ERNEST POOLE

He was standing out on a steel girder, with a blue-print map in his hands. He wore brown canvas trousers tucked into his boots, a grimy jumper, a shirt wide open at the throat, buckskin gloves frayed by hard use, and an old 5 slouch hat on the back of his head. His lean, tanned face was set in a puzzled scowl as he glanced now at the map and now downward at the steel frame of the building. I came cautiously nearer, looked over, and drew quickly back, for there was a sheer drop of five hundred feet be10 tween him and the pavement. A gust of wind blew the map up into his face. With an ejaculation, he leaned slightly out to brace himself and impatiently struck the map open. Then he jammed his hat over his eyes and continued his looking and scowling.

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This was on the thirty-fifth floor. The building—the Metropolitan Life—was to rise fifty "tiers" in all (seven hundred feet), the highest of all the skyscraper cluster. Other Manhattan giants towered around us. To the north the Times building rose slender and white, the roof 20 of the famous Flatiron lay close below us, and down in the Wall Street group loomed the Singer (forty-seven stories), the Hudson Terminal, the City Investing, and a score of others, the largest office buildings in the world.

From our perch the eye swept a circle some sixty miles 25 across, with Greater New York sprawled in the center. Northward over Harlem, the Bronx, and far up the

Hudson; to the west across Jersey City and Hoboken out to the Ramapo Hills, Orange Mountain, and Newark Bay; southward down into the harbor crowded with vessels and tugs; and eastward over the end of Long Island out to the misty gray ocean, black here and there with the 5 smoke of the ships endlessly coming and going.

Even through the noise of the wind and the steel you could hear the hum of the city below. And looking straight down through the brisk little puffs of smoke and steam, the whole mighty tangle of Manhattan Island drew close 10 into one vivid picture: Fifth Avenue, crowded with carriages, motors, and cabs, was apparently only a few yards away from the tenement roofs, which were dotted with clothes out to dry. Police courts, churches, schools, sober old convents hedged close round with strips of green, the 15 Wall Street region, the Ghetto, the teeming Italian hive, lay all in a merry squeeze below; a flat, bewildering mass, streets blackened with human ants, elevated trains rushing through with a muffled roar. And from the North River a deep, shaking bellow rose from the ocean liner 20 that just at this moment was swinging out into the

stream.

Down there humanity hurried and hummed. Up here the wind blew fresh and clean and the details of life dropped off into space, and above me on the open steel 25 beams that bristled up into the heavens some two hundred grimy men clambered about-silent men in the roar of the steel, seemingly careless and unconcerned, in this everyday job of theirs up in the skies.

Between their work and the world below are two con- 30 necting links, the blue-print map and the beam of steel. The maps represents long months of arduous labor by scores of engineers. First conceived as a whole by the

architect, they are elaborated, enriched by his draftsmen; turned over to the building contractor, to be drawn over and over in ever-increasing detail, first floor by floor, next room by room, and finally beam by beam. There 5 are hundreds of maps, and they bear a staggering mass of figures-intricate calculations as to the stress and strain upon every beam and rod according to "dead weight," "live weight," "impact," and "wind pressure." Here is careful figuring, checked and rechecked by many vigilant 10 eyes. For human lives depend upon its exactness.

Meanwhile the iron ore has been dug from the Lake Superior mines; in the Pittsburgh mills it has been blasted; the white-hot ingots have been rolled out into beams and plates, and, with the blue prints as patterns, 15 the beams and the plates have been shaped and trimmed

into columns and girders and trusses, the rivet holes punched, and the rivets welded in tight—all but those connecting the joints. And when at last the maps and the beams, the brains and the matter, come together up 20 to the skies, the maps show exactly where each mass of steel is to be fitted and riveted into the frame.

"All we do is to put 'em together," said the man with the blue print. "Easy as rolling off a log; only rolling off wouldn't be pleasant. Look here," he added; “here's 25 one of the girders just starting up."

There was a creaking and straining over our heads as the ponderous derrick swung round. Its "mast" of steel was lashed by cable guys to the center of the building's frame. Every week or two, as the building rose, it had. 30 been moved farther up. From the base of the mast the steel "boom" reached upward and outward, extending some twenty feet over the cañon below; and from the boom's upper end two cables, looking like mere silken

threads, but in reality one-inch ropes of woven steel, dropped five hundred feet to the pavement. Slowly the boom swung out to position; the cables grew taut and began to move. The journey had begun.

Looking over the edge I could see the girder leave the 5 street, a twenty-ton beam that looked like a straw. Slowly, moment by moment, its size increased. Now you could see it swing slightly and tilt. It was steadied by a guy rope that curved out into the wind like a colossal kite string, and far down in the street a tiny man lay on 10 his back with the rope wrapped under his armpits. A crowd stood round with upturned faces. The journey took five minutes in all. At last the beam rose to the rough concrete floor on which we stood. There were no walls around us.

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A man beside me gave a sharp jerk to the bell rope. This rope ran thirty-five stories deep into the bowels of the building. In his closet down there the engineer jerked a lever; his engine stopped. Up here the great girder stopped and hung motionless before us. An hour before 20 I had been down with the engineer; I had been surprised at the strained look on his face as he listened for the stroke of the gong. But I understood now. Up here we could do nothing, powerless as so many monkeys. He had to do all the moving from his closet below. And lives 25 hung on his promptness.

Another jerk on the bell rope, an instant's pause, then the boom swung in and the girder came toward us. Another sharp jerk and it stopped in mid-air. A man leaned forward, took a tight grip on the cable, and stepped out 30 onto the tilting mass. It swung out over the street. Still another jerk on the rope and it started on up with its puny rider. He stood with feet planted firmly in the

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chains that wound it round, his hands on the cable, his body swaying in easy poise. Once he glanced at his feet and the void below, then gave me a humorous wink and spat off into the universe.

For the floor two tiers above us the upright columns had already been placed, pointing straight up, silhouetted against the blue vault above. Near their tops were the "beam seats," supports into which the girder was to be fitted. More and more slowly it rose and moved into 10 position. The signals came now in rapid succession, till at last it hung just between the two columns.

Its rider crept out to one end. He might have been a fly, for all the effect his weight had on the balance. With his left hand clinging tightly to the steel, his eyes fixed 15 steadily straight ahead, suddenly with his right hand he reached out, seized the column, and as the girder slipped into its seat he snatched the long, tapered "spud wrench" from his belt and jammed it through two rivet holes. The mass was safely anchored. Back he crept to the other 20 end, and there the job was repeated.

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The new floor, or "tier," was now started. Later, when the columns and girders were fitted together on all four sides of the building, the flimsy wooden scaffolds would go up and the riveters would begin.

These riveters were already at work on the floor just above us. Up there on a platform three feet wide was a stout, fiery little forge where the rivets were being heated white-hot. The forge tender plunged in his long, slender tongs, pulled them out with a flaming rivet clinched in 30 their jaws, whirled them round in two sweeping circles, let go, and the rivet went sailing a hundred feet, to be caught in a keg by a man who stood poised on a beam to receive it.