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The Mohawks who Built Manhattan
Manhattan’s building boom in the Roaring Twenties relied on Mohawk Indians to get the job done.
Mohawks got into construction in 1886, when the Canadian Pacific Railroad needed land on the Kahnawake Reservation near Montreal for a bridge it was building. In return, the company agreed to hire tribesmen to unload supplies. But the men climbed up the bridge every chance they got. “[T]hey would climb up and onto the spans and walk around up there as cool and collected as the toughest of our riveters,” recalled a bridge official in a 1949 article by Joseph Mitchell in The New Yorker. They may have just been teenagers daring each other to climb the 150 ft. structure and “walk the iron,” but their fearlessness impressed the foremen, who were always short of reliable workers. Riveters had the most difficult and dangerous jobs and were hard to find, and by the time the bridge was built, a dozen Kahnawakes—enough for three riveting gangs—were trained.
They kept training apprentices, and by the 1920s, when skyscrapers were shooting up everywhere in New York, hundreds of them were commuting the 350 miles from the reservation to the city every week. They worked on all the big construction projects of the time: the Chrysler Building, Empire State Building, RCA Building, Daily News Building, the United Nations, Madison Square Garden, and the Triborough, Henry Hudson, and Hell’s Gate Bridges—among others. The building boom gave way to Depression-era public works projects and then postwar prosperity.
The work paid well, and many Kahnawakes and neighboring Akwesasnes took up residence in Brooklyn. By 1960, some 800 were living around Fourth and Atlantic Avenues. Grocery stores stocked Mohawk foods and churches offered services in their native languages.
The World Trade Center was the last major project to be built with substantial Indian help. By the 1970s, rents were pricing them out of the city and admissions tests for union training programs favored the school-educated over those with a more vocational background. Some workers believe that in another decade there will be no Mohawks on New York building sites any more.
