“Lunch atop a Skyscraper” Sculpture Comes to Rockefeller Center

The eleven fearless ironworkers that posed for the famous 1932 photograph “Lunch atop a Skyscraper” have had their likeness returned to Rockefeller Center once again, in fittingly cast-iron form. The mobile tribute–it’s mounted on a “Top of the Rock” truck–was molded by Sergio Furnari, and will be viewable from Oct. 30 to New Year’s Day.

“Presently, the most photographed artwork in NYC and the world, ‘Iron Workers’ is a monument that offers a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” Furnari said in a statement. “Now you can catch it at Rockefeller Center or driving around Times Square and The Theater District. Tourists can observe a moment in history that will be cherished for generations to come.”

The “Top of the Rock” observatory that the sculpture promotes, which is located at the peak of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, unveiled its own twist on the famous photograph last winter. Formally known as The Beam, it’s essentially a rotating version of the one that the steelworkers posed on, minus the sense of vertigo (it’s suspended only slightly above the observatory deck).

The 1932 photograph itself was taken as part of a campaign promoting the then-in-development 30 Rock. It was taken on September 20 of that year, and published in the New York Herald-Tribune on October 2. It’s unclear who snapped the immortal shot, although it’s often attributed to a certain Charles Clyde Ebbets, who was the photographic director in charge of promoting the skyscraper’s construction. The photo’s subjects, all immigrants, were suspended 850 ft. above the ground–the equivalent of 66 stories, which is the indeed the height of the completed 30 Rock.

The identities of many of the men also remains a mystery, although vigorous documentary work has provided a partial record. The 2012 Irish film “Men At Lunch” investigated whether any of the ironworkers were Irish-American, after a man in the city of Galway claimed that his father and uncle-in-law were in the photo. The filmmakers, Seán Ó Cualáin and Éamonn Ó Cualáin, credibly determined the identities of two men: the third-from-left Joseph Eckner, and the third-from-right Joe Curtis.

Other researchers believe that the rightmost man on the beam is Gustáv (Gusti) Popovič, an immigrant from Slovakia, who had a copy of the photograph addressed to a loved one in his estate (in which he identified himself as the man with “the bottle,” which he said he found hard to quit).

Furnari, who was born in the Sicilian town of Caltagirone, has made much smaller iterations of the sculpture now on display at Rockefeller Center. In 2000, he told The New York Times that he was inspired by the men in the 1932 photo because they “were immigrants” and “poor people that worked hard,” which he said also described himself: “High up above the city street, they gulped their coffee, ate their sandwiches, and then continued their backbreaking labor, and they did this day after day.”

Those that won’t be able to make it to Rockefeller Center to see Furnari’s skyscraper sculpture, and who have a fair amount of money, should know that he sells versions of it on his website. A similar full-sized replica costs between $220,000 and $1 million, with a much smaller ceramic version going for the relatively more affordable $895.