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A Five-Piece Shooting Suit

The roughneck daredevils who built the Empire State Building

 

The Empire State Building was built by Starrett Brothers and Eken, developed by Empire State Inc. (led by John J. Raskob & Al Smith), with Homer Gage Balcom as structural engineer, and involved thousands of diverse workers, including many Mohawk ironworkers, with their heroic efforts noted by contemporary press like the New York Times, describing them as "daredevils".

 

Key Players & Facts:

Developers: Empire State Inc. (Raskob, Al Smith).

Main Contractors: Starrett Brothers and Eken.

Architects: Shreve, Lamb & Harmon (not in snippets, but implied in the history).

Workforce: Diverse, including Irish, Italian immigrants, and Mohawk ironworkers.

Noteworthy Quote: C.G. Poore for the New York Times described the ironworkers as "strolling on the thin edge of nothingness".

 

‘It would take 11 seconds to hit the ground’: the roughneck daredevils who built the Empire State Building

 

They wrestled steel beams, hung off giant hooks and tossed red hot rivets – all while ‘strolling on the thin edge of nothingness’. Now the 3,000 unsung heroes who raised the famous skyscraper are finally being celebrated

 

Catherine Slessor

Mon 1 Dec 2025 15.00 CET

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/dec/01/empire-state-building-lewis-hine-glenn-kurtz-new-york

 

Poised on a steel cable a quarter of a mile above Manhattan, a weather-beaten man in work dungarees reaches up to tighten a bolt. Below, though you hardly dare to look down, lies the Hudson River, the sprawling cityscape of New York and the US itself, rolling out on to the far horizon. If you fell from this rarefied spot, it would take about 11 seconds to hit the ground.

 

Captured by photographer Lewis Hine, The Sky Boy, as the image became known, encapsulated the daring and vigour of the men who built the Empire State Building, then the world’s tallest structure at 102 storeys and 1,250ft (381m) high. Like astronauts, they were going to places no man had gone before, testing the limits of human endurance, giving physical form to ideals of American puissance, “a land which reached for the sky with its feet on the ground”, according to John Jakob Raskob, then one of the country’s richest men, who helped bankroll the building.

 

Like astronauts, they were going to places no man had gone before

 

Known for his empathic studies of workers, artisans and immigrants, Hine was hired to document the development of the Empire State Building during its breakneck 13-month construction period from 1930-31. Along with formal portraits of individual workers, he recorded men animatedly performing their jobs: drilling foundations, wrestling with pipes and cables, laying bricks and navigating precipitous steel beams as the colossal skyscraper took shape above Manhattan.

 

Today, visitors to the Empire State can take selfies with bronze sculptures of old-timey construction fellows, wreathed in a confected soundscape of “ironworkers and masons shouting over the din of machinery, moving steel beams into position, and tossing hot rivets into place”. This genuinely heroic feat of construction has long been commodified into yet another visitor experience.

 

History valorises the ambitious, affluent men who commissioned the Empire State, including Alfred Smith, a former governor of New York and Democratic presidential candidate. It also valorises its architects, Messrs Shreve, Lamb and Harmon, who alighted on a distinctive art deco style, with prefabricated parts designed to be duplicated accurately in quantity and then brought to site and put together in a similar manner to a car assembly line.

 

The men in dungarees raised the steel frame as others – carpenters, glaziers, stonemasons – followed

 

Yet the men who assembled those parts – 3,000 workers toiled on site each day – are largely unknown and unsung. Even The Sky Boy – for all his romantic allure “lifted like Lindbergh in ecstatic solitude”, as one commentator rhapsodised – remains unidentified. The man in dungarees was simply part of a gang of structural ironworkers, who raised the building’s steel frame, leading the way upward as other tradesmen – carpenters, glaziers, tilers and stonemasons – followed in their wake.

 

A tight-knit fraternity of Scandinavians, Irish-Americans and Kahnawà:ke Mohawks, the ironworkers were self-proclaimed “roughnecks”, undisputed kings of constructional derring-do. As the New York Times writer CG Poore put it at the time, they spent their days “strolling on the thin edge of nothingness”.

 

Fleshing out the men behind the myth, a new book called Men at Work throws light on the lives and opinions of a small fraction of this forgotten workforce. “My father’s office was in the Empire State Building, so I grew up visiting it,” says the author Glenn Kurtz. Familiar with Hine’s images, his interest was further piqued by a small plaque tucked into a corner of the opulent main lobby, bearing the names of 32 men who had been singled out for “craftsmanship awards” for their work on the building.

