1952 MOHAWK INDIAN STEELWORKERS magazine article, New York City skyscrapers

$11.00 Buy It Now, FREE Shipping, 30-Day Returns, eBay Money Back Guarantee
Seller: Top-Rated Seller busybeas_books ✉️ (15,949) 100%, Location: Hubbards, Nova Scotia, CA, Ships to: WORLDWIDE, Item: 295762607948 1952 MOHAWK INDIAN STEELWORKERS magazine article, New York City skyscrapers.

Selling is a 1952 magazine article about:

Mohawk Indian Steelworkers 

Title: The Mohawks Scrape the Sky

Author: Robert L. Conly Photos by B. Anthony Stewart

This is a short article on the Mohawk Indians high-rise steelworkers in New York City. This was 1952, they aren’t called 'Native Americans' yet.


Quoting the first page “One of the last places in the world where you might expect to meet a Mohawk Indian is the top of the towering steel skeleton of a New York City skyscraper. Yet that is where many a modern Mohawk brave earns a living, walking narrow steel girders more perilous than any warpath.

   On Manhattan's East Side, I watched a gang of them at work. High above my head, they operated with hammers and tongs and red-hot rivets, moving as surefootedly as cats, as calmly as if they were standing on the sidewalk.

   What were Mohawks doing in Manhattan? Why, stranger still, should Indians be raising the steel frame for a skyscraper?

   I found the answers a few miles away, in the Borough of Brooklyn. There I visited a small but well-settled Indian village, where some 400 of these same Mohawks live as neighbors in comfortable, modern apartments. Almost every man in the community, I learned, earns his living in "high iron."

   Working 500 to 1,000 or more feet in the air, balanced precariously where one misstep means death-this is specialized, skilled work, and most of the Indians who do it have spent their lives at it.

   The first Mohawks I saw were putting up steel for the United Nations' new General Assembly building next to the East River. But even the lofty UN buildings were dwarfed by some other structures I could see against the horizon. Mohawks had helped erect them too: the Metropolitan Life Tower (700 feet tall), the Woolworth Building (792 feet), the RCA Building (850 feet), and, out-reaching them all, the Empire State Building, which, with its new television tower, soars 1,472 feet, more than a quarter of a mile.

   For Mohawks to help build the United Nations was strangely appropriate. More than 300 years ago, the ancestors of these same Mohawks belonged to a United Nations of their own-the mighty Iroquois federation, or…"


7” x 10”, 10 pages, 14 B&W photos.   

These are pages carefully removed from an actual 1952 magazine.

52G1      

  • Condition: Used
  • Country/Region of Manufacture: United States
  • Type: magazine article

PicClick Insights - 1952 MOHAWK INDIAN STEELWORKERS magazine article, New York City skyscrapers PicClick Exclusive

  •  Popularity - 0 watchers, 0.0 new watchers per day, 287 days for sale on eBay. 0 sold, 1 available.
  •  Best Price -
  •  Seller - 15,949+ items sold. 0% negative feedback. Top-Rated Plus! Top-Rated Seller, 30-day return policy, ships in 1 business day with tracking.

People Also Loved PicClick Exclusive