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The Journal of
Modern Craft
Volume 4—Issue 2
July 2011
pp. 119–146
DOI:
10.2752/174967811X13050332209206
Reprints available directly
from the publishers
Photocopying permitted by
licence only
© Berg 2011
Corporate Craft:
Constructing the
Empire State Building
Ezra Shales
Ezra Shales is the author of Made in Newark: Cultivating
Industrial Arts and Civic Identity in the Progressive Era (Rutgers
University Press, 2010), in which he analyzes representations
of workmanship as expressions of civic ideals and metaphors
connecting the mission of the city’s public library and museum
with local department stores and schools. The article in
this issue develops his interests in cultural production as a
significant collective endeavor and artifacts as anchors of
regional identity. He holds an MFA from Hunter College,
a PhD from the Bard Graduate Center, and teaches art
history at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred
University.
Abstract
At its opening in 1931, the Empire State Building inspired
two contradictory narratives, one valuing the skyscraper’s
novel technocratic assembly-line-like construction
methods and the other validating the artisanal virtuosity
of its craftsmen. By focusing on workers and the
materials of their trades, this article supplements the
prevailing interpretations of the Empire State Building
as an icon. Collating types of evidence usually separated
by disciplinary boundaries, such as a bronze memorial
that names construction workers given awards for
“modern craftsmanship” and Lewis Hine’s photographs
of these men, the essay examines the ways the building
figured in a public discourse about skilled labor and the
value of work as a civic virtue. The skyscraper was a
complex symbol fraught with ideological tensions. It was
a significant metaphor that articulated and contested
visions of industrial democracy and, employed by Chrysler
and General Motors, craftsmen represented heroic
individualism in the modern city and also the triumph of
the modern corporation.
The Journal of Modern Craft
Volume 4—Issue 2—July 2011, pp. 119–146
120 Constructing the Empire State Building
Keywords: Empire State Building, civic
art, collectivism, mechanization, Taylorism,
Lewis Hine, General Motors.
Pyramids, Empire State Building—these things
just don’t happen. There’s hard work behind
it. I would like to see a building, say, the Empire
State, I would like to see on one side of it a
foot-wide strip from top to bottom with the
name of every bricklayer, the name of every
electrician, with all the names. So when a guy
walked by, he could take his son and say, “See,
that’s me over there on the forty-fifth floor. I
put the steel beam in.” Picasso can point to a
painting. What can I point to? … Everybody
should have something to point to.
Studs Terkel interviewing Mike LeFevre in
Studs Terkel, Working: People Talk About What
They Do All Day and How They Feel About
What They Do (New York: Pantheon Books,
1974), p. xxxii.
Architectural critics and historians describe
the wondrous pace of the creation of the
Empire State Building between March
1930 and May 1931 as an assembly-linelike production driven by technological
efficiency.1 But Lewis Hine’s photographs
suggest a different story: riveters’ hands
dexterously and heroically crafting the skyline
(Figure 1). While the architects Shreve,
Lamb & Harmon implied in the pages of
Architectural Forum that their managerial
timetables and forethought were what sped
construction (Figure 2), Hine’s portrait of
a “sky boy” proposes that the young man
is the artisan of the city’s spires. This essay
explores the ways the Empire State Building
articulated two concepts of work that are
usually opposed, simultaneously representing
corporate empire-building and artisanal
Ezra Shales
craftsmanship. Celebrated as a symbol of
the collective strength of New York State, it
also functioned as an emblem of competitive
capitalism and individualism. The skyscraper
and Hine’s photographs have been wrongly
interpreted within a structure of polarization
between hand and machine. I will argue that
these metaphors were in fact in motion
together, and not mutually exclusive. The
facile, binary narrative of man vs. machine
is often reiterated in scholarship, but the
history of this building supports a more
complex discourse in which the two forces
were interdependent and intertwined.2
Two metal plaques on the marble
walls of the building’s reception hall, which
celebrate two very different sets of authors,
are compelling evidence of the coupling
of these seemingly contradictory values of
technocratic and manual virtuosity. In the
chapel-like lobby off Fifth Avenue, below
a two-storey-high representation of the
skyscraper delineated in bronzed aluminum,
a plaque surrounded by a cartouche praises
the president of the real estate venture,
Alfred E. Smith, the highly popular fourterm governor of the state, and his board
of entrepreneurial speculators. This board
included the businessmen Pierre du Pont
and John J. Raskob, whose ambition it was
to build the tallest skyscraper in the world,
and the building’s architects as well as the
contracting firm, Starrett Brothers and Eken.3
Oddly enough, the fact that the capital of
Raskob and du Pont was tied to General
Motors never became a part of the Empire
State Building’s public identity, despite the fact
that it was often compared to the Chrysler
Building. Nor did the imperial connotations
of the design ever become a cause for
anxiety.
The Journal of Modern Craft Volume 4—Issue 2—July 2011, pp. 119–146
Ezra Shales
Constructing the Empire State Building 121
Fig 1 Lewis W. Hine, “Up
from the City Streets,” Survey
Graphic 65(7) (January 1, 1931):
361. Hine is credited for this
photo-essay in the periodical’s
table of contents, an artistic
achievement that corresponded
to the way Fortune featured
Margaret Bourke-White.
Florence Kellogg, art editor of
the Survey (who was married
to the managing editor, Arthur
Kellogg, and sister-in-law of the
founding editor, Paul Kellogg),
wrote a brief introduction
for Hine’s “photo studies”
and would be responsible
for helping him secure a
commission to photograph the
workers in Shelton Looms a
year later.
The ornate mural on the lobby wall
depicts the skyscraper as an axis mundi
that sits astride the Erie Canal, the key to
New York’s first industrial revolution; it
rises up to pierce the sun (Figure 3 and
its inset).4 A radiant halo of speed lines
visualizes the building’s priapic power; its
reflective chrome-nickel and aluminum
cladding, dominance of the sky—and use
as a radio transmitter, too. In the hallway
to the right of the lobby, on the way to the
banks of elevators, hangs a simpler bronze
tablet that celebrates the recipients of
“modern craftsmanship awards” given to
thirty-two of the building’s four thousand
construction workers, which lists each man’s
name alongside his trade (Figure 4). If the
majestic reception area and record-setting
height convey aggressive imperial ambitions
and technocratic power, the democratic
memorial to workers suggests that the
building was a collective endeavor, handwrought by local citizens. To date, no one
has accounted for the decision to call the
skyscraper the Empire State Building or
identify the author of an ingenious moniker
Ezra Shales
Fig 2 Richmond H. Shreve,
“The Empire State Building:
Organization,” Architectural
Forum 52(6) (June 1930): 773.
that made the monument stand for the state
instead of, as usual, a business.5 Its name is an
aspect of its social life as a cultural artifact.6
Although the plaque dedicated to
construction workers has remained in plain
sight since 1931, it has never been noted
by scholars. But this commemoration of
craftsmanship as a vital and civic virtue
effectively undermines the usual narrative
of the machine age. The conspicuous
Ezra Shales
Fig 3 Lobby, Empire State Building, 1931. Decorative metal mural by Oscar Bruno Bach. Inset: detail of
“Empire” lettering in bronzed aluminum. Photographs by author.
