The Staged Reality Behind 'Lunch atop a Skyscraper'

Lunch atop a Skyscraper, one of the world's most famous photographs, depicts workers casually eating lunch on a steel beam 260 meters above New York City. The image was taken on September 20, 1932, at the Rockefeller Center construction site and first published in the New York Herald Tribune on October 2, 1932. Despite its spontaneous appearance, historians agree the photo was staged: the workers were posed, and the Rockefeller family used it to promote their skyscraper's grandeur. However, many contemporary photos show that the daily lives of workers building New York's iconic structures were not far from this now-mythic image. The authorship remains uncertain, as three photographers—Charles Ebbets, Thomas Kelley, and William Leftwich—were present that day.