Little over a century ago, thousands of workers escaping famine and ethnic violence in Europe washed up on the shores of New York only to find that they still hated their wives and families.
Empires had fallen, and others were on the rise to take their place in the titanic battle of nations. The American Century had dawned. A labor force made up of everyone and anyone – almost – would be given the role of Atlas, hoisting the sky ever higher to keep the roof from caving in.
On September 20, 1932, in the midst of a worldwide Depression that had begun just a few miles away at the bottom of the island, the indelible image of American pluck, a Prometheus’-eye view of the empire of industry unrolling beneath the mountains of man, was captured. You’ve seen it before: eleven stony-faced workers, done up in high semiotic fidelity with flatcaps, overalls, and trousers, relaxing over sandwiches and cigarettes on a steel beam hanging 70 stories above West 50th Street, at the construction site for Rockefeller Center. Behind them Central Park, the Upper West Side, and the Hudson can be seen as if glimpsed from within a cloud. Never mind that the photo was staged for a publicity campaign; never mind that no one knows whether the beam even truly dangled over the precipice, or whether the photo is instead a clever work of framing: what is truly vertiginous in the picture is something human, all too human. It’s the same sensation I have looking at depictions of ordinary people from throughout the industrial era – really anything that resembles the opening sequence of Days of Heaven. When I’m confronted with something like Lunch atop a Skyscraper, this image of… well, call it stoicism, resignation, surliness, roughspun dignity, abandon, whatever – an abyss opens between me and the photograph’s subjects. I wonder whether I’m even the same type of creature as them. I’m descended from immigrants who toiled through the Depression in New York just like the eleven workers in the photo – who knows, maybe they even knew each other, several of the workers’ identities remain unknown to this day… But what could any of them have to do with me, a child of the suburbs who used to be pretty good at Wii Sports?
Original caption: “While New York’s thousands rush to crowded restaurants and congested lunch counters for their noon day lunch, these intrepid steel workers atop the 70 story RCA building in Rockefeller Center get all the air and freedom they want by lunching on a steel beam with a sheer drop of over 800 feet to the street level. The RCA building is the largest office building in terms of office space in the world.”
There is an idea of America in Lunch atop a Skyscraper – an idea captured, or created, and at any rate propagated at the behest of titans of industry like Nelson Rockefeller. Call it the Life magazine view of America (though in fact the photo was published in the New York Herald Tribune). In it we see a glowing image of a nation on the rise, a nation of workers, of shapers of earth and sky. A nation of immigrants all chipping in to build the great century.
But no one believes in all that anymore. We’re a dying empire now, a generation that jumps as one to the Slack notification noise, or else trains desiccated eyes on Instagram’s notifications tab awaiting reactions to a story from the club that serves gold flakes on overdone steaks – or else thinks Andrew Tate did nothing wrong. And now, a new attraction has arisen at Rockefeller Center, The Beam, which consummates the union of the two Americas in bombastic pantomime for a nearly reasonable price.
I rode The Beam last September, when my friend Jasmine was visiting New York from med school. She had discovered it on Instagram. I was incredulous at this masterpiece of influencer bait: a photo op add-on at the Top of the Rock observation deck that allows visitors to simulate Lunch atop a Skyscraper. You sit on a facsimile of the steel girder – harnessed in, for liability’s sake – and are slowly raised by a vertical shaft attached to the “girder,” until a mounted camera manages the illusion that you’re dangling precipitously over West 50th Street, when really you’re a cozy, non-bone-endangering 10 or so feet above the concrete of the observation deck. When I saw precisely how my friend wanted to spend our afternoon – and quite a bit of our money: at least $40 just to go to the observation deck, plus an extra $25 for The Beam Experience – I went hoarse offering alternatives.
We went to Rockefeller Center. Our friend Sam tagged along.
When you first get there, they herd you into a room done up in Art Deco kitsch trappings. The centerpiece is a scale model of Rockefeller Center itself, maybe five feet tall, that eagerly lights up with six or seven facts. They’ll then corral you into a bizarrely undulating theater with the couple dozen other tourists who showed up at the same time as you. They’ll make you watch a documentary about the planning and construction of Rockefeller Center that’s something like if Waystar Royco’s Parks division had written a Bioshock cutscene. Then you wind your way through cordoned paths to the big elevator. The elevator operator asked us all where we were visiting from. One group said Australia, another one Austria. I said Brooklyn.
At the observation deck you can look out over the city in any direction. Facing downtown, toward the Empire State Building and the Financial District, you can see Brooklyn and the Statue of Liberty and even (is it that speck out there?) Ellis Island. From this view, Manhattan looks like a battleship captained by titans on the seas of history. There’s also a surprisingly decent bar (which gave us free beers!).
But we were there for The Beam Experience. We hastened to experience The Beam. Up on the third level of the observation deck, we got on a short line, showed our tickets, and received cursory safety instructions. Staff were handing out fake foam hammers, donuts, and apples to the customers for their photo ops. From scraps of overheard conversation I could tell most of the tourists were European. They held their hammers and apples lamely aloft, or else folded their hands over them in their laps, quite unsure what to do with this last-minute onset of props. One woman went up on The Beam on her own, with a donut, and I experienced the peculiar emptying sadness of watching someone make a docile, head-tilted grin in a tourist photo whose context is completely lost on them. She held up the foam donut as if it were a prize she had wrested from the many disappointments of her everyday life.
At last, it was our turn to strap in, harness up, and get Beamed. We politely declined the props. Feet tucked underneath us – we had been instructed not to dangle them – The Beam inched us upward. Just as it cleared the fence of the observation deck, it swiveled around, and Central Park spread out to the north, occluded here and there by glassy, pencil-thin oligarch towers. Beyond the park, Harlem and Washington Heights and the Bronx shrugged into a vanishing point. The East River carried out its tortured course past Randall’s Island, seat of the empire of Moses, and Rikers and La Guardia.
Suspended over this one-to-one-scale map of my doomed metropolis, I saw all at once the extent of the sickness that had fallen on New York in recent years; its symptoms were pustules of steel and glass jutting up out of a face I thought I had known my whole life. From this perspective that actually made “god’s-eye” seem to mean something, I saw Manhattan’s topography of towers hunch and ripple and writhe as if I were playing SimCity on fast forward. Blighted polyps were spreading block by block over the whole surface of the island, piling themselves, as they piled the decades, into heaps, slowly to become a gleaming cage of oligarch towers casting their shadows over the huddled parks and avenues.
But weren’t these symptoms really just uglier manifestations of a sickness New York has been suffering from for far longer than it’ll ever acknowledge? Wasn’t my New York, too, an illusion, if one I’ve always gamely gone along with? Deep down, wasn’t it all just real estate?
A god’s-eye view, it turns out, is a view into the impermanence of things, beloved and repugnant alike. For a brief moment I was able to fathom the swaggering equipoise of those workers in 1932, who had come from nothing to find themselves looking down, from a height almost no one had ever reached, at the greatest city in the world. They themselves had raised the mountain on which they serenely sat.
Weeks later, I was to realize that just that moment, helped along by the works of Mary Beard, had been all I needed to have a really great time watching Megalopolis.
The Beam swiveled back around. A recorded voice told us the first picture was being taken. We smiled. The recording announced the second photo, and we hurried into our second pose – but too late. It would come out all wrong. Only a video, divided horizontally into two panels – our stoical forebears in black-and-white above us, we below – managed to capture that as Jasmine shrugged haplessly, on each side of her, symmetrically, Sam and I dabbed.
