AN SCÉAL/ABOUT
AN SCÉAL/ABOUT
Men at Lunch is the untold story of New York’s greatest legend and one of the most iconic images of the 20th century - Lunch atop a Skyscraper - taken on the 69th floor of the Rockefeller Building in the autumn of 1932.
At the height of the Great Depression, eleven ironworkers sit eating lunch on a steel beam - boots dangling 850 feet above the sidewalk of 41st Street – Central Park and the misty Manhattan Manhattan skyline stretching out behind them. The definitive counterpoint of epic and mundane – a symbol of the indomitable working man.
Part homage, part investigation, Men at Lunch is the revealing tale of an American icon, an unprecedented race to the sky and the immigrant workers that built New York.
For 80 years, the identity of the eleven men – and the photographer that immortalized them – remained a mystery: their stories, lost in time, subsumed by the fame of the image itself.
But then, at the start of the 21st century, the photograph finally began to give up some of its secrets.
Seán Ó Cualáin
