Flashback 1999: Cranes lift city's profile

Atop the future Park Hyatt in 1999 (photograph by Robert A. Davis)

     Stories can resonate for a very long time. More than 25 years after this was written, I stopped by the Park Hyatt Hotel Tuesday and had a friendly talk with the front office manager, collecting information for an out-of-left-field follow-up that will run ... at some point in the indeterminate future. 

     In our conversation, I mentioned having been on a tower crane atop the building while it was being constructed. I assumed that this article had been posted before. But it hasn't. Which is surprising, because I remember reporting it so clearly — how could you not? Particularly the moment when I suggested to ace photographer Bob Davis that he needed to climb into the little car that held the tower crane's hook lowering mechanism, have himself run out to the end, and shoot the crane operator down the length of the boom. Normally the hardiest of collaborators, in my memory, in this one instance, Bob demurred, wordlessly handing his $2,000 motor drive Nikon to me. What could I do? It was my idea. I climbed into the open car, held tight to a metal bar with one hand and to the Nikon with the other, and was shot out to the tip of the crane. That much I expected. Then the operator swept the boom in a wide arc out over the street, 700 feet above Michigan Avenue. Not a moment that leaves a fellow.

    Enough preface. The following piece is 1300 words long, almost twice the length of a column today. I hope it merits the time it takes to read; this is my favorite kind of story, filling readers in on the fascinating details of something they've seen many times and perhaps wondered about.

     The view between Mike Femali's feet will cost condo owners $1 million or more when they finally move into their luxury suites atop the Park Tower after it is completed next year.
     But for Femali, the view is not only free, he's being paid $29.60 an hour to look at the sweeping panorama from the top of Water Tower Place to the coast of Michigan on a good day.
     When he has the time.
     "It's beautiful, but to tell you the truth we never have time to even look at the view," said Femali, a veteran tower crane operator who at the moment is working 700 feet above the street, ferrying concrete panels to the roof of the new hotel; condo high-rise going up just west of the corner of Michigan and Chicago.
     These are boom times for cranes. The red-hot downtown high-rise market has brought a flock of them to roost, like their namesake birds, upon the growing steel skeletons of buildings citywide.
     "This is the most I've seen in 10 years," said Bill Tierney, vice president of Imperial Crane Services in Bridgeview.
     "There's still more going up_that's the unbelievable thing," said Mike Regal, Midwest sales manager for Morrow Crane Co., the nation's largest supplier of tower cranes. "They'll probably be 30 to 35 tower cranes in downtown Chicago by the end of the year."
     Morrow, based in Salem, Ore., has 450 tower cranes and rents them throughout the world. They're not cheap, ranging in price from $600,000 to $4.5 million for the largest models. Most construction companies rent them, though that isn't cheap either, costing up to $70,000 a month. Crane rental, erection and operation can add $1 million to the cost of a building.
     Like wine auctions and $750,000 one-bedroom condos, cranes are a sign of a robust economy.
     "Cranes are usually a pretty good indication of how the construction industry and the economy is going," said Don Sheil, of Gatwood Crane Services in Arlington Heights. "Five or six years ago you'd see maybe one or two on a rare occasion. Now you go through the city and see a dozen, 15 of them."
     There are two basic kinds of crane.
     Tower cranes are fixed — they either sit on top of a building, or are anchored three or more floors into the structure rising around them. They rise with the building, "jumping" several stories at a time through a complicated process in which the crane is jacked up with a hydraulic ram and new sections inserted. Other tower cranes rise alongside the entire length of the building.
     Mobile cranes, or crawlers, are more common and cost less to rent. They can lift heavier loads, but obviously not as high. They'd never reach, for instance, the top of the 67-story Park Tower.
     They also take up room. A construction job, particularly downtown, is a headache of logistics. Even if a crane would be large enough to reach the top of the Park Hyatt, the city would be loath to shut down Chicago Avenue so it could sit there for months and months while the building was going up. Atop buildings, tower cranes are not in the way.
     They also are safer. By law, tower cranes must "weather vane," that is, be free to spin into the wind, 360 degrees, when not in use. While the cause of the crane collapse at Illinois and Rush hasn't been determined, the long, non-spinning booms of crawling cranes take more stress from winds because they can't swing.
     That's sometimes a problem when it comes to tower cranes. Across the street from the new Park Tower is another hotel, the Peninsula, which is just starting to be built and will rise 25 stories above the Ralph Lauren store at Michigan and Chicago. One large crane in the center of the job might be cheaper to use. But because it couldn't reach all the way around the building and still weather vane without hitting the apartment building to the west, two smaller cranes are being used.
     Like every other of the 18,000 crane operators in Illinois and parts of surrounding states, Femali belongs to the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 150, based in Countryside.
     "I've been in the union 30 years," he said. The biggest change has been the pumping of concrete on construction sites. Cranes used to haul concrete up in large cauldrons.
     Femali's crane — made in Germany, like most big cranes — can lift 22,000 pounds. To try to lift more is an invitation to pull the crane off the top of the building. Cranes today use special sensors to automatically refuse to hoist anything too heavy. "It shuts off," Femali said. "These cranes are smarter than their operators."
     Crane accidents are rare but not unknown. One man was killed at the LTV Steel Co. plant in 1996 and another seriously injured when a crane dropped some roofing material on them. A concrete bucket once fell to the street during the construction of Water Tower Place. When 900 N. Michigan was being built, the heater in a crane cab caught fire. No one was hurt, but firefighters watched helplessly from the street while it burned.
     The most significant recent accident occurred in Milwaukee in July, when a 567-foot crane lifting a section of roof onto the Brewers' new Miller Park stadium collapsed, killing three workers and delaying the opening of the new ballpark.
     Even when hauling a load within limits, the end of the crane (called the jib; the part at the back is the counter-jib) can dip three feet.
     "That tightens you up a little bit because you might think it's not going to stop," said Jim Miller, assistant to the president of Local 150.
     Also scary is the occasional lightning strike.
     "We all get hit by lightning," said Femali. "It's loud. But you don't feel anything. It's all grounded."
     The hardest part about the job is that, most of the time, the operator can't see what's happening on the ground below and has to operate the lift by hand and radio commands.
     "Every time you move a load you could hurt somebody," Femali said. "Working in the blind, you don't know what they're doing down there. You have to have competent people down there — it can be stressful."
     They work in teams of two, an operator and an oiler who makes sure the bolts are tight and lines are lubricated.
     There is a lot of winking dismissal of oilers. "It's just a union thing," Regal said. "In some places it's not required."
     But oilers allow the operator to take breaks, and they play an apprentice role.
     "One of the primary things is training," Miller said. "The oiler can get to break in as an operator of the rig. Otherwise, there's no real way to get on-the-job training."
     It is an odd sort of job, but those in it tend to stay. Mike Femali's son is an operator. Ken Doogan, 49, has been one for 32 years.
     "My wife thinks I'm crazy. My twin brother wouldn't come up here," he said, standing on the windswept counter-jib of the north crane of the Park Tower. "But you should see the sunrises. They are beautiful."

     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, October 17, 1999