Rich History

Buried in the Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives of the NYU Tamiment Library, lies a faded, typewritten document recounting the origin of the New York Building Congress. It’s a history that is known only in flashes even by the present day leaders of the organization as it prepares to celebrate its 90th anniversary.

Current NYBC president Richard T. Anderson says that “the folklore” has it that the idea for the organization – which organizes the various elements of the construction industry under the same tent – originated at an American Institute of Architects convention at Atlantic City.

In fact, NYBC founder Robert D. Kohn’s “History of the Inception of the ‘Congress’ Movement” reveals that the first organization of its kind was not a “Congress” but a “Parliament” that flourished briefly in Great Britain during the First World War, then fizzled and died before the American movement it inspired came into fruition.

Founded in 1916, the Building Trades Parliament “attempted to smooth out the difficulties of war-time building through a representative Council” of the employers and workers in the Building Trades of England and Scotland before it disintegrated three years later, Kohn wrote.

Shortly after the Armistice ended the First World War in 1919, a group of American construction companies, design firms and material supplies that worked in ship yards during the fighting met in Philadelphia to discuss how to secure similar cooperation after the war.

During that meeting, they agreed on a need for an organization based on the Parliament prototype, but the first formal meeting toward its founding occurred two years later. As “the folklore” correctly had it, that committee, led by architects, met in Atlantic City, where they set in motion the procedures and enthusiasm to found the New York Building Congress a year later.

What happened during the organization’s early years is subject to its own folklore, remembered in its essence but with essential details forgotten.

Lou Coletti, the NYBC’s president from 1986 to 1994, says that before he took office, the organization was more of a “social club.” Anderson added that leaders, before this change in the Congress, mostly “ran events and kept the liquor bottles filled.”

During the organization’s first 65 years, the NYBC had no paid staff, relying completely on volunteers with little ability to mount effective political campaigns. The archives from this time period have scant evidence of any Congressional testimony, City Hall speeches or lobbying efforts, which only became a focus of the organization when it hired its first full time and paid president in 1986.

When he first heard about this position opening up for a New York Times want-ad, Coletti, who was then a graduate student, applied for the job without expecting that he would be the person to be hired. He remembers walking into an office with “titans” like Jack Rudin, Chairman of Rudin Management, and Tishman Construction CEO John Tishman, for what he remembered as a “perfunctory” interview.

“This is a joke,” Coletti recalls thinking, adding that he expected they already had the job lined up for someone at City Hall. They contacted him for a second interview, however, and this time asked for writing samples. He remembered that the follow-up was held on a “dark, dreary day” in an office overlooking St. Patrick’s Cathedral, when he remembered thinking, “Oh my God, they’re going to offer me the job!”

When he told his wife that he would reject a Wall Street position to be the NYBC’s first full time staffer, he says she told him, “Are you crazy? You told me they didn’t have any money.”

“You had to be in that room,” Coletti says. “The sense of commitment oozed across... We set the table for what the Building Congress is today.”

Although it lacked the compensation of a Wall Street position, Coletti would soon be surprised by the influence that came with his new position. For example, he says he thought Jack Rudin overestimated a NYBC president’s clout when he gave Coletti the private phone number for then-New York City Mayor Ed Koch.

“Jack Rudin can make that phone call. Lou Coletti cannot make that phone call,” Coletti recalls telling Rudin.

In reply, Rudin dialed the number in front of him and introduced the mayor to Coletti, who picked up the receiver to listen to Koch’s collegial instructions on when and how to use his private number.

Shortly after, other major players taught Coletti not only how to speak to the powerful, but also how to snub them when the occasion warranted it.

When development meetings for Riverside South progressed too slowly, Ed Malloy, President of the Building and Construction Trades Council, grabbed Coletti and interrupted a private conversation between Donald Trump, his attorneys and Deputy Mayor Barbara Fife, telling them, “It’s 3:30 in the morning. We’ve been waiting… It’s our frickin’ turn!”

