Iron men

PROVIDENCE — Ironworkers have a saying: show me where the first piece goes and the rest will tell a story.

Fifty feet in the air above Fountain Street, Kyle Coulombe, dusted in rust and as lean as a cable, shimmies up a naked steel column toward an 800-pound beam suspended above his head.

He’s already read what happens next in the story: the piece will help frame a front corner of the new Residence Inn Providence Hotel. But first, crane operator Steve Berube, whose skill is measured by each hoisted beam’s incremental movements, must inch this one close enough so Kyle can align a bolt hole at the end with one in the column and connect the two.

Then Kyle will step up on the beam and walk its length to secure the other end as the crane holds it steady.

Late next year, guests at the nine-story hotel will be checking into their rooms, watching TV, ordering late-night room service. They won’t see the steel skeleton behind the walls nor likely ever meet the men who “went first,” as ironworkers say, to build it.

For now, the “raising gang” of ironworkers is a summer stage show on Fountain Street — attention-grabbers in an aerial performance of bravery and century-old tradesmanship. Kyle plays a starring role. He’s the gang’s “lead connector.”

“That guy’s nuts,” says Steven Strychasz, who has a front-row seat each day across the street at his valet station at the Dean Hotel.

Having bolted the close end, Kyle now attaches his safety line to the top flange of the beam. It trails behind him as he ambles to the middle of the beam — hanging by a cable from the crane hook.

He slips around the cable, resets his safety line and walks to the end. The beam dips slightly from his weight.

“Crazy,” says the valet, gazing up. Kyle jams a tapered metal bar through one of the beam’s bolt holes and into a hole in the column to hold them together. Quickly he slides a half-pound bolt through another hole and spins on a nut from the other side. He hand-tightens one bolt, then another, before tightening both again with a spud wrench.

Then he’s back at the middle of the beam. Steve lowers the hook enough to create slack in the cable. Kyle slides the cable off to cut the crane loose. With a confident flair, he coils the cable like a lasso rope and stands alone in the sky.

He checks for a safe spot on the ground and flings the cable down with a snap of his wrist.

Kyle is 31 and a third-generation union ironworker, Local 37, out of East Providence. In 1983, his father, Kent, rode the last beam up 18 stories and “topped-out” what was then known as the Fleet Center, now the office tower at 100 Westminster St.

His grandfather, Raynor, hung iron, too. The pain has been passed down. Sore thighs and knees from squeezing flanges and performing one-legged squats. Backaches from lugging around 50, 60 pounds of tools in his work harness. He dons it each morning like a hiker wrestling on a heavy pack. As he does his spud wrenches and connecting bars clang, a 9-pound “beater” sledge sways against his jeans, worn from friction and rolled halfway up his calves to cool his legs. Inside a canvas pouch pressed against his back, a dozen or so 3 ½-inch nut and bolt pairings knock around. Two would fill a coffee mug.

On this hot summer day, Kyle wears a week’s worth of black beard, a sleeveless shirt to work on his tan and dark sunglasses under his scuffed hard hat. As the lead connector he also wears a radio headset to talk to Steve in the crane or his raising-gang foreman, who watches from below with the story’s script in hand, directing the order of steel going up.

But sometimes there’s so much noise around him — so much banging as other guys swing their beaters at disobeying steel or “bolting up” the beams he’s connected with pneumatic torque “guns” — that Kyle gets frustrated. Then he resorts to old-fashioned communication if he knows Steve can still see him: hand signals.

Up comes another big piece. Steve lowers the far end into position first. Then Kyle twirls a finger downward and the close end drops slowly by his feet. Kyle steps on it to bully it into an open collar. The metal clash reverberates.

Kyle crouches and shoots a pointed finger down at Steve, as if to say, "You’re the man."

“I love what I do, I love it,” Kyle says one afternoon over lunch. (The 10-member crew often eats in their pickups and sedans, parked in the shade along Sabin Street.) He is a single man who’s more afraid of women, he says, than falling. He resides in Rumford but lives on the steel.

“I was kind of bred into this. We Coulombes have been ironworkers forever. I knew what a choker was (the cable used to lift the beams) before I could ride a bike.”

He admits he likes the attention that comes with the perilous job: “All eyes are on you. Who doesn’t like being in the limelight, you know what I mean?”

His connecting partner is big Dave Mazzucco, 32, of Warwick, who carries 70 more pounds of brawn than his sinewy coworker. Kyle calls him The Beast. A married father of four, whose uncle was also an ironworker, Dave has a mellower temperament.

“Every connecting partner I’ve ever had — this is the dynamic,” says Dave. “The guy on the other end, he’s the hyper one. I‘m a little more contemplative.”

Kyle is deferential: “He’s humble. I’m a loudmouth. I’m aggressive. You need one guy who is not afraid to scream at the foreman. I could care less who I scream at. But Dave, he’s reserved, which is nice.”

Dave says he gripes about the weather year-round, the cold in the winter and the 10 layers of clothing that impede your balance, the damn summer heat that cooks the steel and burns your skin. Kyle prefers to sweat than freeze and will occasionally work on his tan while waiting for the next piece to come up, his face turned up to the sun.

