The story behind this photograph of men building Rockefeller Centre revealed
<p>It’s one of the most iconic photos from the Great Depression: eleven men perched 256 metres above the ground. There’s no harnesses. There’s no safety nets. One false move almost means certain death.</p>
<p>And yet the workers were simply enjoying lunch before getting back to work constructing the famous 30 Rockefeller Centre in the middle of Manhattan.</p>
<p>It was undoubtedly a dangerous job but with the unemployment rate sitting at 24 per cent in 1932, workers were desperate for jobs to feed their family — and the Rockefeller gave them that opportunity, no matter the risks.</p>
<p>“The pay was good. The thing was, you had to be willing to die,” John Rasenberger, author of High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World’s Greatest Skyline, said.</p>
<p>But the media at the time didn’t see it that way. The New York Herald Tribune published the photograph on October 2, 1932, with the caption: “While New York’s thousands rush to crowded restaurants and congested lunch counters for their noon day lunch, these intrepid steel workers atop the 70 story RCA building in Rockefeller Center get all the air and freedom they want by lunching on a steel beam with a sheer drop of over 800 feet to the street level.”</p>
<p>But eighty years on, little did the men know that their story would become legends. But for all the interest, the identities of the men are for the most part unknown.</p>
<p>The company which owns the iconic image, Corbis, believe for “certain, they were part of a new generation of Americans, descendants of late 19th century European migrants”.</p>
<p>But we may never know. Whatever the case, whoever it was, the photo is ingrained in our shared memory as one that proves the might of man’s accomplishment.</p>
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