Poised on a steel cable a quarter of a mile above Manhattan, a weather-beaten man in work dungarees reaches up to tighten a bolt. Below, though you hardly dare to look down, lies the Hudson River, the sprawling cityscape of New York and the US itself, rolling out on to the far horizon. If you fell from this rarefied spot, it would take about 11 seconds to hit the ground.
Captured by photographer Lewis Hine, The Sky Boy, as the image became known, encapsulated the daring and vigour of the men who built the Empire State Building, then the world’s tallest structure at 102 storeys and 1,250ft (381m) high. Like astronauts, they were going to places no man had gone before, testing the limits of human endurance, giving physical form to ideals of American puissance, “a land which reached for the sky with its feet on the ground”, according to John Jakob Raskob, then one of the country’s richest men, who helped bankroll the building.
