The daring lunch break 850 feet above Manhattan was a carefully staged publicity stunt.

Art · Published 3 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: Eleven ironworkers dangling above the city streets in a 1932 photograph created one of the most enduring images of the 20th century. While long considered a candid moment of labor, the scene was actually a calculated promotional effort to drum up excitement for the near-completion of Rockefeller Center.

On September 20, 1932, eleven ironworkers sat on a steel beam 850 feet above Manhattan to participate in a publicity campaign for the RCA Building. The image, which captured the men eating lunch, tossing a football, and pretending to nap, was never a spontaneous snapshot. It was a deliberate, staged production designed to showcase the progress of the skyscraper’s construction. Despite its fame, the photograph’s origins remained shrouded in mystery for decades, with the identity of the photographer and the men on the beam largely unknown.

For years, the image was frequently misattributed to Lewis Hine, a common error stemming from the mistaken belief that the structure was the Empire State Building. Investigations into the photograph’s authorship have been complex. While Charles C. Ebbets was once widely credited after his daughter discovered evidence of his presence at the site, subsequent research revealed that other photographers, including Thomas Kelley and William Leftwich, were also present that day. Consequently, the official credit for the image remains uncertain, and the original glass plate negative, now stored in a climate-controlled facility in Pennsylvania, remains uncredited.

The men in the photograph have also been the subject of intense speculation. While many families have claimed their relatives were among the group, definitive identification has been difficult. The 2012 documentary Men at Lunch successfully identified two of the men, Joseph Eckner and Joe Curtis, by cross-referencing the famous shot with other images taken during the same session. Another worker, Gustáv Popovič, was identified through a note found in his estate. The photograph’s enduring appeal lies in its ambiguity; as filmmaker Seán Ó Cualáin noted, the lack of definitive information allows viewers to project themselves onto the beam, turning a commercial stunt into a universal icon of American history.

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