Fig 4 “Empire State Craftsmanship Awards”
plaque installed in 1931. Photograph by author.
identification of individual modern craftsmen,
in the context of a corporate skyscraper
purpose-built through a regime of scientific
management—at the crossroads of Fordism
and Taylorism so to speak—at first glance
seems incongruous. White-collar managerial
apparatus is usually thought to have
annihilated craft, or at least disempowered
its practitioners. However, there stands the
homage to skilled labor, in a monument
whose unprecedented pace of construction
is usually credited to the ability of its
engineers to deskill construction. It is worth
tracing the story of the Empire State plaque
in order to illuminate the degree to which
“craftsmanship” was acknowledged in this
enterprise, and with what intentions.
Ezra Shales
The recipients of “Empire State
Craftsmanship Awards” did not represent
the artisanal occupations of old. Listed on
the plaque are the names of the “wrecker”
who prepared the site, demolishing the
Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in record speed; the
“derrick man” who swung the steel skeleton
into place in a nimble aerial ballet; and the
installer of the asbestos (then highly regarded
as a fireproof material). The geometric
sans-serif typeface—“modernistic,” in the
parlance of the era—that spelled out the
jobs and (immigrants’) names rendered them
as cubic and sleek as the edifice itself. The
plaque defines craftsmanship contextually
and contingently, as if in response to
modernization and its attendant social
and economic issues. Through a complex
publicity program, both the real estate
speculators and the construction workers
became associated with civic and state
patriotism. In every newspaper report on
the project, “craft” and “technology” were
vaunted alongside one another.
For the words mechanization and
craftsmanship were compatible in 1931. Craft
was still perceived as a collective ideal. Since
the plaque quantifies craftsmanship in terms
of individual hands, it might seem compatible
with the use of the term to denote manual
skill. But the value placed on collective labor
and on highly specialized and differentiated
tasks runs counter to the late twentiethcentury expectation that to be a craftsman
is to be self-employed and engaged in
autonomous artistic conception, a selfdirected worker who guides her or his own
process to fruition. This article seeks to meet
David Pye’s unanswered 1968 appeal for
art historians to probe the gray area “where
craftsmanship ends and ordinary manufacture
Ezra Shales
begins.”7 I actively contest the hackneyed
presumption that the machine and the hand
are antithetical modes of production. I also
question another prescriptive definition of
craft, the idea that corporate workmanship
is fundamentally opposed to artisanal
labor. The craftsmanship awards identified
heroic individuals and also articulated a
commitment to a corporate project. It is this
view of “craftsmen” as both valiant and selfeffacing that merits recuperation.
Other bronze medallions in the lobby
also salute work, and similarly suggest that an
expansive notion of craftsmanship was a part
of the building’s programmatic declaration
(Figure 5). Above the lobby doors, three
round emblems celebrate “masonry,”
“electricity,” and “heating.” The image of the
trowel signifies a manual trade while the
abstract emblems of turbines and boilers are
less clearly related to human agency. The
other components deemed noteworthy
Fig 5 Round medallions above Fifth Avenue entrance, Empire State Building, and detail. Depictions
of Electricity, Masonry, and Heating are significant parts of the lobby’s self-referential visual program,
and are attempts to illuminate the inner workings of the building. The mason’s trowel and hammer in
Masonry are repeated and rotated as a motif, hand tools quite unlike the turbine and boiler depicted
in Electricity and Heating. While other emblematic images of Steel, Metals, Decoration, Excavation, and
Elevators adorn the hallways snaking through the lobby, the prominence given to the trowel seems
explicable only in relation to Al Smith’s persona as a bricklayer. Inset: detail of masonry medallion.
Photographs by author.
include “steel,” “steam,” “machines,”
“concrete,” “elevators,” and “decoration,”
as if all these were comparable features.
By honoring materials, tools, amenities, and
artistic intentions and skills, interchangeably,
the Empire State Building implied that human
and machine were mutually supportive
allies in the making of the world’s tallest
building. The corporate skyscraper and the
construction worker became parts of a
magical “technology of enchantment” bound
together by glorious ambition.8
In the course of construction, the
making of the skyscraper and the skill of
an ironworker both became analogues for
public aspirations. Like alternating currents,
each could represent “craft” without
encroaching upon the other’s power. If, four
decades later, Neil Armstrong was cast as a
triumphant pioneer of space, as integral to
his mission as his rocket, so too was the “sky
boy” swinging aloft an indispensable author
of the skyscraper’s aerial supremacy.
The Meanings of Craftsmanship
The Empire State Building, then, embodied
two seemingly incongruous meanings: it
was acclaimed for pioneering a new type
of technological speed of construction and
for the work of its skillful craftsmen.9 The
achievements of engineering, hymned as
efforts to achieve redemption, permitted
society to distract itself from the anxietyproducing aspects of machinery and
modernity, and functioned as screens for
speculators to obscure the fact that they
were adding unneeded office space to
Manhattan.10 “None of all the ancient world
wonders in any way matched the amazing
assembly of skilled craft and fashioned
materials … in the daily wrought miracle
Ezra Shales
of a modern skyscraper,” claimed architect
Richmond Shreve.11 In 1930, the critic
Douglas Haskell shrewdly described the
Empire State Building as “caught at the
exact moments of transition … between
handicraft and machine design, and on the
swing from what was essentially handicraft
to what will be essentially industrial methods
of fabrication.”12 Haskell had an eye for the
dramaturgy of architecture, and his view
of the Empire State’s commercialism was
similarly perceptive: the building was both
handmade and industrial.
Human skill and advanced technology,
genius and self-sublimation, were also
paired in the pages of Architectural Forum,
where William Lamb, the firm’s primary
artistic force, described his design for the
Empire State Building as “suited to speed
in construction.”13 While he claimed that,
“[a]s far as possible, handwork was done
away with,” his espousal of Taylorism was
not incompatible with an appreciation for
craftsmanship. Five years earlier his partner
Shreve had established the “Craftsmanship
Awards” as president of the New York
Building Trades Congress, a private
association of architects, bankers, mortgage
brokers, and builders. Shreve and Lamb
expounded on the new role of the architect
as a “coordinator of construction, the master
of his craft … but as part of an organization,
not a despot.” Shreve described the meetings
where vast sums of human experience were
pooled to consider the chrome-nickel steel
exterior cladding with “the subcontractors
rolling the material, the metal workers who
were to fabricate and those who were
to erect it, and the inspectors who were
to test all sheets.”14 The architect realized
consensus, he wrote, “in the name of
Ezra Shales
Cooperation.”15 For Lamb, too, the building
was the expression of a common vision.
“Instead of being the intolerant aesthete,
[the architect] is one of a group of experts,”
wrote Lamb, “for the modern large building
with its complicated machinery is beyond the
capacity of any one man to master.”16
The crafting of the Empire State Building
was praised for three distinct aspects:
coordination; speed; and novelty of materials.
In a series of twelve articles, published
monthly in Architectural Forum the year
before the building opened, Shreve and
Lamb outlined their innovative systems for
the placement of elevators, the insetting of
radiators into the aluminum spandrels, and
the potential use of the spire as “mooring
mast” for dirigibles. The architects further
emphasized their professional acumen by
publishing more hand-drawn graphs of
complex schedules than traditional illustrative
drawings. Each piece of façade was delivered
pre-finished, the Indiana limestone, the
nickel-chrome-steel alloy fenestration, and
the aluminum spandrels; each exterior unit
arrived ready to be lifted into place with no
customization, just as the steel beams had.
