Lunch Atop a Skyscraper: Analysis

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Lunch atop a Skyscraper is a world-famous black and white photograph illustrating eleven ironworkers having a break from a day of work. It has many surprises when it comes to its history. Many would have thought that the photograph was taken accidentally when workers were having lunch casually, but that is not what really happened. On September 20, 1932, eleven ironworkers participated in a daring publicity stunt above 41st Street in Manhattan (Gambino, 2012). The men depicted in the photograph (see Figure 1) were highly skilled at walking along metal girders used for constructing skyscrapers. The beam shown in the picture was used to construct the RCA building (GE building today) in Rockefeller Center.

Figure 1. Photograph chosen for analysis (“Lunch atop a Skyscraper”).

On the particular day when the photograph was taken, the workers decided to humor the photographer because of their excitement over completing the construction project. Some of them played football while others pretended to take a nap on the girder. However, the most famous photograph was taken when all eleven of them sat down to have their lunch eight hundred and fifty feet above the streets of New York. Because of its striking imagery, the photograph has become an icon of twentieth-century American photography. However, there are many unknown facts that remain a mystery after many decades. Specifically, it remains unclear who the photographer was and who were all the ironworkers as their names cannot be found anywhere. To some extent, this is why the photograph is so appealing to many people, as they can picture themselves sitting on the iron beam.

It is known that an Irish filmmaker Seán Ó Cualáin first saw the photograph’s copy hanging in the corner of a Galway pub that he visited together with his brother Eamonn. Beside it was a note from a local immigrant’s son saying, “This is my dad on the far right and my uncle-in-law on the far left” (Gambino, 2012, para. 7). Seán and Eamonn asked the pub’s bartender about this, and he put them in contact with Pat Glynn, the man from Boston who pinned it. As the filmmaker was quite intrigued with the photograph, he undertook a journey beginning from the ironworkers’ relatives to the archives of the Rockefeller Center in New York City and then to a Pennsylvania storage facility. Ó Cualáin determined that Corbis, a licensing company, was in possession of the original negative on a glass plate (Gambino, 2012). Throughout the process, it was confirmed that the photograph was real, but the person who took it remained unknown throughout the investigation.

Since Lunch atop a Skyscraper remains an enigma because of the many unknown facts about it, the descriptive poem composed below intends to speak about what it means to be a worker on a skyscraper construction site.

Eight Hundred Feet High

A cloudy warm day, noon

It is time to take a pause

To relieve the day’s gloom

All of the friends are together

Making jokes, eating, smoking,

Talking about the weather.

Eight hundred feet high

The soles looking at the pavement

No place for a shirt or a tie

Their job is quite complicated.

Men of iron, men of steel,

Building the New York landscape,

No matter how on the day they feel,

It is the work they will not escape.

Reference

Gambino, M. (2012). Lunch Atop a Skyscraper photograph: The story behind the famous shot. Web.

Lunch atop a Skyscraper [Image]. (n.d.). Web.

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Lunch Atop a Skyscraper: Analysis

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