Lunch atop a Skyscraper (New York Construction Workers Lunching on a Crossbeam) is a famous black-and-white photograph

Photograph

A photograph is an image created by light falling on a light-sensitive surface, usually photographic film or an electronic imager such as a CCD or a CMOS chip. Most photographs are created using a camera, which uses a lens to focus the scene's visible wavelengths of light into a reproduction of...

 taken by Charles C. Ebbets

Charles C. Ebbets

Charles Clyde Ebbets was an American photographer, most famous for his photograph Lunchtime atop a Skyscraper -Biography:...

 during construction of the RCA Building

GE Building

The GE Building is an Art Deco skyscraper that forms the centerpiece of Rockefeller Center in the midtown Manhattan section of New York City. Known as the RCA Building until 1988, it is most famous for housing the headquarters of the television network NBC...

 (renamed as the GE Building in 1986) at Rockefeller Center

Rockefeller Center

Rockefeller Center is a complex of 19 commercial buildings covering between 48th and 51st streets in New York City, United States. Built by the Rockefeller family, it is located in the center of Midtown Manhattan, spanning the area between Fifth Avenue and Sixth Avenue. It was declared a National...

 in New York City

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

, United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

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The photograph depicts eleven men eating lunch, seated on a girder

Girder

A girder is a support beam used in construction. Girders often have an I-beam cross section for strength, but may also have a box shape, Z shape or other forms. Girder is the term used to denote the main horizontal support of a structure which supports smaller beams...

 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, and it appeared in the New York Herald Tribune

New York Herald Tribune

The New York Herald Tribune was a daily newspaper created in 1924 when the New York Tribune acquired the New York Herald.Other predecessors, which had earlier merged into the New York Tribune, included the original The New Yorker newsweekly , and the Whig Party's Log Cabin.The paper was home to...

on October 2 in its Sunday photo supplement.

The copyright owner of the photograph, the Bettman Archive, did not recognize Charles C. Ebbets as the photographer until October 2003 (reportedly after months of investigation by a private investigation firm). 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

Lewis Hine

Lewis Wickes Hine was an American sociologist and photographer. Hine used his camera as a tool for social reform. His photographs were instrumental in changing the child labor laws in the United States.-Early life:...

, whose earlier work documenting the construction of the Empire State Building in 1931 (see, for example, 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 is Austin Lawton of King's Cove, Newfoundland and the fifth man is Claude Stagg of Catalina, Newfoundland. 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, Peter Sausage. 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

Slovakia

The Slovak Republic is a landlocked state in Central Europe. It has a population of over five million and an area of about . Slovakia is bordered by the Czech Republic and Austria to the west, Poland to the north, Ukraine to the east and Hungary to the south...

 from then Czechoslovakia

Czechoslovakia

Czechoslovakia or Czecho-Slovakia was a sovereign state in Central Europe which existed from October 1918, when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until 1992...

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There was another name associated with the 11th man. David Cherry. Another photograph taken by Ebbets the same day, Men Asleep on a Girder, shows the same workers napping on the beam.