 

 “Hine’s portraits play such an important role in the mythology surrounding not only the Empire State Building, but also 1930s America in general,” says Kurtz. “I was astonished to learn that no one had ever inquired about the men pictured.”

 

Bringing them into focus was no easy task. Construction workers frequently led itinerant lives, to escape “the coarse grain of official attention”. Employment records from the era were rarely preserved, and the private lives of ordinary people remained largely undocumented. This made it hard to properly record the number of people who died during the building’s creation. Although the official figure is five, Kurtz believes at least eight people perished: seven construction workers (one of which was judged a suicide) and one passerby, Elizabeth Eager, who was hit by a falling plank.

 

Delving into census data, immigration and union records, contemporary newspaper accounts and the personal recollections of their descendants, Kurtz illuminates Hine’s images in new ways, conjuring backstories of men who, as he puts it, “until now, have been used solely as the embodiments of generalities and abstract ideals”.

 

Take Victor “Frenchy” Gosselin, whose specialist skill was as a “connector”, catching a suspended beam and moving it into place to be attached to the building’s steel frame. A rare conjunction of personal details and exhilarating photos elevated Gosselin beyond the usual anonymity of the “devil-may-care cowboy of the skies”. Hine shot him nonchalantly straddling a hoisting ball in shorts and work boots, à la Miley Cyrus, an image that featured on a US Postal Service stamp in 2013.

 

Kurtz elaborates on the trajectory of Gosselin’s life and sudden death aged 46 in a car accident, leaving a widow and two young sons. “Distinguishing Victor Gosselin, the man, from the figure in Hine’s iconic photograph does not make him any less heroic,” he argues. “Instead, it allows us to see the photograph more fully, and it roots Gosselin’s genuine heroism in a real life, tragically short and mostly unknown, rather than in a fantasy.”

 

There are other no less compelling histories. Vladimir Kozloff, born in Russia, who throughout the 1930s served as secretary for the House Wreckers Union, and was active in winning protections for workers in this highly perilous profession. Or Matthew McKean, a carpenter who emigrated from Scotland, leaving behind his wife and two children. Or terrazzo craftsman Ferruccio Mariutto, who at the time of his stint on the Empire State had been in the US only two years. Like many workers, he died relatively young, just before his 64th birthday, probably of mesothelioma related to asbestos exposure.

 

Kurtz saves his most controversial speculation until last: that the unknown Sky Boy was a man called Dick McCarthy, a second-generation American, grandson of Irish immigrants, living in Brooklyn, who died in 1983. Although Hine never left any clues in his notes, comparison of images of McCarthy and the Sky Boy point up a tantalising physical resemblance.

 

“Considering the worldwide fame of this photo, it’s astonishing we do not know the name of the man,” says Kurtz. “His use as a symbol almost precludes attention to him as an actual person. We may never know the truth, but I’d say I have 50% confidence in my conjecture.”

 

Narratives of architecture tend to disregard the human cost of construction. History is made by the few, not the many. “The lives and experience of actual workers are marginalised,” says Kurtz. “They are too ‘ordinary’ to be interesting. Yet their skill, their training, and the specific conditions of their workplaces, are all profoundly important to architectural history. They are how every building gets built.”

 

Men at Work: The Untold Story of the Empire State Building and the Craftsmen Who Built It by Glenn Kurtz (Seven Stories Press, £25). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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Fackham Hall | Official Green Band Trailer | Bleecker Street / Downton Abbey spoof is fast, funny and throwaway

Review

Fackham Hall review – Downton Abbey spoof is fast, funny and throwaway

 

Period drama parody has some decent and often smart gags and benefits from a game cast including Damian Lewis and Thomasin McKenzie

 

Adrian Horton

Fri 5 Dec 2025 23.28 CET

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/dec/05/fackham-hall-movie-review

 

Perhaps it’s the feeling of end times in the air: after years of inactivity, spoofs are making a comeback. This summer saw the resurgence of the lighthearted genre, which at its best sends up the pretensions of overly serious genre with a barrage of pitched cliches, sight gags and stupid-clever puns. The Naked Gun, starring Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson in a spoof of a buddy-cop spoof, opened to moderate box office success; the hapless rock band dialed it back up to 11 in Spinal Tap II: The End Continues. Reboots of the horror spoof gold-standard Scary Movie and the Mel Brooks Star Wars rip Spaceballs were greenlit, and there were rumors of a return for international man of mystery Austin Powers. Unserious times, it seems, beget appetite for knowingly unserious, joke-dense, refreshingly shallow fun.

