Flashback 1992: High voltage

On the west communications mast of the John Hancock Building in 1992. (Photo by Robert A. Davis)

     Wednesday is the 30th anniversary of my regular column first appearing in the Sun-Times, and I prepared a list of all-time favorite columns to post today. Looking for something to illustrate it, I came across this photo — from before I was a columnist, true, but reflecting a certain spirit. And I realized, much as I like to paint the years beforehand as being spent slumped in the corner of a late night newsroom, waiting for something to burn down, that wasn't entirely the situation. There was fun and adventure too, such as this story — which I somehow never posted before. The list can wait until Thursday.

     A hundred and thirty floors above downtown Chicago, the city is utterly quiet. No car horns, no grinding truck gears, no sirens. Only the endless howling of the wind.
     And, of course, the voices of the workmen, as they scramble over the twin communications masts of the John Hancock Building, which are receiving a rare refurbishing after years of exposure to the brutal elements.
     To hear the workmen's voices, before the wind carries their words away, you must climb up onto the masts, higher than most people care to go.
     "We don't get many visitors," says a paint-spattered Greg Teeters, coming down from a night spent on the towers.
     They work mostly at night because the television and radio antennas lining the masts have power going through them. Those antennas could cook somebody. But shutting off the power is not always easy. During ratings sweeps week, one TV station refused to cut transmission and work had to be suspended.
     The antennas are shaped strangely — a pair of interlocking, curved sausages; a batwing grill; several giant snare drums; a few clusters of boxes. Some stick out at right angles. They act like vocal cords for the wind.
     "You hear it singing," said Phil Elliot, one of the workmen on the site. "Boy, it's pretty wild."
     About two dozen workers are taking part in some aspect of the project. Most are ironworkers, familiar with working where a misstep means instant death. All say that focusing your attention on safety and work, and ignoring the height and danger, is key.
     "You don't think about it, that's the thing. You just do it," said William "Bud" Mudd. "You start thinking about it, you screw up."
     The work, which began in early August, was divided into three stages. First, the red beacons atop the masts were replaced. The 2 1/2 foot-tall aviation beacons, 1,455 feet, 6 inches above the street, had been untouched since the building was dedicated in July, 1968. They had not burned out, but 24 years of weather faded their glow and corroded their circuits.
     Next, the tops of the towers were painted, for the first time in 14 years, by workers wearing lifelines, with plastic half-gallon jugs of paint hanging off their belts. This was the phase where winds caused delays. The project was to have wrapped up about now, but will continue for several more weeks.
      The last phase of work is being done now on scaffolding at the base of the masts. The bases are more accessible than the tops, so have been painted several times. Old layers of paint are scraped off before the new can be applied.
     Here came more delay, as the scaffolding crews, unused to the height and the winds, stopped work under conditions ironworkers didn't blink at.
     For a layman setting out to climb the towers, the journey is both fearsome and incredible. The Hancock elevator makes its final stop at the 98th floor, which is jammed with pumps and wild electrical gear, such as 3,000-amp fuses the size of tomato juice cans. Their elements are packed in sand to reduce the damage when they blow up.
     A stairway to the 99th floor reveals television equipment — big steel cases, marked with network logos. Another stair leads to the 100th floor — the roof — where air-conditioner steam floats out of giant, 10-foot-wide horizontal fans, slowly turning. Atop the boxlike "penthouse," a grove of white pole antennas, faintly visible from the ground, waves like bamboo in the strong wind.
     To go further, you must climb. Hand over hand, up a ladder, about 400 feet from the roof to the top beacon. At first you are inside a roomy metal cylinder — the white solid base of the mast, as seen from the ground. Inside, it is hot, and you are surrounded by conduits and naked copper pipes.
     After about 100 feet, you clear the cylinder, exit a hatch, and are outside, surrounded by the triangular structure of the middle section of the tower. Even in summer, the metal chills your hands.
     The climb through the triangular structure seems frightening only until the final ascent: a free-climb scramble up a narrow set of metal pegs jutting out of the thin pipe that tops each mast. It is not for the faint at heart.
     "Tower people have to be a unique kind of person," says Seth Elliot, president of Communications Site Management, the company overseeing the project. "Not totally insane — if you got crazy people, you've got a problem. They need to be calm, cool and collected, but with a certain degree of bravado. It's hard to find people to do that kind of thing."

            — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Oct. 4, 1992