We raced up the ladder side by side, and reached the floor above, neck and neck, all out of breath.
Photograph by Brown Brothers.
Throwing a red-hot bold into a riveter—five hundred feet above the pavement.
“Say, how many stories of this are there?” I asked.
“I counted thirty-nine from the street.”
“Well, excuse me. If we ’ve got to climb thirty-nine ladders like this, I resign right here. There must be an elevator somewhere.”
“There is one over there,” exclaimed Will, “and the car is just going up.”
We ran over and jumped aboard. A man hailed us on the way, but we did not stop to answer him; the iron gate of the elevator-shaft was slammed shut, and we were off before he could ask any more questions. The elevator was a large, wooden box big enough for about fifteen men to squeeze in, and with no door. As we were the last aboard, we had the pleasure of standing at the very edge of this open side, shrinking back as far as we could for fear of striking the door frames of the shaft as we sped past the successive landings. The men in the elevator looked at us curiously, but no one challenged us. At the thirtieth floor, the elevator stopped, and we all got out. The floors were laid, and there did not seem to be anything very exciting about our adventure so far. No walls were up as yet, but the outside girders were so deep all around the floor, that they formed a sort of low parapet which kept a fellow from feeling that he was going to fall off when he went to the edge of the building.
Projecting from the girder about ten feet apart were brackets from which was suspended a scaffold seven stories below, where men were at work on the walls. Below that was Broadway, filled with animated little specks, each tiny man no doubt fully conscious of his own importance. We could look down at one side upon the spire of a church, and I remember seeing a sparrow fly out of a chink in the steeple. I could gaze with contempt upon the bird from this loftier dwelling. How flat everything looked! Yet the horizon was on a level with my eyes. I could easily trace the Hudson River, from the Palisades to Governor’s Island, where it joined the East River, broadened out into the Upper Bay, squeezed through the Narrows, and then spread out into the Lower Bay. Off to the south the Atlantic Highlands showed clearly, and the Orange Mountains formed a ragged horizon to the west. The day was superb for long-distance seeing. There was not a cloud in the sky; not a trace of haze in the air.
“My, but I wish I had brought my camera,” shouted Will above the racket of the riveting hammers.
“Yes, and I wish I had brought a cap. This straw hat won't stay on!”
The wind was blowing a veritable gale. In the streets it was bad enough, but here there was no protection from it, and it swept by us at something like fifty miles an hour. I noticed that the men did not seem to have any trouble. Those who wore caps turned them, like aviators, front for back, with the peak pointed up, so that the wind could not lift them and tear them off their heads.
“Well, we had better proceed with our investigations, Will,” I said. “There is no use dreaming here all day.” We spied a stairway near the elevator, which we mounted. The thirty-first story looked so like the thirtieth that we did not linger, but went on up to the thirty-second. Here a gang of arch men were putting in the floor arches. I was astonished to find that the “arches” were perfectly flat and made of hollow tiles. A platform of planks was hung from the beams to support the tiles until they were all set in place. In the center of the arch two wedge-shaped tiles served as keys to keep the floor from caving in. It was impossible for any tile to be