The architects, engineers, and contractors
mapped out on paper the precise progress
to be made on each floor each day, and
deliveries of materials were planned down
to fifteen-minute intervals. For the skeleton,
this meant communication between Homer
Balcom, the structural engineer; Post &
McCord, the steel erector; and two firms, the
American Bridge Company and McClinticMarshall, which prepared and refined the
material rolled by U.S. Steel. The “Progress
Schedule” was designed to sustain twentyfour-hour work days of three shifts, so that
“[t]he plaster may appear in the lower
floors before the roof, many stories above,
has been made tight.”17 The whole process
epitomized efficiency and the triumph of
scientific management. The breakneck pace
is nearly impossible to imagine today.
The rapid-fire assembly of the building
had only one precedent, the seventy-storey
skyscraper for the Bank of Manhattan
Company, also built by Shreve, Lamb &
Harmon and the Starrett Brothers. This
Wall Street tower, which opened in April
1930, was the world’s second tallest building,
the runner-up to the Chrysler. To build it,
Shreve, Harmon & Lamb had pioneered
new time-management systems, such as
the three-shift schedule, to manage 1,300
construction laborers. Precision planning was
crucial in negotiating the building site, where
storage of materials was impossible. As soon
as the foundation skeleton was in place, the
basement began to be filled with bricks that
would later be taken up in elevators. At
the Empire State Building, rail lines circled
the interior floors and elevators distributed
materials, with hundreds of horses aiding in
the maneuvering of tons of steel, plaster, and
stone. Contractor Colonel Starrett stated,
“Never again would there be an architectural
design so magnificently adapted to speed in
construction.”18
Shreve and Lamb argued that the
traditional parameters of the architect’s
craft were expanding. They presented their
work to the public as a novel skill, perhaps
in response to critics like Royal Cortissoz,
who was infamous for his conservative
reaction to the Armory shows of the 1910s.
Cortissoz questioned whether the design of
the new skyscrapers should even be called
architecture, and asked for the invention
of “a new word to designate the new style,
a word drawn from the terminology of
engineering, with aid from that of mechanics
rather than the art of building.”19 In response,
Shreve explained why “the intrusion of a
cold Martian calculus of values in the field of
aesthetic study” was a modern necessity and,
to show that change is at the heart of the
architectural process, he published an 1891
letter handwritten by architect John Carrère.
Shreve had trained in the firm of Carrère
and Hastings, which built many of New
York’s first generation of skyscrapers. He
dismissed Cortissoz’s arguments as old and
unfounded. In 1909, Montgomery Schuyler
had denounced skyscrapers in similar terms,
as “new commercial Babels” lacking in artistic
quality and civic responsibility.20 The art
of building, Shreve explained in a manner
more sympathetic to business, was always
contingent upon a client’s needs and funds.21
Chicago had pioneered the use of steel,
he conceded; now his New York firm was
changing the nature of the skyscraper and
the craft of architecture, achieving dazzling
scale on a “clockwork schedule.”22
When critics have compared the Empire
State Building to the Chrysler Building, they
have usually found it wanting in craft, artistic
values having been sacrificed to economic
logic. But this view equates craft with
ornament.23 The Chrysler’s fanciful spire,
stainless steel riveted over immense steel
beams (shaped in a New Jersey shipbuilding
yard), is usually considered more customized
than the Empire State’s mast; and William
Van Alen, the architect of the Chrysler, is
therefore seen as more involved in aesthetic
form-giving. In contrast, for example in
Carol Willis’s study Form Follows Finance,
the Empire State Building is described as
capitalism, not art, in action.24 Yet Willis
Ezra Shales
obscures the fact that the Empire State
Building was a one-of-a-kind work, much like
the Chrysler, and that it cannily exploits its
own propagandistic name in, for example,
Oscar Bruno Bach’s metallic map and
representation in the lobby, which is in fact a
luxurious use of ornament. To describe this
skyscraper as merely rational is to accept on
face value its own self-promotion.
The month after Shreve sparred with
Cortissoz, his firm awarded “certificates
of craftsmanship” to “nineteen mechanics”
who had labored on the Bank of Manhattan
Company skyscraper, according to a news
brief in The New York Times.25 Among the
recipients were a steamfitter, an elevator
constructor, a marble setter, a tile setter,
and a terrazzo worker, as well as each of
their assistants, in addition to an electrician,
a marble polisher, an ornamental iron and
bronze worker, a painter and decorator, a
plasterer, a plumber, a sheet-metal worker,
and a glazier. So the plaque in the Empire
State Building’s hallway is not an isolated
case: the New York Building Congress had
awarded over 150 such medals by 1930, and
while public plaques were rare, in 1925 The
New York Times noted the dedication of one
on a warehouse in the Bronx.26 The strategy
was intended to encourage apprenticeships
in the trades, and also to foster good
relations between labor and capital; and
indeed, it coincided with the diminishing of
strikes and building boom of the 1920s.27In
1930 Fortune magazine, then only a year
old, described the Empire State Building
favorably, and specifically in terms of its
craftsmanship (Figure 6). The new periodical
described the riveters as “the new artisans”:
“master-workmen” driving “steel to steel with
hammer strokes … [who] still depend upon
Ezra Shales
the judgment of hand and eye.”28 This view
integrated corporate and artisanal craft and
aligned with the architects’ view of the work.
Shreve presented his plan to the public as
a new architectural skill, not a deskilling of
the construction worker. “Skilled craft and
fashioned materials” were compatible, even
complementary, in his eyes.29 He praised the
way that chrome-nickel trim, cast aluminum
spandrels, and windows could be assembled
“independently of one other.” A system
designed “to eliminate in so far as possible,
material interdependence” enabled “the
stone work to proceed at any time after the
setting of metal trims quite without regard
to the windows and spandrels.” “Freedom
from the complication of interrelated
forms” was a new concept in modular
Fig 6 “The Artisans Are Dead …,” from
“Skyscrapers,” Fortune 2(4) (1930): 90.
Photograph by Arthur Gerlach.
construction, designed with time and costs
of labor in mind. It may seem strange that
Shreve developed these rational methods
alongside the impractical vision of docking
blimps. But though it appears absurd in
hindsight, even this improbable proposal was
actually beneficial as a tax break. Craft, speed,
and storytelling were each important and
economically influential.
The Craftsman-Statesman
Craft became a central aspect of marketing,
in part because Al Smith expressed genuine
affection for modernization and laborers:
in the public eye the skyscraper was an
extension of his persona. Representations of
virtuous labor were central to both. Smith
had already been described for a decade as
the leader of the “Empire State” when John
J. Raskob invited him to serve as the public
face of the building in the spring of 1929.30
It was a shrewd move. Smith was at loose
ends after an unsuccessful run for the White
House. His own story, of an immigrant’s
child rising from the slums of the Bowery
to the governor’s mansion in Albany, was an
inspiring one that suggested all citizens could
do the same. The skyscraper mirrored the
self-invention of the boldly ambitious “Boy
from Oliver Street.” Smith’s magnanimous,
modest, and democratic persona, that of
a representative of the people, was on
constant display at each of the Empire-State’s
stages of creation. He was photographed
demolishing the Waldorf-Astoria with saw
in hand and laying the cornerstone with a
trowel.
Smith managed the trick of appearing
both superior, and a “man of the people.”
A real-life figure sprung from the pages of
Horatio Alger stories, he represented vaulting
aspiration and the assimilation of society’s
parts into a greater and unified purpose.
At the 1928 Democratic convention, when
Boston’s Mayor Andrew Peters (described
in The New York Times as a “descendent [of ]
the Pilgrims”) had nominated the Catholic
Smith as the presidential candidate, he had
cited Smith’s bootstraps narrative as “proof
of American Democracy and of its promise
for the future.”31 Peters characterized Smith
as an exemplar of “European races and
religions [that] have contributed large and
important infusions into that composite life
we call America” and a sign of the country’s
ability to achieve “homogeneity.”
