Men at Work: The Empire State Building and the Untold Story of the Craftsmen Who Built It

The author of Three Minutes in Poland and Practicing uncovers the identities of the Empire State Building construction workers, made famous by Lewis W. Hine’s legendary portraits.

This little-known chapter of American labor history captures forgotten stories and features more than 75 photos and other illustrations--some by Hine that have never been seen before--of working class, immigrant, and indigenous lives who built the architectural icon.

Who built the Empire State Building? Astonishingly, no list of workmen on this historic landmark was ever compiled. While the names of the owners, architects, and contractors are well known, and Lewis Hine left us indelible images of the workers, their identities--the last generation of workmen still practicing these time-honored trades, have not been identified until author Glenn Kurtz unearthed their individual stories for this book.

Drawing on eclectic sources--census, immigration, and union records; contemporary journalism; the personal recollections of their descendants--Kurtz assembles biographies of these workers, providing not only a portrait of the building’s labor force, and a revolutionary re-interpretation of Hine’s world-famous photographs, but also a fundamental reimagining of what made the Empire State Building a fitting symbol for the nation, built as it was at the very height of the Great Depression.

For ninety years, photographer Lewis W. Hine’s iconic portraits and photographs have served as potent symbols of America in the early 1930s. Yet as famous as Hine’s images are, they have never been seen in their proper historical context. By identifying the individuals that built the early skyscraper, Men at Work transforms Hine’s evocative portraits from abstract symbols of an era into documentary evidence of specific, working-class, immigrant and indigenous American lives.

GLENN KURTZ is the author of Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014), which was named a ＂Best Book of 2014＂ by the New Yorker, the Boston Globe, and National Public Radio. A documentary film, Three Minutes--A Lengthening, based on the book, was directed by Bianca Stigter, co-produced by Academy Award-winner Steve McQueen, and narrated by Helena Bonham Carter. After premiering at the Venice Film Festival in 2021, the film was an official selection of the Sundance Film Festival and received the inaugural Yad Vashem Award for Outstanding Holocaust Documentary. Glenn’s first book, Practicing: A Musician’s Return to Music (Knopf, 2007), garnered enthusiastic reviews from the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. The recipient of a 2016-2017 John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, Glenn is a graduate of Tufts University and the New England Conservatory of Music and holds a PhD from Stanford University.