New York - The Novel

workers all the time. Photographers had taken pictures of the steelworkers perched on their girders in the sky. The promoters liked that sort of thing. “Will he be safe?” he said.
    “He used to be a bricklayer,” Salvatore told him. “He won’t do anything stupid.” He grinned. “In fact, he just made a sketch of you a few minutes ago.” He gave the foreman a small drawing Angelo had dashed off.
    “Well, blow me down, that’s me all right,” said the delighted foreman. And he waved them through.
    As they went up in the service elevator, he glanced at his brother. Angelo was wearing a suit and a small homburg hat. He looked as handsome and contented as on his wedding day. The only change was that his face was a little fuller, and he had an air of modest success about him too. There was enough painting work to keep him busy, evidently. He’d also designed the logos and paint jobs for the trucks of several Long Island businesses. There was no question, Angelo had found his feet.
    The new Otis elevators that would soon carry the occupants to their offices had been specially designed to travel up at almost double the speed of any elevator before, but even the works elevators moved at a rapid clip. Salvatore was proud of the building, and described its wonders as they went.
    “Any day now,” he said, “they’ll start to build the mast on the top.”
    The Empire State Building’s top office floor was higher than the tip ofthe Chrysler Building by two feet. But whereas Chrysler had beaten out the opposition with his cheeky, but useless spike, the Empire State would be topped by a huge mast, containing observation platforms, at the top of which there would be a dock at which huge dirigibles could be moored and their passengers disembark. “The whole place will be ready to open by Easter next year,” Salvatore said.
    They came out at the seventy-second floor, and Salvatore went over to the outer wall where he was working.
    The construction of the Empire State Building had proceeded rapidly because its design was so simple. First came the network of huge steel girders which carried the building’s entire weight. Some of the vertical steel columns would support a weight of ten million pounds, but they could have taken far more. The building was massively over-engineered. Between the girders were curtain walls, whose only structural function was to keep the weather out.
    But here the architects had shown their genius. The outer edges of the vertical girders were given a chrome-nickel trim that rendered them a soft gray. Apart from that, the entire working facade of the mighty tower contained only these principal elements: first, pairs of rectangular, metal window frames; second, above and below each frame, a single aluminum panel, called a spandrel; third, between each pair of windows, large slabs of pale limestone. Thus the facade soared up in pure stone and metal vertical lines. Only at the very top of each high column of stonework or window was there an elegant art deco carving with a vertical direction to satisfy and uplift the eye. Essentially, therefore, the men working on the facade just moved up behind the girder riveters and, as it were, clipped the frames, spandrels and blocks of limestone into place.
    And then there were the bricklayers.
    “We work from inside, you see,” Salvatore explained. “Two courses of brick, eight inches thick.” The brick went in behind the limestone and the spandrels, supporting and insulating them. But the brick had another important function. “The brick protects the girders,” Salvatore pointed out. Being fired when they were made, the bricks were flame-resistant. In high heat, even steel girders are vulnerable. The brick would clothe and protect them. “The building is strong as a fortress, but it would be almost impossible to burn it down as well.”
    While Salvatore and his gang went to work, Angelo sat on a pile of bricks with his sketchbook, and began to draw. High above, the deafeningnoise of the riveters at work would have made conversation difficult. Some days the racket went on from seven in the morning until nine at night, echoing down to the street below. The local residents just had to put up with it.
    As well as sketching the bricklayers, Angelo’s attention was caught by a stack of the aluminum spandrels that had been stashed near the elevator. Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, the architects of the building, had been trained at Cornell and Columbia