Publishers Weekly
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Guggenheim fellow Kurtz (Three Minutes in Poland) uncovers the identities of the construction workers immortalized in the Empire State Building photographs of Lewis Hines, who famously posed his subjects on steel beams dangling hundreds of feet above ground. Following a clue left behind in Hines’s own handwriting, Kurtz was able to connect the photographs to a long-overlooked plaque in the building’s lobby honoring skilled craftsmen involved in the skyscraper’s 1930–1931 construction. From there, Kurtz pieces together bare-bones but poignant accounts of the craftsmen, including 22-year-old stone setter James Patrick Kerr, whose father, a Northern Irish immigrant, was killed in a streetcar accident when he was three years old and who lived with his mother and stepfather in a $17-a-month apartment on Tenth Avenue when Hines snapped his portrait; and Ukrainian-born glazier Samuel Laginsky, father of five, who suffered a gruesome death on the job just two years after his photo was taken. Kurtz emphasizes how this reframing of the Hines snapshots as a planned photo shoot memorializing local craftsmen’s excellence puts a populist lens on a building that has more often served as a symbol of corporate might, while also puncturing the myth that the photos are somehow “documentary” records of the work itself. New York history buffs will be thrilled by Kurtz’s discovery. (Oct.)