Then-Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan also received a dressing down during Coletti’s tenure. A strong industry supporter, Moynihan was outraged that he would not be allowed to speak at the podium during a 75,000-person demonstration – organized by the Building and Construction Trade Unions and emceed by Coletti – to create jobs after the 1992 real estate crash.

“Listen, Mr. Senator, leave the kid alone!” said rally organizer Peter Brennan to Moynihan, who confronted Coletti for enforcing a rule barring politicians from using the demonstration as a platform.

Although the NYBC emerged as a political advocacy force during Coletti’s tenure, the boxes of documents from before that transition occurred contain much more than empty whiskey bottles and vintage coasters.

A pamphlet distributed for the organization’s 25th anniversary memorialized one of the organization’s early efforts, an Apprenticeship Commission formed in conjunction with the Building Trades Employers’ Association and the Board of Education to provide night-school training courses for aspiring construction professionals.

“Unfortunately, but quite naturally, this very important activity died out during the Depression,” wrote the pamphlet’s author, former NYBC President Max H. Foley.

Other initiatives and accomplishments from this period lasted, such as the creation of an arbitration court preventing delay in settling disputes, a Building Code of Ethics that the New York Times originally described as a nonbinding “attempt to cure trade evils,” and a Craftsmanship Awards program meant to recognize a wide variety of construction workers.

“You can still go around New York and see wall plaques for people who got awards for being good carpenters, good masons [and] ironworkers,” Anderson says.

In the 1960s, the Congress also modernized the New York Building Code to reflect “what a building component should do rather than what it shall be,” as described in Builders of New York, a history of the organization. Four NYBC presidents worked on it, including John F. Hennessy and Bradford N. Clark, who headed the Industry Building Code Advisory Committee.

Through its series of lectures, talks and forums, one can find not only the evolution of the organization’s development, but also New York City and American history reflected from the construction industry’s perspective.

The Congress hosted a forum on “The Skyscraper” in 1926, during which opposing sides debated whether it was New York’s “Worst Enemy” or “Greatest Asset.” That same year, two speakers chimed in on the advent of the five-day work-week.

A decade later, a forum debated the Works Progress Administration in an event asking, “Do We Want More WPA?” The Congress’ official position at the time, according to an archival document, endorsed “the national policy that needy unemployed should be provided for and employment given wherever feasible,” but discouraged making it permanent.

In 1937, Nelson Rockefeller and others held an event promising to reveal what went on “Behind the Scenes at Rockefeller Center.”

During World War II, the Congress investigated the fighting on many fronts: AFL president George Meany discussed “Labor’s Responsibility in the Emergency. War correspondent Cecil Brown spoke of his personal experiences in “I’ve Seen This War,” and an army lieutenant addressed how the industry could respond to the effort in the lecture “Today’s War Production Challenge.”A decade after bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, one Prof. Hubert Alyea delivered a speech about “The Atom Bomb.”

New York City’s influential urban planner Robert Moses was a regular speaker for the Congress, emerging after World War II for an event called “The Greatest Project for the New York Area – U.N.” in 1948. Later, Moses spoke about “Rebuilding New York” after the war, told the “Story of Lincoln Square” in 1956, and confronted his detractors in a speech called “The Critics Build Nothing” in 1959.

An excerpt from The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s harshly critical biography of Moses, is clipped from a New Yorker reprint in the Congress’ archives, but it is clear that Moses was a beloved figure in the NYBC.

When Moses became a lifetime NYBC member on Oct. 27, 1966, an ode to him was read at the induction ceremony, in the style of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha.” The parody poem describes the adventures of a mighty “papoose,” who thwarts the resistance of “town-trapped people” to reconstruct New York.

“Then the keen-eyed thoughtful Moses
Spanned the city’s mighty rivers,
Spanned them high with lofty bridges
Bridges costing plenty wampum;
Peanuts when compared to progress
Progress of a noble City.”

