In 1949, New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell described Mohawks as “the most footloose Indians,” and, quotes an official of the Dominion Bridge Company, the first company to hire Mohawks to do ironwork in the 1880s as saying “that putting riveting tools in their hands was like putting ham with eggs.” At its peak in the late 1950s, there were 800 Mohawk ironworkers living in North Gowanus in a neighborhood nicknamed Little Kahnawake. They made up about 15 percent of ironworkers then. Today, they make up about 10 percent. “Virtually every skyscraper … has been built by Mohawk and other Iroquois ironworkers including the new Time Warner building…Rockefeller Center, Empire State building, Chrysler, all these skyscrapers, virtually all the bridges,” said Robert Venables, a historian and former Director of Cornell University’s American Indian studies program.
Posted on: Tue, 11 Jun 2013 17:50:26 +0000