Good morning. It’s Friday. We’ll meet a first-time rider in the Five Boro Bike Tour who learned the hard way that wearing a helmet matters. And on this, the 95th anniversary of the day the Empire State Building opened, we’ll find out about some of the workers who built it.
As a first-timer in the Five Boro Bike Tour on Sunday, Patricia Hochhauser will wear a helmet. It’s a must for the 32,000 entrants.
But Hochhauser has special reason to. She wasn’t wearing one a couple of years ago, when she tried out a gas-powered scooter. Her husband, Harold Hochhauser, said it had bucked and thrown her off. She sustained a traumatic brain injury.
“I live every day with the consequences of not wearing that helmet,” she said. She was checking out the scooter in a parking lot. “I was so excited about it, thinking I was going to do errands in the neighborhood — put on a backpack and throw my groceries in there,” she said. “I had all these big hopes and dreams.” She said she did not remember anything about the accident “until they were putting staples in my head” — 15 in all, she said.
The accident cost her a job opportunity, she said: She had been scheduled to start training a week later as a bus driver with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. She had been a school bus driver and was looking forward to getting behind the wheel of one of the 1,300 buses in the M.T.A.’s fleet.
On Sunday she is looking forward to riding over the 2.6-mile-long Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. The lower level will be closed to cars and trucks to accommodate the cyclists, who will start out at Franklin Street and Church Street in TriBeCa in Manhattan. Some avenues and major highways will also be off limits to cars and trucks at times during the tour. The City Department of Transportation’s traffic advisory is here. And the Five Boro Bike Tour does not permit scooters like the one she was riding when she had the accident. Some e-bikes are allowed. She plans to ride her regular road bike.
‘We are Gen X’
When the accident happened, Hochhauser and her husband were already practiced cyclists and owned helmets. But they never bothered with them, she said.
Why not?
“Because we are Gen X, and I grew up not having to wear a helmet,” she said. “Half the time growing up, I didn’t even have to wear a seatbelt in the car. It wasn’t like, Oh, get in the back seat and buckle up, you know?”
After the accident, she was determined to ride again. Harold Hochhauser said that their first outings were difficult. To help her maintain balance, he put training wheels on her bike — since removed, he said.
Last year they rode in the Tour de Yonkers, picking the 50-mile route, the longest of three that participants could follow. She said there were hills that she could not conquer — she had to get off and walk up.
“I’m doing it all myself this time,” she said. “I am, you know, stronger than I was then.”
Weather
Today will be bright and sunny with a high near 65. Expect increasing clouds and a chance of rain tonight, as temperatures fall near 51.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until May 14 (Solemnity of the Ascension).
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“I would probably encourage him to return the Koh-i-Noor diamond.” — Mayor Zohran Mamdani, on what he would have said to King Charles III if they had met privately during the royal visit on Wednesday. The priceless jewel is a symbol of colonial plunder.
The latest Metro news
-
Epstein victims will testify in Albany: Two women who have accused Jeffrey Epstein of sexual misconduct will testify in support of a bill introduced by State Senator Zellnor Myrie, above. The bill would let victims of Epstein to seek punitive damages in state lawsuits against his estate.
-
Epstein’s suicide note: A suicide note purportedly written by Epstein has been kept secret for nearly seven years. On Thursday, The New York Times petitioned a judge to unseal it.
-
At odds with a Mamdani move: Survivors of domestic violence are at odds with the mayor’s plan to restructure the way police handle mentally ill people. The move has pushed the office that oversees domestic violence prevention efforts down the City Hall hierarchy.
-
Sherrill sued over mask ban: The Trump administration sued Gov. Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey and its attorney general over a state law that bars law enforcement officers, including ICE agents, from wearing masks while on duty.
-
Slowing down “super-speeders”: Gov. Kathy Hochul is supporting a bill that would require speed-limiting devices to be installed in the cars of drivers who get more than 16 speeding tickets in a year.
The workers who built the Empire State Building
On another May 1 — in 1931, by coincidence also a Friday — the Empire State Building opened, and on that morning, everyone’s perspective changed. People were awed by the view of the building and the view from the building, “a new view” of New York, as The New York Times described it from 85 stories up. The ships in the Hudson River were “little more than rowboats,” the paper reported. Fifth Avenue and Broadway were “slender black ribbons.”
The Times said that 3,400 workers had “coordinated tasks to finish ahead of schedule.” Glenn Kurtz, whose father’s office was in the building, wondered who they were.
“When you look at the standard histories, the answer is always the architects, the owners and the contractors,” Kurtz told me. He wanted to know about the “people who had tools in their hands.”
“I very quickly discovered there was almost no information about them,” he said. There was no list of their names; the men in famous photographs taken by Lewis W. Hine “have invariably been referred to as ‘anonymous workers,’” Kurtz said. He spent a decade doing research for the book “Men at Work: The Empire State Building and the Untold Story of the Craftsmen Who Built It” and put names to some of the faces in Hine’s photos.
He spotted 32 names on a plaque in the lobby — for workers who were given “certificates of superior craftsmanship” — and realized that many were the men in Hine’s photographs.
But the images themselves were why the workers’ identities had been overlooked. “The photographs are iconic, they represent a generalized ideal, and we love generalized ideals,” Kurtz said. To say, ‘Oh, that’s not this magnificent, iconic image of a worker, it’s Victor Gosselin, who lived in Canada and died in a car crash’ — many people would feel it diminishes the image to know who the actual person was.”
Or, as he said a moment later, “the actual lives of these men often undermine the mythology.”
Gosselin was almost certainly a Mohawk from the Kahnawake reservation, whose territory once reached what is now upstate New York. Another, George Adams, was apparently distantly related to the second president of the United States, John Adams. Others were recent immigrants from Ireland and Italy, as well as Eastern Europe and Scandinavia. Some were sons or grandsons of German or Scottish immigrants.
In “Men at Work,” Kurtz described Neil Doherty, an ironworker Hine photographed, as one of the few “allowed to have his own voice” in newspaper articles about the construction of the huge skyscraper.
“It’s just like anything else,” Doherty was quoted as saying in one article. “A person on solid ground never has any fear of falling. That’s just the way you become, up on the girders after a while, and you have to watch yourself taking that attitude. Usually the two days off at the end of the week are enough to take away this carelessness.”
Gosselin was “the single best-known worker on the building” because he was photogenic and charismatic, Kurtz said. “And in every portrayal of him, he epitomizes the cultural ideal that has so powerfully shaped our image of the workmen who built the Empire State.“
“My real question was, What does the building stand for?” Kurtz told me. “One way to think of it is as a central symbol of America in the 20th century. If we imagine it in those terms, do we think of the five rich men who were funding it, or do we think in terms of the 10,000 mostly immigrant men who built it? The story of the five is told over and over again. I thought it would be interesting to tell the other story.”
METROPOLITAN diary
Covered up
Dear Diary:
I was walking down Clinton Street on the Lower East Side when I passed a couple of guys sitting on a bench.
“You look like you’re in a witness protection program,” one said.
“Excuse me?” I asked.
“You look like you’re in a witness protection program, for sure,” he repeated.
“Well, I’m not!” I said.
“But of course,” he replied, “you’d have to say that!”
— Annette Rose-Shapiro
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you Monday. — J.B.
Davaughnia Wilson and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.
James Barron writes the New York Today newsletter, a morning roundup of what’s happening in the city.
The post This Time, She’s Wearing a Helmet appeared first on New York Times.
