"topping out" traditions of the high-steel ironworkers, The

Western Folklore, Fall 2001 by Robinson, John V

The history of the flag in the topping out ceremony is a bit easier to trace. In December 1984 The Ironworker magazine reported that topping out a structure with a flag goes back at least to the 1920's. It is thought that use of the flag was a response to the union busting "American Plan" instituted in 1919. The "American Plan" may have popularized the custom among the ironworkers, but the custom itself predates the "American Plan" by a good many years.

In her book, The Ferry Building (1998), chronicling the history of San Francisco's famous waterfront landmark, Nancy Olmstead publishes a photo (circa 1897) of two high-steel men and an American flag perched atop the 240-foot clock tower's newly completed steel skeleton (15).4 Charles Sheppard's book, Skyscrapers, contains a photograph of New York's Woolworth Building under construction in 1912 where the newly completed iron frame is topped with a flag. During the early part of the twentieth-century labor unions were seen in some quarters as un-American. The flag then became a way for ironworkers to demonstrate that their unionism was not inconsistent with patriotism.

A good early photo depicting the patriotic power of the flag in the ceremony is the 1934 photo of ironworkers placing a flag atop the wind blown North Tower of the Golden Gate Bridge (Figure 2). The photo of the five ironworkers, kneeling and standing, setting the flag in place is vaguely evocative of the later, more famous, image of the Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima.5

The custom of painting the final beam white and inscribing it is also common and seems to be a formalization of the ironworkers natural tendency to write graffiti on the iron as the structure is being built. In 1989 Debora Kodish, editor of the Philadelphia Folklore Project's Newsletter Works in Progress, published a short article about the topping out of Bell Atlantic Towers in Philadelphia. Kodish astutely points out that the signing of the beam is the ironworkers' way of symbolically "signing off" on a job well done and is a way for the ironworkers to take credit for a building that will, in some sense, always bear their names (1989:2).

Skyscrapers are not the only projects that honor the topping out tradition; any job with ironworkers on it is likely to generate a topping out ceremony of some kind. The Ironworker (December 1983) reported that some Colorado ironworkers working in the Elands Valley of South Africa, unable to secure a Christmas tree, "borrowed" a sheet from their hotel, painted it up with stars and stripes and proudly flew that atop the newly completed structure. As a former ironworker myself I am alert to the custom and have seen the telltale signs of a topping out ceremony in some unusual places.

During the 1989 Loma-Prieta earthquake sections of the 880 freeway collapsed-as did a section of the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge. It took ten years to rebuild the collapsed section of the 880 freeway. When it was finally replaced it ran along a new route and was elevated over the interstate 580 and 80 interchange as a fly-over approach to the Bay Bridge. One afternoon, while was driving 580 west towards San Francisco, I gazed up at the new structure and much to my surprise I saw, on the bottom flange of a beam, 100 feet in the air: an American flag, an evergreen tree, and a large hand-painted sign that read "Ironworkers 378."