Even before the Empire State Building officially opened on May 1, 1931, it represented something greater than just the world’s tallest office building. From the moment of its conception in August 1929, through its construction during the onset of the Great Depression, the Empire State embodied an American ideal, the very American dream of rising. But whose American dream does it truly embody? Who actually built the Empire State Building? Astonishingly, no list of workmen was ever compiled, and the stories of those who labored on the building were never told. This erasure also embodies an aspect of the American experience—albeit a more painful part. The United States has long attracted and benefited from immigrants whose ambition and hard work have helped the country reach new heights. But too often, those workers never received the rewards and recognition they deserve. Yet new research, drawing on census, immigration, and union records, contemporary journalism, and interviews with descendants, allows us for the first time to reconstruct the lives of the immigrant, working-class, and Indigenous men who built the nation’s most iconic skyscraper. By recognizing their role in constructing this great American monument, we correct the historical record. More importantly, we celebrate the Empire State Building as a national symbol that includes all Americans, regardless of their ethnicity, social status, or country of origin. If you enter the building today through its grand Fifth Avenue portal, the first thing you’ll see at the opposite end of the imposing lobby is a stainless steel depiction of the structure itself. At the base of this two-story-tall wall relief, beneath the stylized rays blazing from the structure’s Art Deco mast, a plaque names the architects, the general contractor, and the corporate owners. Consult any of the conventional histories of the building’s record-breaking construction—or ask ChatGPT right now—and these men will be credited with building the historic landmark.Probe beneath this high-level perspective, and you’ll quickly discover that almost no documentation survives about the approximately ten thousand men whose labor put the skyscraper into the air. Ask Who built the Empire State Building? from the perspective of the workers, and the answer is simply, “we don’t know.” Why this is the case reveals a cultural preference for ignoring or mythologizing laborers as American as the Empire State Building itself. And yet, ten steps to the right of the stainless-steel plaque identifying the architects, contractors, and owners, you’ll find a smaller, bronze plaque, unlit and perched inconspicuously above a radiator grille. This other commemorative plaque lists the names of 32 men who received Empire State Craftsmanship Awards. These 32 craftsmen constitute the majority of workers whose names have come down to us. Few as they are, they provide a new answer to the question of who built the Empire State Building. And amazingly, photographs of them have been slumbering in archives or circulating unidentified for almost a century. Many of these men were recent immigrants, like Owen Scanlon, the award-winning marble setter’s helper. Scanlon was born in 1906 in County Leitrim, Ireland. He arrived at Ellis Island aboard the ship SS Samaria on October 26, 1926, joining his two brothers, Thomas and James, who had emigrated earlier. All three brothers may have worked on the Empire State Building. Owen Scanlon, marble setter’s helper —Hiram Myers—Empire State Building archive, 1930-1969, Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia UniversityGlazier Samuel Laginsky was born in 1894, in Teplik, Russia, now Teplyk, Ukraine, about 180 miles south of Kyiv. An Ellis Island manifest, dated April 21, 1906, documents his arrival in the United States, along with his mother and brother. Their passage was paid for by Samuel Laginsky, Sr., a boarder at 257 Monroe Street in Brooklyn, a three-story brownstone that still exists. Samuel Laginsky, glazier —Lewis W. Hine—Empire State Building archive, 1930-1969, Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia UniversityJames Irons, a stone cutter, was born in Scotland in 1883, 1884, or 1885, depending on which document you believe. He arrived in the U.S. as a child with his parents in 1887. In 1930, when he won his Empire State Craftsmanship Award, he was about 45 and was living in Queens with his wife and their three children. His grandson, also named James Irons, remembered him as “a tough old coot. Not a big man, but a tough man.” As a child, the younger James Irons would visit his grandfather on the weekends. Despite how large