Today is the 80th Anniversary of the Iconic “Lunch Atop a Skyscraper Photograph” and Two of the Ironworkers in it Have Been Identified.
For 80 years, the 11 ironworkers in this image (most likely appearing in a college dorm room near you) have remained unknown, and now, thanks to new research, two of them have been identified. In an interview with Smithsonian.com, Irish filmmaker Seán Ó Cualáin, tells the story of the photograph as he has done in his latest documentary, Men at Lunch, which debuted earlier this month at the Toronto International Film Festival:
“It was a happy accident,” says Ó Cualáin. He and his brother, Eamonn, the film’s producer, were in a pub in Galway, when they noticed a copy of the photograph hanging in a corner. Beside the photograph was a note from the son of a local immigrant who left Ireland for New York in the 1920s: “This is my dad on the far right and my uncle-in-law on the far left.” They asked the bartender about the note, and “like all good Irish barmen,” says Ó Cualáin, he put them in contact with Pat Glynn, the Bostonite who penned it, that very night.