For all their differences, they get along on the beam, proud of what they can do that most people would never dare. “You better get along because you could kill each other, no problem,” says Kyle. “One flick of the wrist and you could kill your partner.”

Dave has been hanging iron for seven years, Kyle for 13. Both have fallen while on the steel.

Twice Dave “walked into a hole while running deck” — carrying and laying sheets of corrugated metal prior to pouring a concrete floor. Each time, “I thought there was one more sheet down, took a step” and walked into space.

He managed both times to cling to an edge and pull himself back up.

In Kyle’s mishap, “I was standing up, being an idiot, trying to pry something in, and my bar just slipped.” Fortunately he was only about 17 feet up and managed to grab a hold. “I was dangling there, probably 12 feet between my feet and the ground. Sprained my ankle when I hit.”

Dave is actually a member of the Local 7 ironworkers union and usually works in Boston, where the union ironworker’s rate is $46 an hour — about $11 more than in Rhode Island.

But the Residence Inn job was close, and its nice to get home to his family at a reasonable hour, especially on exhausting days when he’s so tired he’s falling asleep by 8 p.m. This job’s been good, too, without the sometimes nagging pressure from the “white hats” — project supervisors.

“It’s called being bird-dogged,” says Kyle, “When they’re looking up at you with their clipboards and going, ‘Oh, he’s doing this wrong, he’s doing that wrong.’”

That’s when you can get distracted, says Dave. “You start thinking about the future of your job — are they going to say something when you come down? You don’t need those kinds of things when you’re just trying to do your job without falling.”

“We actually pressure ourselves to get the job done,” says Kyle.

“It’s a pride thing,” agrees Dave. “Maybe we got 20 picks yesterday. Today we’re going to get 30 or whatever,” referring to the number of pieces of steel they connected.

The two will also compete to see who connects their ends of the beams first and gets to the chokers in the middle to cut the crane loose.

“You have to have fun because the job is so hard,” says Dave. “You do what you can.”

Not all ironworkers hang iron. Some weld. Some “bolt up,” adding another half-dozen A-325s at each joint and using the torque gun to tighten them. Others, like Kyle’s cousin, Emily, work on the ground, attaching choker cables to the beams so the crane can lift them. In ironworker argot, they “hook on.”

Joe “Mac” McWilliams, 52, is on the ground now after 15 years of connecting.

“All of a sudden I became an old timer,” he says. “Younger guys showed up and I said, 'all right, I’ll hook on.'”

Mac says, “It’s definitely safer down here.” But he misses some things about the glamor job. “I used to like to take a break and sit up there, waiting for the next piece to come. You didn’t have to hear all the crap that can go on down here.”

He still wears the ironworkers’ special boots. The ones with the wedge sole instead of a heel that could catch on a beam flange.

“Connecting isn’t for everybody,” says Kyle, though “everybody’s a connector from the ground” with opinions about what you’re doing wrong.

Dave laughs in agreement: “Come on up. You try.”

Few ironworkers start right off connecting. They must learn first about the iron on the ground, learn to use their tools, understand centers of gravity. Kyle was an exception.

In his first year, “I was connecting on my third job. I was working with my father, and he probably pulled a few strings. He’d be so frazzled, standing under me, telling me, ‘Put your wrench here, stick your bar there, push your head against the column, use your feet.’”

The biggest mistake new guys make is not listening to veterans’ tips about body position on the beam, about leverage, about avoiding pinch points so you don’t crush a finger, about always knowing what’s above and below you so someone doesn’t drop a bar on your head — or you drop one on theirs.

Beam work isn’t just physically stressful, it’s mentally stressful, says Dave. “You’re always tense, your muscles are always tight,” as you concentrate on where to grip or step next. “As soon as you get complacent, something happens.”

It doesn’t get any scarier the higher you go, he says. “It’s all kind of the same after 40 feet.” If you fall and you’re not tied to a safety line, “you probably won’t see the next day.”

“I don’t even think about falling,” says Kyle.

Most of their time in the air, they’re reading the story.

“Reading iron is anticipating where you’re going next with the next piece without yelling down to the ground,” says Kyle. “As it’s coming up, you’re looking for clips and connections — 'Ok, we just put this one in, now we’ll put this one and this one and finish the box.' There’s a lot of ins and outs. It’s like a puzzle.”

Kyle says he doesn’t mind at all getting stared at.

“I wish more women would stare at us,” he says, laughing. “Some of them seem to have blinders on.”

Kyle’s father spent 30 years as an ironworker, retiring in 2008 when he was about 50.

“He’s a pretzel now,” Kyle says. “He can’t stand up straight. Thirty years of this will do that to you.”

Dave says he probably won’t be able to retire until he’s 70 and “will have to have an out” before then.

Maybe he’ll take up another facet of the job, become a welder, or hook on like Mac.

Kyle says he isn’t one to think too far ahead. Meantime, lunch is over. Steve is climbing back into the crane, Mac and Emily are over by the pile of steel, ready to hook on. There’s another piece to make, another chapter in the story to finish.

— tmooney@providencejournal.com

(401) 277-7359

On Twitter: @mooneyprojo