At the laying of the Empire State’s
cornerstone in September 1929, Smith
boasted that he still had his membership
in the Bricklayers’ Union, a detail dutifully
relayed by the newspapers.32 And at the
skyscraper’s opening in May 1931, as the
press cited numerous instances of the ancient
virtue of craft, the wildly popular Smith,
wielding a silver trowel, praised the Empire
State Building as “the greatest monument in
the world today to craftsmanship.”33 The job
he had forsaken decades earlier still served
as a metaphor for his role as a down-toearth leader; civic statecraft wielded power
on the basis of personal mythology. The
humility of the bricklayer palliated the hubris
of erecting the world’s tallest building, an
ambition that could have been described as
folly had it lacked a civic-minded craftsman
at the helm. At the opening on May 1, 1931,
he stated that “the Empire State Building is
a monumental proof of hopefulness,” neatly
deflecting attention from the arrogance
and greed of the speculators and the fact
that a shorter skyscraper would have been
more practical and financially sound.34 (This
Ezra Shales
view was propounded in a publication by a
group of experts, among them none other
than Richmond Shreve.35) However, when
the economy was nearing its worst, Smith
was correct that the building remained a
metaphor for unfounded optimism.
Behind Smith’s public relations smarts
and “Happy Warrior” reputation were the
real capitalists raising the building. Raskob
was a leading executive officer of General
Motors; so was Pierre du Pont, another key
member of Empire State, Inc. In the war over
Detroit’s automobile production, the building
can be seen as an engagement staged in
aerial combat over New York City. The
beguiling name and the toothy front man
suggested that the skyscraper was a civic
endeavor, unlike the nearby Chrysler tower
that Raskob and du Pont deliberately aimed
to eclipse by a few feet. Walter Chrysler had
followed a well-worn strategy in identifying
his building as if it were his own progeny, and
overtly declared his building a monument
to capitalistic, individualistic, and corporate
triumph. The Chrysler Building was vilified
in the newspapers and seen as scandalous
because it added no tax revenue to the city’s
coffers. (Its land, leased from the CooperUnion Institute, was therefore tax-exempt.)
Raskob was deeply competitive with
Chrysler, and went to extraordinary lengths
to outdo him in the court of public opinion.
Though he was a Republican, Raskob had
served as the head of Smith’s campaign and
the chief of the Democratic Party, and had
even relocated its offices into his General
Motors building. He concocted the Empire
State Building in the months after Smith lost
the presidential election in 1928; the urge to
best Chrysler seems as important a rationale
as any other for the building.
Ezra Shales
Fig 7 Al Smith, “Just One of the Boys” (October
9, 1930), np. Shreve, Lamb & Harmon Scrapbooks,
Courtesy of Avery Library, Columbia University.
Despite his ties to these moneyed
interests, Smith seemed to embody civic
harmony because of his renown as a
champion of the underclass. His major
condition to Raskob upon being offered
the job as the president of Empire State,
Inc.—or at least the one that was made
public—was that the labor be executed by
union shops only. A few months later, when
an “open shop concern” was hired to erect
steel, Smith “exerted his efforts … to have
the Starrett Brothers redeem their promise
to him that the Empire State job would be
entirely union.”36 That month seven hundred
ironworkers went on strike on a miscellany
of the Starretts’ projects, but not on 34th
Street. Newspapers credited the avoidance
of strikes in the course of construction of the
Empire State and the good state of its labor
relations to Smith’s popularity.
In October 1930, Smith presided
at the “New York Building Congress
craftsmanship award” ceremony held several
months before the formal opening of the
Empire State Building (Figure 7). At these
“craftsmanship exercises” it was the former
bricklayer, not the architect, contractor, or
Lieutenant Governor of New York State,
who awarded gold pins to the workers.37
“In former times a building was just a
building, with no one receiving any particular
credit for genius or for craftsmanship in its
construction,” Smith complained, arguing
that the current era of “co-operation”
would change such oversights. “Now, credit
is publicly given for good workmanship,
and that is as it should be … The human
note was dominant in this great work.”38
To those leaving the site and entering the
Depression, with its grim breadlines and
dim chances of future employment, Smith
issued “craftsmanship cards” to skilled
workers, intended to boost their chances
of employment. In February 1931, he
arranged for the wood dismantled from
the construction site to be allotted to the
homeless on Manhattan’s wharves, to feed
the makeshift fires sustaining them in the
brutal winter. The building thus gave comfort
in a multitude of ways to the bodies of the
Empire State. After all other construction
in the city had slowed to a halt in 1930, Al
Smith, comparable perhaps only to Babe
Ruth, still attracted news cameras and
reporters.
In the figure of Smith, the values of
craftsmanship, municipal patriotism, and
the industrial ethic aligned. Katherine
Solomonson has written that “the distinctions
between commerce, culture, and civic life
narrowed” in the urban expansions of
the “Roaring Twenties”; there is no better
example of this than the persona of Smith
and his hand in the Empire State Building.39
Architect William Lamb had avowed
that the building was a “work of art and
efficiency” because of “the co-operation of
the workmen in the individual trades”; the
photographs of Smith smiling amid a mob
of pleased laborers supplied tangible proof
to support these claims.40 As a newspaper
caption put it, he was positioned as “Just One
of the Boys.” At every opportunity, Smith
praised the building’s “high type of modern
craftsmanship.”41 The sentiment was picked
up and disseminated. “Among the workmen
on a modern skyscraper, few are of the
unskilled class,” noted a nationally syndicated
article on the building’s progress.42
Contractor Colonel William Starrett noted,
“In the Middle Ages the feeling of friendship
existed … Craftsmanship brings back
something we have lost in this intricate
scheme of building—the contract between
employer and employee.”43 It was a case of
Ruskinian rhetoric meeting modern public
relations.
Despite this constant reiteration of
harmony, the scrapbooks of Shreve, Lamb
& Harmon provide evidence that critics and
public alike vacillated between locating the
record-breaking skyscraper as an expression
of the machine age or of human hands.
Newspapers discussed the “human side
of a great skyscraper” by considering the
workmen with condescension, describing
them as “like children making a jigsaw
puzzle … unaware that they are actors
Ezra Shales
in a metropolitan drama” concerned
with a “masterpiece of skyscraper art.”44
The scrapbooks also contain a handful of
satirical cartoons that indicate that the
unconventional celebration of a plumber,
hoist operator, and asbestos handler as
artisans was provocative—and not without
its detractors (Figure 8). The New York
World even saw fit to mock the medal
ceremony and the very notion of “modern
craftsmanship.” Using the real names of the
medal winners, the newspaper ridiculed
the notion that praise was due to men like
Michael Tierney, despite his skill with a rock
drill. Tierney was portrayed as a golfer, asking
his caddy for a “number three iron.” There
was also unease over celebrating Vladimir
Kozloff ’s skill as a “champion wrecker,” as if
the concept of virtuosic destruction were
inherently contradictory. The New York
Times had recognized the New York Building
Trades Congress’s awards to workers
for quality since 1924, and had not yet
derided the organization’s criteria. But the
Empire State Building’s medals for workers
triggered public sneering: in the case of the
world’s tallest skyscraper, the stakes were
higher than usual. The question of whether
skyscrapers were artistic remained unsettled,
and meanwhile another question—whether
they were the physical embodiment of
financial recklessness—loomed larger as
the Depression deepened. The cartoons
suggest that not everyone could maintain
an integrated appreciation for industrial and
artisanal craftsmanship, and that Americans
could tolerate social mobility and plasticity
only up to a point.
