The High-Risk, High-Reward Milieu

This video might be interesting to any number of people from most any walk of like. It’s like catnip to anyone who ever constructed a commercial building. I think it’s the greatest example of construction, ever. You can build things taller, or wider, or goofier (I’m looking at you, Gehry), or more expensive, or more elaborate, but you can’t ever surpass what was accomplished by so few men in so short a time, resulting in a more iconic building. The Empire State Building in New York City is the greatest office building in the world, and has been since the day it opened.

The lady out in the harbor with the lantern jaw, wearing a bathrobe, holding an ice cream cone, and beckoning every country on Earth to use America as their recycling bin has nothing on the Empire State Building. I wouldn’t be surprised if half the population think the Empire State is named after the building, not the other way around. The only structure as iconic as the Empire State Building might be the Eiffel Tower, and that’s nothing but a radio antenna, when you really look at it. Big deal.

The Empire State was completed during the Depression. They didn’t have trouble finding people willing to take risks to earn a living just then. So you’d be forgiven if you assumed that they’d look at workers as kind of expendable. You assumed wrong, however. Up to 3,500 people worked on the building at any one time. Four people died during construction. That’s 3,500 people working two shifts, day and night, to complete the tallest building in the world in one year and 45 days. Four deaths.

Let’s compare that to the World Trade Center Project in 2001. One World Trade Center, which is as ugly as a home-made suit, took 8 years to build. It had somewhere between 4,000 to 5,000 workers, and depending on who you ask, had 5 worker deaths. If you do the math, the fatality rate per worker is essentially identical to the Empire State Building. Other big buildings like the Burj Khalifa and the Shanghai tower claim lower fatality rates, but I don’t trust stats about worker safety from closed societies, thank you very much.

So you can see the guys in the video working on the Empire, hanging all over it like King Kong would a few years later. They didn’t fall off much. They didn’t have OSHA, or any number of other safety foofaraws that are in place today. So how did they manage to stay in one piece while working four times as hard as people would in the future?

It’s simple, really. They were smarter than people are now. Not the kind of smarter that’s in vogue nowadays. None of them was plucked from any Ivy League admission offices. They were predominately Irish and Italian immigrants, at least from what I’ve read. They had nerve. They had skills. Mad skills, by the look of it. They had experience building things like railroads, mining ore, or erecting steelwork, even if it was a little closer to mother earth. Many were craftsmen, with prodigious hand skills developed by long experience. They were used to working around heavy machinery and keeping their fingers out of the gears.

By comparison, modern workers are skilled at avoiding risk, instead of managing it. They’re more conversant with technology-driven tasks. They crave automation, standardized working conditions, and lunchtime. They’re not really skilled in navigating dangerous situations in the way their predecessors were. But they died at the same rate, because building great big things is inherently dangerous, and having little experience with true danger make them vulnerable to brain farts, as we used to call them.

The Empire State Building was constructed in a truly high-risk, high-reward milieu. Men with a high tolerance for risk, or whose desperation for work overrode their tolerances, needed mental toughness, and relied on their experience in risky environments to stay safe. Modern workers rely on a rulebook that only the shop steward has read. The investors, who didn’t stick one spud into a rivet hole, were also working in a high-risk, high-reward mode. The building didn’t start to turn a profit until the 1950s.

We could use a few guys like the men who financed and built the Empire State Building just now. God knows where we’re going to find them.