 

The latest of these goofy parodies, which premieres on the beyond-parody day that Fifa awarded Donald Trump an inaugural peace prize and Netflix announced its plan to buy Warner Bros, is Fackham Hall, a Downton Abbey spoof that pokes at the very pokeable pretensions of gilded British period dramas. (Yes, Fackham rhymes with a crass kiss-off to the aristocracy.) Co-written by British Irish comedian and TV presenter Jimmy Carr and directed by Jim O’Hanlon, Fackham Hall has plenty of material to work with – the historical soap’s grand finale just premiered in September, 15 years after Julian Fellowes’s series started going upstairs-downstairs with ludicrous portent – and wastes none of it. From ludicrous start (servants rolling joints for the household and responding to calls from the “masturbatorium”) to ludicrous finish (someone manages to marry a second cousin rather than a first!), this enjoyable silver-spoon romp packs all of its 97 minutes with jokes and bits ranging from the puerile to the genuinely funny, proving that there may yet be more to wring from eat-the-rich satire.

 

 

Like Downton, Fackham Hall is a pastiche of very self-important rich people and very obsequious servants, of effete masculinity and feminine gamesmanship. What is life as a British aristocrat, if not to drink tea and scheme others’ marriages? Having lost their four sons in four separate tragic accidents, the feckless Lord Davenport (an enjoyably affected Damian Lewis) and his anti-reading wife, Lady Davenport (Katherine Waterston), are left to focus on their daughters. Poppy (Emma Laird), the younger sister, has accomplished the family goal of finding the right first cousin to marry, lest the manor drift out of family control. But when Poppy bails on a future of know-nothing conversation with cousin Archibald (a perfectly smarmy Tom Felton) for a simpleton, the family’s hopes land on the unmarried Rose (Thomasin McKenzie) – at 23, a “dried-up husk of a woman”, according to her mother – whose belief in such things as female autonomy leads her to detest Archibald.

 

Carr fares much better joking about the suffocating expectations on early 20th-century women often mined for self-serious drama – poor Rose just wants to read books (the scandal!) in but One Shade of Grey – than joking about women, as in his disastrous recent standup. The trope of respectable, enviable femininity are the stars here, and often make for the best punching bags; when plucky pickpocket Eric Noone (the dashing Ben Radcliffe), hand-selected from his London orphanage by a mysterious stranger to deliver a letter to Fackham, collides into Rose, he is inevitably sidetracked by an “incredibly beautiful woman with a kind of carefree essence that makes men grateful to be alive!”

 

As befitting an intentionally ridiculous spoof, the plot is secondary to the bits, which Carr keeps delivering at an amiably humorous clip, with a solid three guffaws in the mix. There is a murder, and an incompetent investigation. The forbidden romance between Noone (pronounced “no one”) and Rose, played by Radcliffe and McKenzie as just the right balance of bumbling and beguiling, imperils the aristocrats’ best-laid plans. Genre skewering, pratfalls and spoof-staple wordplay abound. (“I’m here for the murder,” says the investigator (Tom Goodman-Hill). “I’m afraid someone’s already done it! But come in anyway,” says the butler.)

 

It’s all in lighthearted fun, though that itself has limitations. The dialed-up silliness of a spoof can wear quickly, and the mileage on this particular variety runs out somewhere between sketch and feature. At a certain point, you might wish to return to the world of (very slight) reason. But you have to respect a sincere commitment to the artform – if we’re going to amuse ourselves to death, might as well laugh at it.

 

Fackham Hall is out in US cinemas now, in the UK on 12 December and in Australia on 19 February

 

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Inside Trump’s Push to Make the White House Ballroom as Big as Possible

 

Inside Trump’s Push to Make the White House Ballroom as Big as Possible

 

President Trump’s ever-growing vision has caused tension with contractors. His architect has taken a step back as the president personally manages the project.

 

Luke Broadwater

By Luke Broadwater

Luke Broadwater is a White House correspondent. He reported from Washington.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/29/us/politics/trump-white-house-ballroom.html?searchResultPosition=2

Published Nov. 29, 2025

Updated Nov. 30, 2025

 

As President Trump took a stroll on the White House roof in August, generating headlines and questions about what he was up to, the man walking beside him was little noticed.