Distinguishing the suggestion of
craftsmanship in the Empire State from its
actual presence remains highly subjective, and
Ezra Shales
Fig 8 “The New Who’s Who,” from World, n.d., Shreve, Lamb & Harmon Scrapbooks, Courtesy of
Avery Library, Columbia University.
weekly articles about Smith on the worksite,
describing the brawn of the workers, the
number of horses pulling plaster and cement,
and such new technologies as asbestos make
the line even harder to draw. Even as Al
Smith identified himself with the laborers, the
bodies and faces of the construction workers
were appropriated. The real estate venture,
Empire State, Incorporated, was disguised as
a community builder.
Representing “Modern
Craftsmanship”
Anticipation of the building’s opening was
whetted by full-page promotions in Fortune
and the daily New York Times, among other
periodicals. Advertisements sold it using
various styles, including ultra moderne and
the Colonial Revival. Narrative focal points
included both its luxury amenities and
historic lot. Over two hundred years, the
parcel of land had been transformed from
a humble farm into the site of the WaldorfAstoria Hotel and then into the base of the
world’s tallest office building. Advertisements
suggested that this charted Manhattan’s
pseudo-biological impulse towards
commerce.
The advertising campaign in The New
York Times was an elaborate and unusual
sequence of theatrical recreations of
historical typography, laden with allusions to
Colonial and early Federal life (Figure 9).45
They interrupted tightly packed columns
of text with largely vacant space and faux
antique “for sale” notices intended to
resemble an archaic newspaper, seemingly
composed of handset wooden type
in frames that were an uneven row of
irregularly shaped fleurons. The semblance
of an old bill implied hustling was a New York
tradition. Colonial Revival, which the Edison
Company was using to sell light bulbs and
electricity at this time, was flexible enough to
embrace the skyscraper.
Ezra Shales
Hugh Ferriss’s drawings of the tower
looming up from the city, made long before
the building was complete, depicted it as
a sleek monument of modernity, a beacon
of the future.46 Future-past montages
combined four layers of time, so that the
eighteenth-century farm, the Civil War-era
Astor mansion, the Gilded Age WaldorfAstoria hotel, and the skyscraper replaced
one another in an evolutionary sequence.
One promise was that New York’s tradition
of “luxury and service” found in the hotel
would continue on the site. The pictorial
lesson seemed to celebrate the growth of
urbanism, as if Al Smith’s tale were parallel
to a similar but more protracted story
of “natural” achievement and competitive
survival. In these advertisements and in
Smith’s pronouncements, financial speculation
was interpreted as an organic law of the land,
an unassailable fact of life.
Empire State Building, Incorporated,
the real estate company, crafted identities
for both the building and the workers by
Fig 9 Advertisement, New
York Times (April 29, 1930):
4. Shreve, Lamb & Harmon
Scrapbooks, Courtesy of Avery
Library, Columbia University.
Ezra Shales
commissioning photographs which put
forth contradictory visions of the machine
age, both the lyrical abstractions of László
Moholy-Nagy and the humanist vision of
August Sander. Smith’s tenacious and able
public relations assistant Belle Moskowitz,
who had traveled with him from his first
citywide elections on to Albany and then
through his failed presidential campaign, was
the publicist for the Empire State Building.
Moskowitz’s son, Josef Israels II, worked for
her, and it was he who hired Lewis Hine, a
photographer best known for his muckraking
images of child labor, to create a portfolio of
images of the construction process.47 Hine
seems to have been free to interpret this
assignment; the letter Israels sent him in July
1930 to authorize entrance to the work site
contains no artistic directions.
In the years before World War I, Hine
had made his name in the Survey, a social
welfare periodical established by the Charity
Organization Society of the City of New
York, where he drew attention to unsavory
conditions in sweatshops and factories.
Moskowitz and fellow ardent municipal
activist Frances Perkins knew Hine when
they were working in solidarity as urban
reformers. In 1930, Hine’s job was to praise
a corporate work ethic, not to attack
the corporate abuse of labor. His photos
ranged from portraits of specific laborers
to a more general effort to document the
steel skeleton and its rapid rise. His image
of a laborer supine, resting against the steel
during a noonday lunch break, showed the
city sprawling below. In the fall of 1930,
that tranquil image and the more athletic
“Riding up to the Clouds,” a photograph of
a worker riding the ball of a derrick, were
syndicated nationally. Hine’s image of a
worker’s half-clothed muscular body told
the world just how tall the Empire State’s
eighty-sixth floor stood.48 He also shot the
Empire State from the subterranean steps
of a subway entrance and from the top
of the Chrysler Building, framing it within
the triangular windows. For one of the real
estate company’s 1931 advertisements in
Fortune magazine, his camera transformed
the building’s grid of windows into a pattern
of parallelograms; the image possesses a
compression and dynamic asymmetry most
often associated with Modernist European
photography (Figure 10).49 His twilight
portrait suggested the building naturally
extended the city’s spirit (Figure 11). Yet
Hine’s portraits of bare-chested workers
Fig 10 Advertisement, Fortune 3(6) (June 1931):
33. Photograph by Lewis Hine.
Fig 11 Advertisement, Fortune 3(5) (May 1931):
116. Photograph by Lewis Hine.
“riding the ball” and dangling over the city
are his best known images of the site, and in
them he seems to express reverence for the
workers’ manliness and heroism.
Despite being among his most widely
reproduced images, Hine’s photographs
of the Empire State Building have a bad
reputation. Their artistic standing has
suffered a similar fate to that of the Empire
State, their commercial focus deterring art
historical appreciation. Comparing them
with Hine’s early photographs taken for
the National Child Labor Committee, Alan
Trachtenberg has argued that his work done
for Empire State, Incorporated “seemed
tepid and accommodating compared to his
child-labor work.”50 Trachtenberg perceives
a “socially engaged” photographer in the
Ezra Shales
work of the early years and an inauthentic
“aesthetic of sociality” in the late work. This
distinction deserves skepticism, especially
in view of Trachtenberg’s admission of
his own anti-commercial bias. While he
concludes that only “more complete
negativity toward business culture [would]
free the photographic image” and transform
it from mere mechanical reproduction into
art, Trachtenberg’s classificatory method
resembles a counter-cultural inversion
of progressive, modernist history.51 His
prejudice blinds him to the fact that Hine’s
early work was propagandistic too: the
“politics of adjustment and manipulation”
that Trachtenberg repudiates can be
identified in all of Hine’s work. The
photographer’s didactic and ideological bent
informed his images of both happy and
unhappy workers.
Two specific demands that his patron,
Empire State, Incorporated, did place on
Hine have gone unnoticed by historians.
One of the few directives given to Hine
was to follow the men who won the
“Empire State Craftsmanship Awards,”
and he completed photographs of the
medal recipients between September
and December 1930. (Hine carefully
scribbled on the back of several prints, e.g.,
“A mechanic on Empire State / Received
award for craftsmanship,” proving his camera
was consciously directed to the medal
recipients.52) The portraits Hine made of
sheet-metal workers and asbestos handlers
were published in Empire Statements, the
real estate company’s periodical, which
also identified the medal winners by name
(Figure 12). By looking at the larger sequence
of images and not simply the ones that
were included in Empire Statements, one
Ezra Shales
Fig 12 Empire Statements 1(2)
(1931): 2. Photographs by Lewis
Hine. Shreve, Lamb & Harmon
Scrapbooks, Courtesy of Avery
Library, Columbia University.
can see that Hine cajoled the workers for
a smile and elicited demeanors of all kinds.
