How the Mohawks Built New York

 

...In the 20th century hundreds of skyscrapers had been erected atop the land of the Lenape, turning it into a modernistic fairyland of shining towers visible from miles away, a symbol of the ambitions of a restless, competitive people, a literal expression of upward mobility.

A little-known fact is that from 1916 onward, these monuments to aspirationalism were erected largely with the labor of iron and steelworkers from the Mohawk Nation of upstate New York and Canada. They’d broken into this specialized trade 30 years earlier working on a bridge over the St Lawrence River onto their reservation and quickly built a reputation that was in part based on stereotype and superstition. It was rumored that, being Native Americans, they had superior balance and reflexes and panther-like fearlessness when it came to walking and working on steel beams hundreds of feet in the air. As it kept them employed in a lucrative highly skilled trade they weren’t about to put rumors like that to bed. During the Jazz Age they began to be in demand on Manhattan skyscrapers, and so most of the major landmarks in the city were built with their contribution, the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, Rockefeller Center. For decades a community of 800 of them lived in a section of Boerum Hill, Brooklyn known as Little Caughnawaga. The Mohawks are no longer numerous but neither are they dead. To a palpable extent they built New York, just as their ancient cousins had built the great cities of Central and South America. 

One of the structures the Mohawk helped build was the original World Trade Center. I first visited it on a school field trip in 1979 when it was only six years old. At the time, we were disappointed that we weren’t visiting the better known Empire State Building, even though the World Trade Center was taller and had also been visited by King Kong. Naturally, I was the opposite of disappointed once I got there and visited the observation deck atop the South Tower, hurled there a quarter of a mile into the sky on elevators so quickly that your ears popped. Here, a stone’s throw from Wall Street in the former New Amsterdam, a few dozen yards from the site of Barnum’s American Museum, a hop, skip and a jump from the final resting place of America’s first treasurer Alexander Hamilton was a temple of commerce so immense that it reached the clouds.