 

Wearing his signature bow tie, James McCrery, a classical architect who runs a small Washington firm known for its work building Catholic churches, was discussing how to execute Mr. Trump’s vision for a ballroom on the White House grounds.

 

Mr. McCrery’s work has been embraced by conservatives who believe federal buildings should be designed with an eye toward the grandeur of ancient Greek and Roman structures. He often talks of how his design work is carried out in service of God and the church, according to people who have worked with him.

 

It might have seemed an odd pairing: a man who designs cathedrals working for a man who once built casinos, and is now president of the United States.

 

But McCrery Architects got to work on the initial drawings for the project, sketching out a design with high ceilings and arched windows reminiscent of Versailles’s Hall of Mirrors. It would have the latest security features, including bulletproof glass. Gold furniture, known to please the president, was added to the renderings.

 

It was flashy enough to impress a man of Mr. Trump’s tastes, while largely matching the style of the historic White House without overshadowing it.

 

That’s when things got tricky.

 

In offering up his initial design, Mr. McCrery could not have known that Mr. Trump’s vision for the project was growing. What started as a 500-seat ballroom connected to the East Wing grew to 650 seats. Next, he wanted a 999-seat ballroom, then room for 1,350. Even as Mr. Trump assured the public in July that the ballroom would not touch the existing structure, he already had approved plans to demolish the East Wing to make way for something that could hold several thousand people, according to three people familiar with the timeline.

 

The latest plan, which officials said was still preliminary, calls for a ballroom much larger than the West Wing and the Executive Mansion. Mr. Trump has said publicly that he would like a ballroom big enough to hold a crowd for a presidential inauguration.

 

The size of the project was not the only issue raising alarms. Mr. Trump also told people working on the ballroom that they did not need to follow permitting, zoning or code requirements because the structure is on White House grounds, according to three people familiar with his comments. (The firms involved have insisted on following industry standards.)

 

In recent weeks, Mr. McCrery has pulled back from day-to-day involvement in the project, two people familiar with the matter told The New York Times. They emphasized that Mr. McCrery was still involved as a consultant on the design and proud to be working for Mr. Trump.

 

A White House official acknowledged that there had been disagreements between Mr. Trump and Mr. McCrery, a dynamic first reported by the Washington Post.

 

Through a representative, Mr. McCrery declined requests for an interview.

 

This account of Mr. Trump’s personal drive to undertake one of the most significant renovations in the history of the White House is based on interviews with five people with knowledge of the project, most of whom asked for anonymity to discuss private conversations, along with the president’s own statements and planning documents released by the White House.

 

A Builder’s Dream

For Mr. Trump, who was a builder for years in New York City and who often brags about his talents in real estate and construction, the White House renovation is a dream project.

 

Mr. Trump has marveled that he does not need to follow the kind of permitting requirements that he faced back in New York. He doesn’t need approvals from anyone, he has told those around him, and can begin any project at the White House as quickly as he likes.

 

“‘You’re the president of the United States, you can do anything you want,’” Mr. Trump has said he’s been told.

 

Mr. Trump has wanted to build a ballroom at the White House for years. During the Obama administration, he pitched the idea of constructing a $100 million version of his Mar-a-Lago ballroom. But Obama associates never followed up on his offer, a slight that has stayed with Mr. Trump.

 

The ballroom Mr. Trump is planning now is more than four times as large as the 20,000-square-foot one at Mar-a-Lago.

 

Aware of potential resistance to the project, Mr. Trump has pushed to remove any obstacle that could slow down his vision.

 

He has installed his former personal lawyer as the chairman of the National Capital Planning Commission, which is supposed to review plans for the project. That lawyer, Will Scharf, has said there was no need to review Mr. Trump’s plans before he ordered the demolition of the East Wing.

 

Mr. Trump has also fired the entire board of the Commission of Fine Arts, an independent federal agency that was established by Congress to advise the president on urban planning and historical preservation.

 

Mr. Trump’s unilateral approach has raised concerns from the Society of Architectural Historians, which urged that “such a significant change to a historic building of this import should follow a rigorous and deliberate design and review process.”

 

Mr. Trump is aware of the criticism that his ballroom plans are too large. He told a group of donors to the project last month that he didn’t want the new ballroom to “dwarf anything.” But at the same event, in discussing related plans to construct a Triumphal Arch, Mr. Trump showed small, medium and large options.