Trachtenberg’s “aesthetics of sociability”
fails to differentiate the range of this work,
its tracing of the complex lineaments of
distributed authorship. Belle Moskowitz may
not have been prescriptive, but she knew
what she wanted: she prompted Al Smith to
thank Hine for his “interesting studies of the
spectacular steel workers and fine portraits
of ordinary working men [which] do a great
deal to humanize and popularize this great
structure.”53 While it is apt to characterize
Hine’s work as “accommodating” big
business, it is important to notice that he
also anthropomorphized the corporation.
His photographs articulated the company’s
twinned ideals of industrial and artisanal
craftsmanship, suggesting that the skillful hand
and well-oiled corporation coexisted. Hine
used the Chrysler building to express the
competition between it and General Motors.
Too many of his photographic compositions
emphasize the imminent triumph of the
Ezra Shales
Fig 13 Photograph by Lewis Hine, 1931. Courtesy George Eastman House, International Museum of
Photography and Film.
Ezra Shales
Empire State Building over the Chrysler to
be unintentional. In his carefully composed
images of derrick men placing their index
finger on the Chrysler’s spire, it is as if the
Empire State Building is patting its baby
brother on the head (Figure 13).54 The sense
of conquest and competitive individualism
seemed to be shared by the photographer,
workers, and capitalists alike.
Hine went on to transform the context
of his work made for corporations such
as the Empire State in his own publication,
Men at Work (1932), aimed at an adolescent
readership. Recovering his images from
commercial propaganda, he gave them a
coherence and consistency by editing them
vigorously, stripping away information from
the pictures so that they seem to be a flurry
of candid shots. In his accompanying text,
Hine argued that the human hand shaped
modern mechanized production: “Cities do
not build themselves, machines cannot make
machines, unless back of them all are the
brains and toil of men … We call this the
Machine Age. But the more machines we
use the more do we need real men to make
and direct them.”55 His client, Empire State
Incorporated, had used his photographs to
show its corporate benevolence and prove
its employees were content, as if to please
a readership that thought like John Ruskin.
Hine declared his subject, the “Sky boy,” to
be an image of “courage, skill, daring and
imagination,” granting the day laborer an
active intellectual agency as well as physical
prowess.56 But while Hine praised workers,
his Men at Work book left them anonymous.
His decision not to name any individuals
gave workers less recognition than the real
estate company had. In Empire Statements,
construction workers retained individual
identity, their proper names appearing in
the captions. In Men at Work, Hine placed
the construction worker in a synecdochal
relationship, turning men he knew into the
representations of abstract virtues.
Conclusion: Corporate Craft
The tension between Hine’s depiction
of artisanal craftsmanship and his
emblematization of corporate power was
also clear in the mission of Fortune magazine.
When Henry Luce began the journal in
1930, he described its work in terms of
modern architectural construction: “Fortune’s
purpose is to reflect the Industrial Life in
ink and paper and word and picture as the
finest skyscraper reflects it in stone and steel
and architecture.”57 Intended for corporate
America, Luce’s magazine ran interviews with
both riveters and executives of Standard Oil.
Articles included elitist profiles of leading
Americans and worm’s eye perspectives, as
well. One essay—“The American Worker:
Who is He? What is He? How Does He
Work and Live?”—sought to balance both
angles. Margaret Bourke-White, two decades
younger than Hine, supplied many types
of photographs to match these questions.
Bourke-White showed “the worker” in a
diversity of guises: en masse, streaming into
a factory; in a collage of cropped hands; as
thoughtful artisans, blowing glass and chasing
a bronze statuette; or as heroic figures
standing beside the furnace at a Ford plant.
The magazine ran surprisingly trenchant
images on its cover: black women picking
cotton in September 1931, and a Diego
Rivera drawing of a labor rally in the Soviet
Union in March 1932. In its first decade
Fortune glorified both corporate and artisanal
craft, labor and capital.
Craft was not simply on exhibit in Fortune;
the magazine provided a seminal definition
of its role in industry. Portraits of obedient
workers fit the overarching agenda of
corporate enrichment. In an article about
jade carving, Fortune praised craftsmen
who “never blew their own trumpets and
are not known.”58 The magazine identified
heroic individuals worthy of emulation
among management and labor alike: the
entrepreneur King Gillette, and also Ed
Radigan, a riveter extraordinaire and recipient
of a New York Building Congress gold pin.
It construed them both as acting on behalf
of collective need.59 Fortune celebrated
distributed authorship as an inevitable
condition in the building of civic monuments:
“A [modern] living conception is built as the
cathedrals of the 12th century were built:
stone by stone, anonymously.”60 Paeans to
the honest laborer and corporate executive
were printed in the same issue: Fortune
argued that all individuals should subordinate
themselves to corporate identity.61
The tablet in the lobby of the Empire
State Building with which this article began
was clearly part of a broader Zeitgeist:
an industrial ethos in which individuals
were expected to merge into a collective
cause, even if they were granted individual
identity. It was clearly propaganda, at
once representative of the ambiguities
and contradictions of modernity and the
modern urban theater of power. Praise for
industrial workers was an act of corporate
appropriation, a usurpation of “craft” as
much as an expansion of its continually
contested meaning. At the opening of the
Empire State Building on May Day, 1931, Al
Smith and John Raskob repossessed the
date from the International Workers of the
Ezra Shales
World, seemingly on behalf of their own
craftsmen. As a collective enterprise, the
skyscraper achieved a moral and ethical
apotheosis to match its technical bravura.
The “Craftsmanship Awards” were a
suggestive way to cope with fear of inhuman
mechanization, a strategy to frame the
skyscraper as organic, familiar, built upon
traditional patterns. Yet the longevity of the
Building Congress’s awards also implies that
there was genuine enthusiasm for and faith in
industrial teamwork.
So how and when did craft shed the
suggestion of collective solutions? This is a big
question, deserving of future research, but
a few things are clear. First, the Cold War
was an effective deterrent; McCarthyism
tainted the use of collectivism as a term.62
Second, the meaning of craft narrowed in
the late twentieth century to connote a
heroic anti-establishment retreat from both
conformity and mechanization, and for many
this definition is still in service. Third, due to
increasing economies of scale there was a
tendency to overlook the craft involved in
factory/industrial production, an oversight
that was only exacerbated by the shift in
scholarly attention from production to
consumption since the 1980s. Yet the Empire
State Building was a powerful monument
in the interwar years precisely because it
served as a vehicle for the articulation of
collectivist metaphors. When the skyscraper
was claimed as the result of both manual and
technological genius, work was still discussed
in metaphorical terms. On the seventyfirst floor of its counterpart, the Chrysler
Building, visitors beheld the obvious glory,
views of the skyline and stylized hubcaps and
automobiles transformed into ornament. In
addition to such metaphorical imagery, they
Ezra Shales
also beheld, as if in a shrine to craftsmanship,
a display of Walter Chrysler’s first hand
tools.63 This presentation was a monument
to Chrysler himself, not tradesmen in general;
and partly because of Belle Moskowitz’s and
Al Smith’s brilliance as politicians, the Empire
State Building became a porous metaphor
for collective craft, while the Chrysler
remained one man’s jewel. While awards
were given to workers on the Chrysler
building, there was no public dimension or
commemoration of the event. Chrysler’s
tools were obsolete remnants; the Empire
State suggested that manual craftsmanship
was a live, burning ember sustaining tradition
and also innovation.
