Eleven men sit on a narrow steel beam 850 feet above Manhattan, eating sandwiches and lighting cigarettes with no harnesses. The photograph was taken on September 20, 1932, on the 69th floor of the RCA Building, now 30 Rockefeller Plaza, at the depths of the Great Depression. This episode reveals that the seemingly candid image was a carefully orchestrated publicity stunt by Rockefeller Center management, who also had the ironworkers toss a football across the void and pretend to nap on the girder.

We dig into the mystery of the photographer, from the long-held misattribution to Lewis Hine to Tammy Ebbets Hawn’s 2003 case for her father Charles C. Ebbets, and why the credit was later withdrawn because Thomas Kelley and William Leftwich were also shooting that day. We then trace the decades of family detective work that identified men like Gustav Popovic, Peter Rice, Joseph Eckner, and Joe Curtis, and follow the image’s afterlife as a Ground Zero tribute, a theme park ride, and a motivational tool in Sir Alex Ferguson’s office.

• Why the original glass negative shattered into five pieces and now sits in an Iron Mountain vault
• The postcard Gustav Popovic mailed to his wife Marisha reassuring her he still had his bottle
• How Mohawk ironworkers’ high-steel tradition and Peter Rice’s identification served as legal evidence
• The Beam ride opened at Rockefeller Center in 2023 and Time’s 2025 Person of the Year parody
• Why the collision of a mundane lunch break with a lethal drop still makes viewers dizzy today