 

“I happen to think the large looks by far the best,” he said.

 

Deep in the Details

The contractors working on Mr. Trump’s ballroom — including McCrery Architects, Clark Construction and AECOM — did not go through the traditional government bidding process. Instead, Mr. Trump has been personally selecting each contractor and handling the details of the contracts, including how much the firm will be paid, people with knowledge of the situation said.

 

Mr. Trump selected Mr. McCrery after the architect made his presentation personally in the Oval Office, emphasizing a design that would be in keeping with the existing White House. (The building’s original designer, James Hoban, was also a church architect.)

 

The president has also said that the firm excavating the site initially told him the work would cost $3.2 million, but that he pressured the company to accept just $2 million.

 

The short timetable for the project, which the president has said he wants to be completed before 2029, has led to some embarrassing mistakes.

 

The various plans released so far, including a rushed model made by a contractor, have included windows that collide into each other and a staircase to nowhere.

 

Richard W. Longstreth, an architectural historian and a professor at George Washington University, noted that the public had yet to see a final design of the building. He said the ballroom project's success would depend a lot on its execution.

 

“I have nothing against the contemporary use of classical architecture, if it’s done well,” he said. “And there are people who can do it very well, and others who cannot.”

 

The president initially considered ways to preserve the East Wing, the traditional offices of the first lady and the entrance to the White House for millions of Americans on official tours.

 

McCrery Architects provided options to build the ballroom as an addition to the East Wing or construct the new facility over it. But Mr. Trump rejected those plans.

 

Under the latest designs, the offices of the first lady would be on the ground floor of the proposed ballroom, with a main visitor entrance from the East Portico.

 

“We started with a much smaller building, and then I realized, we have the land, let’s do it right,” Mr. Trump said recently to donors, during an event to raise money for the ballroom project. “And so we built a larger building that can really hold just about any function that we want.”

 

Many have embraced the idea of Mr. Trump’s new ballroom as a benefit to the complex, pointing out problems with hosting large events in tents on White House grounds.

 

Joseph Malchow, who is on the board of the National Civic Art Society with Mr. McCrery, said Mr. Trump was leading an effort to restore “classical American architecture.”

 

Mr. Trump has said taxpayers are not on the hook for the ballroom, whose costs have risen by 50 percent, from $200 million to $300 million. The president has said he already raised $350 million from donors, including from major tech and crypto companies, and that businesses pledged to donate all of the steel and air conditioning.

 

But that payment method means going around Congress to fund the project, cutting legislators out of having any say over its direction.

 

“The White House is one of the great buildings in this country. It’s the so-called people’s palace,” said Richard Guy Wilson, professor emeritus of architectural history at the University of Virginia. “This new ballroom that’s going up, it’s gigantic, and unfortunately, it’s going to sort of dominate.”

 

‘An Important Designer’

The ballroom project is Mr. Trump’s latest push to remake the White House in his own image.

 

He has added gold moldings and gold decorations throughout the Oval Office, and gold ornaments to the Cabinet Room.

 

He removed a photo of Hillary Clinton, the former first lady and secretary of state, and replaced it with an image of his own face colored with the American flag. He added marble floors and a chandelier to the Palm Room.

 

He paved over the Rose Garden grass to add a patio. Along the West Wing colonnade, he added gold-framed photos of every American president except his predecessor, Joseph R. Biden Jr., whom he depicted as an autopen.

 

Mr. Longstreth noted that many of Mr. Trump’s changes could be undone by future presidents. “A lot of that is reversible,” he said. “And presidents have often come in and changed the decoration to a considerable degree.”

 

Still, Mr. Trump is showing no signs of stopping. He recently gutted the bathroom in the Lincoln Bedroom, posting two dozen photos on social media of the renovation. And he has informally discussed undertaking more projects at the White House, including more work on the West Wing.

 

A White House official said that a large-scale renovation of the West Wing was not currently under consideration, but that Mr. Trump would be making more changes.

 

Speaking of the design plans for the new ballroom, Mr. Trump has said that he likes to see different proposals, but that he ultimately has the final say.

 

“I consider myself an important designer,” Mr. Trump has said.

 

A correction was made on Nov. 29, 2025: A previous version of this article incorrectly identified the federal agency whose board members were fired by President Trump. It was the Commission of Fine Arts, not the Fine Arts Council.

When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at nytnews@nytimes.com.Learn more

 

Luke Broadwater covers the White House for The Times.