Eleven men sit on a narrow steel beam 850 feet above Manhattan, eating sandwiches and lighting cigarettes with no harnesses. The photograph was taken on September 20, 1932, on the 69th floor of the RCA Building, now 30 Rockefeller Plaza, at the depths of the Great Depression. This episode reveals that the seemingly candid image was a carefully orchestrated publicity stunt by Rockefeller Center management, who also had the ironworkers toss a football across the void and pretend to nap on the girder.

We dig into the mystery of the photographer, from the long-held misattribution to Lewis Hine to Tammy Ebbets Hawn's 2003 case for her father Charles C. Ebbets, and why the credit was later withdrawn because Thomas Kelley and William Leftwich were also shooting that day. We then trace the decades of family detective work that identified men like G ...