» "Topping out" card given to ironworkers upon completion of the A tower.
courtesy of Peter Stacey
» Map of the Mohawk communities Akwesasne and Kahnawake.

» Photographs from the WTC constuction

"I was young at the time, the height didn’t bother me. Once they put me out on the 45th floor. They tied a rope around me, and they just lowered me over the side, and I would shoot the bolts in from the outside so they could put the nuts and washers from the inside. It was a little high over the side—45 floors just with a line but I thought maybe that’s what they always do."

—Randy Horne, talking about the WTC.

"That's the thing I want for my kids the most, to speak Mohawk. I was only home weekends, so there wasn’t much time. Put the iron up. That was our life. My father told me a long time ago, try to talk Mohawk a little bit. That’s our language, try to keep it, don’t lose it."

—Bill O’Hara Oakes

"My mother's brother was a great ironworker. Her uncles, her father, my grandfather Junogate Scott, worked on the Empire State Building. My uncle worked in Brazil, in Chile, in France, he was on the San Francisco Bay Bridge. Weekends when they came home all they talked about was the jobs they was on, what they were doing, where they were traveling. It was great. Especially when you started working yourself. You could almost do the job, you were talking so much about it when you were a kid. You knew what the hell to do, no one really had to tell you."

—Peter LaFleur

"Once in a while you get stuff where you step back and—aye. You get a second thought about your next step. Especially when the wind starts. Because when you're walking a girder or anything the wind is blowing, say from the north to the nouth. You're leaning north. All of a sudden the wind stops, say a gust of wind or something like that. Now you're leaning into it, can you imagine? It stops, and you keep on going."

—Walter Beauvais

"My son fell off, I think he was up 27 stories, but he was tied off. They didn’t tell me till two weeks later. When the creator says you are going, you go. I have to think that way. If I was thinking, oh, my sons are up there, they’re going to get killed, a mother would go crazy. So I just put it out of my head. That is what they wanted to do. That isn’t what I wanted them to do, but seeing their father and grandfather do that, that’s what they want. They feel better up there than they do on the ground."

—Rosie

"Tobacco burning means that you're communicating with the creator and giving thanks to the creator. You're burning tobacco and it rises up and the creator knows that you're speaking to him truthfully and honestly and you're being thankful. So we always carry tobacco—it's just a little bit of medicine to help you. We always have it close by."

—Brad Bonaparte

"I remember fog really socking that whole place in. We got up on the work floor, the Kangaroo cranes stood at least three floors above that. You couldn’t see it, couldn’t see anything. And then you’d hear ice crashing down on the floors below. So we went back down and we reported in the office that it was too dangerous to work. That was the last time I saw the Trade Center. But that 110th floor was up."

—Peter Stacey