the Empire State Building looms in history, it was not something the older man often spoke about. “Only sometimes he would tell me stories about it, how it was being up on the girders and stuff like that,” his grandson said. “He didn’t say much. But I’ve always been very proud of him.”James Irons, stonecutter —Lewis W. Hine—Empire State Building archive, 1930-1969, Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia UniversitySome of the workers were the sons or grandsons of immigrants, like Adam Bigelow, Craftsmanship Award-winner for dampproofing. At the time of his work on the Empire State, Bigelow was 28 and lived in Union City, New Jersey, with his wife and two stepchildren. When I contacted his great niece, she also thought several members of the family may have worked on the Empire State. Indeed, I found a cousin, Henry Bigelow, who received his own Craftsmanship Award for dampproofing in October 1932 for work on the Union Inland Terminal. “As far as Adam,” his great niece wrote me, “he was born and raised in Hell’s Kitchen in a large family. The family seemed to marry and slowly move one by one and buy houses in Bergen County in the Carlstadt/Rutherford area. Some of them making a brief stop in the Union City, North Bergen area of Hudson County as they moved from working poor to middle class.” Adam’s son, William, became a roofer like his father and grandfather. One of William’s sons, Adam’s grandson, became the professional wrestler, “Bam Bam” Bigelow, who died in 2007 of a drug overdose.Adam Bigelow, dampproofer —Lewis W. Hine—Empire State Building archive, 1930-1969, Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia UniversityIronworker Victor “Frenchy” Gosselin was not a Craftsmanship Award winner, but he is perhaps the best documented and most mythologized worker on the Empire State.Victor Gosselin, ironworker —Lewis W. Hine—Empire State Building archive, 1930-1969, Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia UniversityCaptured in some of Lewis W. Hine’s most dramatic photographs of the building’s construction, and thrillingly interviewed in “The American” magazine in June 1931, Frenchy has become archetypal for the American worker in the 1930s, his image used in countless textbooks and finally appearing on a 2013 U.S. Postage Stamp in the series, “Made in America: Building a Nation.” In fact, he was born in Saint-Étienne-de-Lauzon, Levis, across the St. Lawrence River from Quebec, Canada. Genealogical records go back to his great-grandfather, also a native of Quebec. Nicknamed “Frenchy” by fellow ironworkers and celebrated as a symbol of the American character, research indicates Gosselin belonged to the Kahnawake Mohawks, the Native Americans whose territory straddled the U.S.-Canadian border before these countries existed. A few months before the Empire State Building officially opened, a cartoon appeared in the New York Evening Post. A mantilla-clad woman, standing with a small boy on the roof of a Lower-East Side tenement, gazes in awe at the giant skyscraper gleaming in the distance. The caption reads, “Tony, your old man’s buildin’ that.” Perhaps it was meant as a joke, the proud mother exaggerating her immigrant family’s importance. But it also spoke a truth. The nation was built by ordinary people who take justifiable pride in their contributions to America’s rise, even if those contributions are almost always overlooked. To John Jakob Raskob, the Empire State’s primary financier and at the time one of the country’s richest men, the building represented “a land which reached for the sky with its feet on the ground.” Today, even 56 years after it relinquished the title of world’s tallest skyscraper, it remains an abiding symbol of American pride and achievement. But knowing something about the lives of the workers who built it allows us to understand more specifically what the majestic skyscraper stands for.The men who built the Empire State Building were not “anonymous workers.” They were not cartoon figures. Like the Craftsmanship Award winners, like the men pictured in Lewis W. Hine’s masterful photographs, they were Americans with names and complex histories. The building may stand in the popular imagination as the symbol of an American ideal. But for men like Owen Scanlon, Samuel Laginsky, James Irons, Adam Bigelow, Victor Gosselin, and their families, it was the very medium to realize that ideal, the pathway by which they rose into the middle class. On the 95th anniversary of their achievement, perhaps it’s time to honor these workers by name. As much as the owners, architects, and contractors, they, too, built the Empire State Building.