state.” New tools like spray guns, jackhammers, and power saws posed long-term health risks, leading to problems ranging from silicosis to nerve damage, and workplace accidents became deadlier. The New York Department of Labor recorded ninety-eight construction-related fatalities in 1924; by 1929 there were 253. Deaths on the job were particularly gruesome. In 1939, the writer Pietro di Donato published Christ in Concrete, a novel informed by his work as a bricklayer; he describes the body of a man who had fallen tens of stories: “His head, split wholly through by a jagged terra-cotta fragment, was an exploded human fruit.”

By the time the Empire State Building was completed in 1931, claiming six workers’ lives, the building boom was already going bust. Draftsmen and craftsmen were laid off across the industry—the largest architecture firm in New York, Voorhees, Gmelin & Walker, let go of 275 employees in a day in 1930—and numerous offices closed altogether. Many of their counterparts in government were also made redundant. Funds administered by the Architect’s Emergency Committee, an organization that raised private monies in partnership with city agencies, helped unemployed architectural workers through the Depression, but many had to take odd jobs to survive. We learn that Minoru Yamasaki wrapped dinnerware for a Japanese import company, while others worked in department stores and restaurants. Architect Edward Durrell Stone recalled the editor of a prominent architecture magazine “canvassing grocery stores on the lower East Side, selling National Biscuit Company products.” Some contractors made the lateral move from new construction to renovations, but they too had to reduce their workforce, and many firms went under. There were impressive shows of solidarity among the rank and file: Workers in some unions agreed to five-, then four-, then three-day weeks to share jobs. But even these measures couldn’t prevent mass layoffs in a floundering industry. By 1933, 80 percent of craftsmen represented by the Building Trades Council were unemployed.

Wood’s history concludes on a glimmer of hope, touching on how the New Deal helped to revive the industry and bring many architectural practices out of hibernation. Crucial to the city’s recovery was the 1934 election of Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, who established the New York City Housing Authority one month into his term and whose alliance with Roosevelt was rewarded with federal support for ambitious civic projects. Tammany was out; Robert Moses was in; and a new era of “public works, public housing, and slum clearance” had begun.

“During boom years, architects, particularly in the larger offices, became imbued with the psychology of their clients,” architect and historian Talbot Hamlin reflected in a 1933 article on “The Architect and the Depression” for The Nation. “All the Hooverian dogmas of individualism, salesmanship, profit-making, were swallowed unquestioningly.”  Building the Metropolis excites its readers to question such dogmas, which, though we might like to think otherwise, remain dominant in architectural history and practice. While we still reflexively understand architects to be the authors of their buildings, eliding the labor of myriad other actors, Wood exhaustively reconstructs how New York City’s built environment was shaped not just by designers but also by bosses and workers engaged in struggle, by rent-seeking property owners and power-seeking Tammany Hall officials, and by all manner of contractors and subcontractors trying to build as lucratively as possible. While he leaves it to the reader to draw parallels between his historic period and our own times, doing so should be easy enough work. Needless to say, the profit motive still rules our vertiginously unequal metropolis, where seven supertalls have surmounted the Empire State Building in the past decade; where the majority of tenants are rent-burdened, a third severely so; and where homelessness has reached heights not seen since the Depression. Alas, the city foretold by Thomas Gilroy when he accepted Tammany’s mayoral nomination now conjures an ironic smile.

We are still waiting, 133 years later, for this New York to be built. In other words, the city remains a site of material, social, and political construction. Please pardon our progress.