Lunch atop a Skyscraper

Lunch atop a Skyscraper, 1932

Lunch atop a Skyscraper (New York Construction Workers Lunching on a Crossbeam) is a famous black-and-white photograph taken by Charles C. Ebbets during construction of the RCA Building (renamed as the GE Building in 1986) at Rockefeller Center in New York City, United States.

Rockefeller Center under construction in 1932, the site where the photo was taken

The photograph depicts eleven men eating lunch, seated on a girder with their feet dangling hundreds of feet above the New York City streets. Ebbets took the photo on September 29, 1932 on the 69th floor of the RCA Building during the last months of construction. It appeared in the Sunday photo supplement of the New York Herald Tribune on October 2.

It was not until 2003, after months of investigation by a private investigation firm, that the Bettmann Archive (the copyright owner of the photograph) recognized Charles C. Ebbets as the photographer. However, authorship of the photograph, popular as a poster, was listed as 'Unknown' on many prints. The photograph has been frequently misattributed to Lewis Hine, whose earlier work documenting the construction of the Empire State Building in 1931. Hine's Icarus atop Empire State Building has a compositional, though arguably not thematic, resemblance.

Men in the photo

In recent years, the identities of most of the subjects have been provided by their descendents or relatives. Counting from the left, the first man is Matty O'Shaughnessy from County Galway, Ireland. The third man has been identified as Austin Lawton of King's Cove, Newfoundland, though this same man is also identified as Sheldon London of New York, New York, by his great-niece, and is further identified as Ralph Rawding of New York, New York by his granddaughter. The fourth man, identified by his daughter, is Native American John Charles Cook of the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation, also known as the Akwesasne. The fifth man is Claude Stagg of Catalina, Newfoundland. The sixth man is John Johansson, from Okome, Sweden, identified by his niece’s husband. The seventh man has been identified by his daughter as John Doucette. The eighth man has been identified by a nephew as Francis Michael Rafferty; the ninth man is his lifelong best friend, Stretch Donahue. The tenth man is Thomas Norton (born Naughton) of County Galway, Ireland. The eleventh man has been identified as both Patrick "Sonny" Glynn of County Galway, Ireland and Gusti Popovič, a Slovak from then Czechoslovakia. Another photograph taken by Ebbets the same day, Men Asleep on a Girder, shows some of the same workers napping on the beam.^{[citation needed]}

In popular media

• The cast of the popular television series Friends did a promo poster resembling Lunch atop a Skyscraper.
• The cast of CSI: NY also did a promo poster in the likeness of Lunch atop a Skyscraper.
• The Simpsons made a parody of the picture via a couch gag in episodes 299 and 310.