In 1930, soon after the Museum of the
City of New York opened its Fifth Avenue
building, two dioramas were put on display.
One was an aerial view of a farm in New
Amsterdam in 1660; the other showed
derrick men lifting I-beams in the Empire
State Building.64 It was not the image of the
finished skyscraper that resonated with the
public, but Hine’s photographs of the process
of realization. Like Hine’s Men at Work, the
diorama was intended for adolescents and
children, including the men smoking pipes
while on the job. The Empire State Building
served as an object lesson precisely because
it was a liminal technology, as Douglas Haskell
noted, caught between manual craft and a
purely technological mode of construction.
A public spectacle of immense proportions,
it maintained ancient archetypes and also
necessitated the invention of new ones. In
American cultural geography, the skyscraper’s
ambiguities refracted vernacular and
intellectual definitions of craftsmanship in
lasting ways. The project met two symbolic
needs, the ideals of distributed authorship
and heroic individuality, even though these
seem mutually incompatible. The building
was finally absurd, except in symbolic
terms—a failed economic scheme whose
spire, useless as a mast, earned a million
dollars a year as a tourist destination. To
call it a success for big business would be
a stretch. Most ironically of all, perhaps,
it signified the triumph of the immigrant
worker, as well as his failure to rise above
hack politics and economic payoffs. The
Empire State Building’s stability is rooted in
such tensions, most overtly the idea that
speed and skill can be reconciled, and that
one and all, the speculator and architect, Al
Smith and the day laborer, can ally as civicminded craftsmen in the service of a larger
and a greater collective good.
Acknowledgments
This article benefited from the critique of an
anonymous peer reviewer, and the responses
of Glenn Adamson, Matthew A. Postal, and
Victor Margolin, and participants in both
the 7th Conference of the International
Committee of Design History and Design
Studies in Brussels in September 2010
and the College Art Association annual
conference in February 2011. I also thank
Alana West, Curatorial Fellow at George
Eastman House.
Notes
1 See Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture, rev.
ed. (1980; repr. Thames & Hudson: London, 1987),
pp. 222–3; Robert A. M. Stern, Gregory Gilmartin,
and Thomas Mellins, New York 1930: Architecture
and Urbanism Between the Two World Wars (New
York: Rizzoli, 1987), p. 514; William Curtis, Modern
Architecture Since 1900 (London: Phaidon, 1996),
p. 227; Leland Roth, A Concise History of American
Architecture (New York: Harper and Row, 1980),
p. 246; Dell Upton, Architecture in the United
States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998),
p. 215. Also see “Greatest Skyscraper Rises on
a Clockwork Schedule,” New York Times (July 27,
1930): 114.
2 For instance, Terry Smith claims that a “distinctive
machinery of representation emerged in the
United States during the 1920s and 1930s” and
also a “new way of seeing.” See Terry Smith,
Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in
America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1993), p. 6. A more nuanced reading of the
relationship between machine and production is
Nancy Troy’s Modernism and the Decorative Arts
in France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1991), in which Corbusier’s aphorisms celebrating
modern factory production and department
stores’ craft production are considered in tension.
3 The identification of Raskob as the central figure
pushing for the title of “world’s tallest” skyscraper
is widely accepted. See Carol Willis, “Building the
Empire State,” in Building the Empire State, Carol
Willis, ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), pp.
16, 31 n19.
4 These are described as “strips of bronze” and
“marble inserts” in the Starrett Brothers and Eken
“Notes on Construction of Empire State Building”
published in Willis (ed.) Building the Empire State.
Lamb describes them as aluminum and bronzed
aluminum in Architectural Forum.
5 Remarkably little concern has been focused
on the building’s name. The announcement of
Smith as a president coincided with the official
announcement of the name. “Smith to Help Build
Highest Skyscraper,” New York Times (August 30,
1929): 1. Mark Kingwell and John Tauranac credit
Smith with the name, but without presenting
evidence. See Mark Kingwell, Nearest Thing to
Heaven (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2006), p. 13; John Tauranac, The Empire State
Building: The Making of a Landmark (New York:
Scribner, 1995), p. 108.
6 See Arjun Appadurai, introduction to The Social
Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
Ezra Shales
1986), pp. 6–13; Ruth Schwartz Cowan, “The
Consumption Junction: A Proposal for Research
Strategies in the Sociology of Technology,” in The
Social Construction of Technological Systems, W.
Bijker, T. Hughes, and T. Pinch, eds (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 261; Igor
Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things:
Commoditization as Process,” in The Social Life
of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective,
Appadurai, ed., pp. 66–8.
7 David Pye, The Nature and Art of Workmanship
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968),
p. 4.
8 Alfred Gell, “The Enchantment of Technology and
the Technology of Enchantment,” in Anthropology,
Art, and Aesthetics, Coote, ed. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1992), p. 43. In the case of the
Empire State Building (hereafter cited as ESB),
Gell’s thesis is complemented by Lee Worth
Bailey, author of The Enchantments of Technology
(Champaign, IL: University of Illinois, 2005),
who looks favorably on machines as agents of
spiritualization.
9 Recent efforts at rehabilitating the ESB from the
obscurity to which historians and curators of
architecture condemned it have valued it primarily
as a myth and symbol, Flowers’ Skyscraper …
excepted. See Benjamin S. Flowers, Skyscraper:
The Politics and Power of Building New York City in
the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2009), pp. 55–6 for a recent
appreciation of the skyscraper’s civic context and
ideological program, even if Flowers incorrectly
assumes that Hine’s photographs were not used
by the real estate company. What little aesthetic
praise historians have given the Empire State
Building has been directed at its skilled labor.
George Douglas refers to the “craftsmanship” of
the ESB and its ilk, and Kenneth Frampton notes
the “high quality of craftsmanship,” but both value
it only in passing. George H. Douglas notes the
contradiction of highly skilled craft and highly
engineered production that I emphasize. See
George H. Douglas, Skyscrapers: A Social History
of the Very Tall Building in America (Jefferson, NC:
McFarland, 1996), pp. 98, 112–13, 125–7;
Ezra Shales
Frampton, Modern Architecture, pp. 222–3. Also
see William R. Taylor, In Pursuit of Gotham: Culture
and Commerce in New York (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1992).
10 On the skyscraper as “redeemer” see Janet
Kardon, Craft in the Machine Age (New York:
Abrams, 1995), p. 29; Richard Guy Wilson, The
Machine Age in America, 1918–1941 (New York:
Abrams, 1985), pp. 39, 153.
11 Richmond H. Shreve, “The Economic Design of
Office Buildings,” Architectural Record 67 (March
1930): 341; also in “Greatest Skyscraper Rises on
a Clockwork Schedule,” New York Times (July 27,
1930): 114.
12 Douglas Haskell, “The Empire State Building,”
Creative Art 8 (April 1930): 243.
13 See William F. Lamb, “The Empire State Building:
VII. The General Design,” Architectural Forum 54
(January 1931): pp. 1–8.
14 Richmond H. Shreve, “The Empire State Building:
Organization,” Architectural Forum 52(6) (June
1930): 774.
15 Shreve, “The Empire State Building:
Organization,” p. 772.
16 Lamb, “The Empire State Building: VII. The
General Design,” p. 5.
17 Shreve, “The Economic Design of Office
Buildings,” p. 344.
18 Kingwell, Nearest Thing to Heaven, p. 8.
Buildings,” pp. 341–3.