The poem shows a few recurring themes in NYBC documents of the time: Members often felt besieged by “parochial anti-progress, anti-growth forces,” to quote one official letter; they often reaffirmed their professional pride and dismissal for their detractors through artistic outlets; and these artistic expressions were often quite creative, but occasionally lapsed toward the politically-incorrect and the “gross,” to quote Richard Anderson’s description of the now-defunct Fun and Frolic Show.

Founded in 1938, Fun and Frolic was a yearly event held by The New York Building Congress that involved cartoon contests, musical theater, drag performances and, for a time, even minstrel shows.

Throughout the 1950s, the winning cartoons found in the archives reflected a side of the construction industry that brings to mind the TV show Mad Men’s depiction of the advertising world: crude, chauvinistic and sexually charged.

One cartoon depicted a woman suggestively lying face-down on a bed with a slip above her waist, a construction site in the background out the window, and a caption that reads, “For complete satisfaction… TURNER!” [emphasis in original].

Another showed a stereotypical sultan fleeing from his harem with the punchline, “There’s enough business, but how’s the service?”

For the Christmas shows, NYBC members even hired a Broadway lyricist to pen the curtain closing numbers, Coletti says. Sheet music was found in the archives parodying “There’s No Business Like Show Business”:

“There’s no peo-ple like Con-gress peo-ple
They help make this cit-y grow;
Ev-en when they’re slowed by rules and bleed-ing hearts
They find a way to win their starts.
That’s be-cause our group has got the build-ing smarts;
It’s the way they make their dough.”

“It was a tremendous amount of effort by those volunteers, and they loved doing it,” said Coletti, who explained he decided to close it to protect the public image of the NYBC.

In the construction industry, putting forward a positive image is a difficult task when press coverage usually dwells on accidents, protests and occasional indictments.

“What constitutes ‘news’?” asks Richard Anderson, answering, “News is something out of the ordinary. Even at the safest, the best-managed jobsite is still going to be out of the ordinary. Meanwhile, the vast majority, the 98.8 percent of the activities go without a hitch. They’re well-managed sites. There are no accidents. They’re clean. They work on schedule. No one’s going to jail.”

While the NYBC has been committed since its founding to improving the industry’s image, Coletti says that the idea that the organization supports any pro-construction measure is a “misconception.”

When media and real estate mogul Mort Zuckerman tried to court NYBC’s support for a building at the current Columbus Circle site of the Time Warner Center, Coletti told him, “Mort, with all due respect, I don’t think that we can support that building. That’s one of the ugliest buildings that I saw in my life.”

According to Coletti, Zuckerman replied, “Nobody ever said that to me.”

The press, Coletti says, used NYBC’s rejection of the project to attack it until it died, but he says the Congress was never credited for taking a principled and unexpected public position opposing what would appear to be a natural ally.

Yet public image, once the Congress’s founding concern, now has declined in importance, beneath lobbying efforts, political action committees and the foundation.

Richard Anderson says that he wants the New York Building Congress to assert its industry as the city’s economic engine, which deserves public investment.

“If you take the total built environment of the industry as a whole that we try to cover, it’s 25 percent of the city’s economy, which is more than $75 billion annually,” Anderson says, explaining his figures include real estate.

By the time of centennial, Anderson has two major goals for NYBC – to hire a full time economist to display the construction industry’s economic contribution to the city and to quadruple the organization’s membership for the second time since its first surge 15 years ago.

If achieved, it would be a dramatic fulfillment of the Congress’s original vision.

Kohn wrote of its inception: “We started out with the idea that the building industry was disorganized, and the only hope for effective improvement in the industry was… through cooperation of all of its elements.”

By the centennial, Anderson aims for an NYBC that is organized beyond any point of its history, asserting its role as one-fourth of the economic engine of the city at the center of the world.