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These Men Risked Their Lives to Build 1920s New York Skyscrapers

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A heater flings a glowing rivet through open air, and a man three stories up catches it in a tin can — no net, no harness, just steady hands.

Smithsonian Channel’s These Men Risked Their Lives to Build 1920s New York Skyscrapers pulls from rare archival footage of the ironworkers who put up Manhattan’s steel skeletons during the city’s skyscraper boom. These were the men crews called “roughnecks” or sky walkers, and the film shows them doing their jobs hundreds of feet above the street with none of the safety gear that would later become standard on any job site.

• The footage shows ironworkers balancing on narrow I-beams while moving heavy structural components, with no safety harnesses, tether lines, helmets, or netting anywhere in sight.
• A key sequence documents the riveting process: a “heater” uses tongs to throw a red-hot steel rivet several stories up through open air to a “catcher,” who snags it out of the sky in a metal bucket or tin can before it’s hammered into place.
• Cameramen took on nearly the same risk as the ironworkers, hauling heavy tripod-mounted cameras onto exposed steel beams without protective gear to shoot stabilized footage of the rising skyline.

Life on the Open Steel

What the archival reels capture isn’t staged or reenacted — it’s men working. The footage shows crews navigating open steel frames with nothing beneath them but open air and Manhattan traffic far below. There’s no scaffolding wrapped around the structure, no netting strung underneath to catch a slip. The workers move across beams that in some shots look barely wider than a boot, carrying tools and steel components by hand while keeping their balance hundreds of feet up.

That kind of work demanded constant physical coordination — not just strength, but the kind of footing and timing that came from experience nobody could fake. A miscalculated step, a gust of wind, a beam that hadn’t been fully secured yet: any of it could be the difference between finishing a shift and not.

The Riveting Gang

The most striking sequence in the footage follows the riveting process, which required a small crew working in near-perfect sync. The heater pulled rivets from a portable forge and, once they were glowing red-hot, used tongs to throw them through open air — sometimes several stories — to a catcher waiting on the beam above or below. The catcher had to snatch the rivet out of mid-flight using a metal bucket or a tin can, then get it into place fast enough that a bucker-up and riveter could hammer it home while it was still soft enough to set.

A heater tosses a glowing rivet through open air; a catcher snags it out of the sky in a tin can, hundreds of feet above the street.

There was no margin built into that system. If the catcher missed, the rivet either dropped toward the street or had to be tracked down and reheated, slowing the whole gang. Miss too often and a crew’s reputation — and its pace on the job — suffered for it.

The Cameramen Who Went Up With Them

The footage itself exists because cameramen were willing to climb onto the same exposed beams as the ironworkers, carrying tripod-mounted cameras that weren’t light and offered nothing in the way of anchoring or protection. Getting a stabilized shot of the skyline meant setting up on steel that moved and creaked underfoot, with the same absence of harnesses or netting the riveting gangs worked without.

That’s part of why this footage still lands the way it does decades later — it wasn’t shot from a safe distance with a long lens. It was shot from the beam itself, by men who accepted the same risk as their subjects to get the image.

A Record With No Modern Equivalent

Watching a heater and catcher work a rivet through open air, or a crew inch along an I-beam with a load of steel in hand, is a reminder of how much has changed on construction sites since. There’s no OSHA presence in this footage, no fall-arrest system, no hard hats. It’s a straight visual record of a trade that no longer exists in this form, preserved because a handful of cameramen were willing to climb up and point a camera at it.