20 Montgomery Schuyler, “The Evolution of the
Skyscraper,” Scribner’s 46 (September 1909):
257–71.
22 C. G. Poore, “Greatest Skyscraper Rises on a
Clockwork Schedule,” New York Times (July 27,
1930): 114.
23 Frampton, Modern Architecture, pp. 222–3.
24 Carol Willis, Form Follows Finance: Skyscrapers
and Skylines in New York and Chicago (New York:
Princeton Architectural Press, 1995), p. 7.
25 “Awards at 40 Wall Street,” New York Times
(April 27, 1930): 54.
26 “Eight Workmen Rewarded,” New York Times
(November 4, 1925): 16.
27 “Labor Disputes Reduced,” New York Times
(August 19, 1928): 44.
28 Archibald MacLeish, “Skyscrapers: Builders and
their Tools,” Fortune 2(4) (October 1930): 89.
30 “Smith to Help Build Highest Skyscraper,” New
York Times (August 30, 1929): 1. It was only that
August when Raskob began to overtly push for a
“Class-A” office tower, and on October 3, 1929
that “Scheme K” was finalized, once the Waldorf
was already demolished. See Willis, “Building the
Empire State,” pp. 17, 20.
31 “Peters Calls Smith ‘Proof of Democracy,’ ” New
York Times (June 29, 1930): 6.
32 Kingwell, Nearest Thing to Heaven, p. 6.
33 “Smith Helps to Honor his Building Workers,”
New York Times (October 9, 1930): 16.
34 New York Times (May 1, 1931): 26. Smith’s
personification of the ESB is obliquely
mentioned in Lynn Francis, “The Empire State
Building: The Construction and Aging of a
Metaphor,” Journal of American Culture 10(2)
(Summer 1987): 83–90. Also see Robert A.
Slayton, Empire Statesman (New York: Free Press,
2001), pp. 335–43.
35 W. C. Clark and J. L. Kingston, The Skyscraper: A
Study in the Economic Height of Modern Office
Buildings (New York: American Institute of Steel
Construction, 1930); Shreve, “The Economic
Design of Office Buildings.”
36 “Smith Acts to End 25-Year Labor Row,” New
York Times (April 3, 1930): 26.
37 There were two such ceremonies, one before
the building opened and one afterwards, held for
a total of thirty-four laborers. The plaque was
planned as early as July 1930.
38 “Smith Lauds Work of Men on Empire,”
Telegram (February 13, 1931): np, Shreve, Lamb
& Harmon Collection scrapbooks, Avery Library,
Columbia University (hereafter Shreve, Lamb &
Harmon Scrapbooks).
39 Katherine Solomonson, The Chicago Tribune
Tower Competition: Skyscraper Design and Cultural
Change in the 1920s (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001), p. 233.
40 “Empire State Monument to Skilled Workers on
Job,” Telegram (October 13, 1930), Shreve, Lamb
& Harmon Scrapbooks.
41 “Smith Helps to Honor his Building Workers,”
New York Times (October 9, 1930): 12.
42 Richard Massock, “Skyscraper Worker Eats Café
Lunch,” [Leadville, Colorado] Democrat (October
3, 1930). The same column ran as “About New
York,” [St. Augustine, Florida] Record (October
1930), Shreve, Lamb & Harmon Scrapbooks.
Ezra Shales
House collection show that each of these images
was Hine’s.
50 Alan Trachtenberg, “Camera Work/Social Work,”
in Reading American Photographs: Images as
History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (1989;
repr. New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), p. 204.
The best overview of Hine’s work remains
Peter Seixas, “Lewis Hine: From ‘Social’ to
‘Interpretive’ Photographer,” American Quarterly
39 (9) (Autumn 1987): 381–409. Two recent
studies overemphasize the aesthetic value of
Hine’s work and (walking in Trachtenberg’s
footsteps) exaggerate his artistic agency instead
of respecting the intelligence of his patrons and
their agency. See Julia Dolan, “‘I Will Take You
Into the Heart of Modern Industry’: Lewis Hine’s
Photographic Interpretation of the Machine Age”
(Ph.D. Boston University, 2008), Kate SampsellWillmann, Lewis Hine as Social Critic (University
Press of Mississippi, 2009).
51 Ibid., 230. Trachtenberg seems to have written
this unaware that Hine’s images were used in
Fortune.
52 George Eastman House, print 1977:0154:0045.
43 “Empire State Monument to Skilled Workers on
Job.”
53 Al Smith to Lewis Hine, June 10, 1931, Hine
Collection, George Eastman House.
44 Gilbert Swan, “In New York,” Evening Union
(September 5, 1930): np, Shreve, Lamb &
Harmon Scrapbooks.
54 In the George Eastman House archives over
twenty-five of Hine’s images use the Chrysler
in this way. For similar compositions see
1985:0141:0013 and 1985:0142:0010.
45 New York Times (April 29, 1930): 4.
46 Architectural Forum (June 1930): 787.
47 See Tauranac, Empire State, 282–3. Also see
Elizabeth Perry, Belle Moskowitz: Feminine Politics
and the Exercise of Power in the Age of Alfred
Smith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
48 The Post (October 4, 1930), Shreve, Lamb &
Harmon Scrapbooks.
49 The image is credited to Hiram Myers
(also spelled “Meyers” in another Fortune
advertisement), the agency that printed most
of Hine’s works in these years when he did
not have his own darkroom, and is most likely
his negative. Negatives in the George Eastman
55 Lewis W. Hine, introduction to Men at Work
(New York: Macmillan, 1932), np.
56 Ibid.
57 Fortune 1(1) (February 1930): 38. See Michael
Augspurger, An Economy of Abundant Beauty:
Fortune Magazine and Depression America
(Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 21. Also see
John Stromberg, “Art and Fortune: Machine-Age
Discourse and the Visual Culture of Industrial
Modernity,” Boston University PhD diss., 1999.
58 “Jade,” Fortune (March 1931): 60; also see
Michael Augspurger, “Fortune’s Business
Gentlemen: Culture and Corporate Liberalism
Ezra Shales
in the Early 1930s,” Prospects: An Annual of
American Cultural Studies 26(1) (2001): 437.
59 Archibald MacLeish “Skyscrapers,” Fortune 2, no.
4 (October 1930): 94. The author of the article
was not credited in the periodical itself, and my
identification is reliant on Michael Augspurger’s
research. See Augspurger, An Economy of
Abundant Beauty, p. 158.
60 “American Workingman,” Fortune 3(8) (August
1931): 54.
61 Augspurger, An Economy of Abundant Beauty,
p. 12. Also see Archibald MacLeish, “The First
Nine Years,” in Writing for “Fortune,” Daniel
Bell, ed. (New York: Time, 1980), 7; Dwight
Macdonald, “Fortune Magazine,” The Nation (May
8, 1937): 528.
62 See S. M. Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist
Democracy (University of Chicago Press,
2003).
63 See “Mechanics Hear Chrysler,” New York Times
(January 21, 1930): 45. The display is also noted
in Cervin Robinson and Roemarie Haag Bletter,
Skyscraper Style: Art Deco New York (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 22. Also
see Walter Chrysler’s autobiography, Walter
P. Chrysler, Life of the American Workman, in
collaboration with Boyden Sparks (New York:
Dodd, Mead & Co., 1950).
64 Max Page, “‘A Vanished City is Restored’:
Inventing and Displaying the Past at the Museum
of the City of New York,” Winterthur Portfolio
34(1) (Spring 1999): 49–64.

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