Lunch on a Beam: The Making of an American Photograph

The untold story of the many people behind one of America’s most iconic photographs.

Lunch on a Beam , also known as Lunch Atop a Skyscraper , shows ironworkers eating lunch on a steel beam during the construction of Rockefeller Center’s RCA Building in 1932. It’s a photo so famous you can likely picture it in your mind: seated in a row, eleven men chat and break bread 850 feet above the ground, the dense cityscape behind them. While the scene may look spontaneous, the photo was taken during a publicity shoot to promote Rockefeller Center’s new skyscraper. And despite the image’s renown, for years, little information was available about its subjects or its photographer.

In Lunch on a Beam , Rockefeller Center archivist Christine Roussel interweaves the art, architectural, and social history behind the photograph with her personal experience as a confidante to the financiers who developed Rockefeller Center. She tells the stories of the fearless photographers, brazen publicity men, the ironworkers, and their immigrant and Indigenous communities. This portrait of eleven construction workers, she points out, is also a celebration of the nation’s richest man. She examines how, in the depths of the Great Depression, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., took it upon himself to build a monument to American industry and sell it to the public.

Featuring striking images from the Rockefeller Center Archives, Lunch on a Beam calls attention to the fascinating paradoxes contained in a single photo and celebrates the men who built an architectural marvel at great personal risk. This is a story of art and commerce, and the role of a photograph in the mythmaking of New York City.