Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Bonus Show: "The Mohawk Skywalkers Who Build New York City -- And The Former Mohawk Neighborhood In Brooklyn"

Episode Date: October 23, 2025

We make a special bonus show EVERY WEEK for Maximum Fun members. Get them all by supporting the podcast at https://maximumfun.org/join/. And please enjoy this special public release of the bonus show for Episode 267 ("Lunch Atop A Skyscraper").Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore the obviously incredibly fascinating topic of Mohawk ironworkers who build (and rebuild) New York City, the Montreal bridge project that sparked their community's ironwork traditions, and the little-known recent past of Boerum Hill.RESEARCH SOURCES:How Mohawk ‘Skywalkers’ Helped Build New York City’s Tallest Skyscrapers (History.com)A Wigwam in Brooklyn (WNYC Public Radio)Little Caughnawaga (The Brooklyn Rail)Skywalkers: A Portrait of Mohawk Ironworkers at the World Trade Center (9/11 Memorial & Museum)10 Fascinating Facts About the Photograph ‘Lunch Atop a Skyscraper’ (Mental Floss) -- this is one source repeating the claim Peter Rice might be in the photo. It's possible and not certain.Victoria Bridge (Canadian Society for Civil Engineering)When Little Italy Was Big (PBS Channel Thirteen New York City)Exhibitions: Native New York (Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian)

Hey, folks, it's Alex. This is an extra post in your feed of a SIF bonus show, and we wanted to share it for the nice reason that we got really, really good feedback about it. And also people suggested that it is a story about Native folks and why not show it to more people. Basically, every other time, a story about Native people is usually in the main show. And so you're hearing those week to week. Also, if you do love this podcast, I hope you will consider supporting it as a member at Maximumfund.org slash join, because then you do get a wild a bonus show about a story that's obviously incredibly fascinating every single week. Me and Katie are proud to make them. They also have a slightly different and sometimes looser tone than the main show, so it's a special treat. I don't know if this one's looser or not. I do think it's great. And it's an extra treat for you. Please enjoy your extra treat. We made it. We made it to the bonus episode, which means we're enormously thankful to you. your donations make secretly incredibly fascinating possible. That's why you get a whole other story that's great and weird and obviously incredibly

fascinating. Katie, this is the story of the Mohawk Skywalker's who continue to build Manhattan and the recent Mohawk neighborhood in Brooklyn. I hope Lucasfilm doesn't hear about this because they're going to get sued for calling themselves Skywalker's. Or, or make something out of it, right? Right. New Star Wars.

New Star, yeah, let's beat that horse a little more. I think we can get some good stuff out of it. I've heard the Andor is good. I haven't watched it, but I've heard it's good. Is it good? Okay. It's great and I hear every other show is not very good. Yeah, like sometimes you still do get stuff out of a dead horse and it can be good,

but it's a lot of it's going to just be kind of dead horse chunks. No, this sounds really, really cool. Cool name. I'm assuming they came up with it before Star Wars. Yeah. I think that when we talk about building America, there's like a lot of attention paid to European immigrants and then less paid to everyone else.

Yeah, yeah. To be fair, I think that we do, well, we used to, maybe not anymore, Like we did do a pretty good job in schools, at least in my school district, of confronting the way that black slaves were like basically building huge parts of America throughout a lot of history. And then after the Civil War also continued to do that without a lot of economic mobility. I just feel like we kind of gloss over everyone else. Like maybe we talk about the Irish coming and building stuff too and being.

heavily involved on railroads, but I don't remember learning about how important, like, say, Chinese immigrants were to building early America. Yeah. I don't know. It just feels weird. So I'm really excited about this because I feel like these are things that kind of, at least when I was a kid, maybe got mentioned in one sentence. And then they're like, and then look at these guys, like on a beam, kids.

That's cool. And especially the Native American element, they were already. here. And I feel like history of books act like they were removed and killed. And then other people built stuff. Yeah. But a lot of Native American people remained still alive, still here, and then helped build things. And Mohawk people built a lot of New York City. When you look at the skyline, you're seeing what Mohawk people continue to do. Not only do Mohawk people continue to be many generational families of ironworkers in New York, but recently an entire neighborhood of Brooklyn was the Mohawk neighborhood.

And I had no idea. I used to live in Brooklyn. Yeah. I found out researching this. That's wild, yeah. Key sources are one crucial source from the main show. It's a feature for history.com by journalist Tony Tecaroni K. Evans. Tecaroni K is his Mohawk name.

He's Mohawk. Bonus also cites reporting for WNYC Public Radio by Lawrence Fiorrelli, reporting for the Brooklyn Rail Independent newspaper by Isabel Lockhart. And then the spark for this is that I've been to. to the Manhattan branch of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, and they talk about this because it helped build the area. Yeah, yeah. With New York City iron workers in the picture lunch atop a skyscraper, we can't say whether or not

some of them are native, so probably not. Right. We know at least two were Irish. I also figure the PR people for Rockefeller Center probably picked people perceived as white right for the promotional value they perceived not not that that necessarily means anything right because like there are plenty of people who could pass as white who would actually be native that too and so as we said in the main show we know who four of the people are and we know two of them are irish the other two we don't know their ethnic makeup then there have been tons of claims by dozens of other people

that maybe their relative is in there and we can't confirm it and one claim is that an iron worker named Peter Rice, who was Mohawk, might be a man in the center of the picture smoking a cigarette, but that's not confirmed. It's as theoretical as most of these claims. Right. What we do know is these guys almost definitely had Mohawk co-workers or new Mohawk people in their job. Sure, yeah. Because a huge amount of Mohawk people did the ironwork to build New York City.

Amazing, yeah. And that continues to this day. Maybe the wildest story about it is that there's a lot of tributes to Mohawk Ironworkers and the broader memorials to September 11th. Oh, really? Wow. So, like, were they instrumental in constructing the World Trade Center? Yeah, it turns out that there were a lot of Mohawk Ironworkers who helped build the World Trade Center towers in the 1970s, and then either their sons or the same guys helped clean up after the attack. Yeah. Like, they both built it and hauled it away when it got destroyed.

God, yeah. It's a lot. It's a lot to think about, yeah. And then also a lot of those guys were proud to be involved in building the World Trade Center towers because it was taller than the Empire State building. And a lot of Mohawk people built the Empire State building. So they said, if we're going to replace the tallest building, let's be involved in the next tallest building. So how did this become a trend where you would have a lot of people from the Mohawk community being iron workers? Perfect question. So it started with a bridge project in the late 1800s. If people don't know the Mohawk are one of the six groups in the Confederation called the Haudenosaunee, their other name is the Iroquois. They're across especially what's now New York State and also Quebec. And the group furthest to east geographically or the Mohawk, and a lot of them were pushed out of their homes to a set of reservations in southern Quebec. And so that meant a lot of Mohawk. people were concentrated in that location near the St. Lawrence River and looking for blue-collar work. And then Canadians wanted to build bridges over the St. Lawrence. So then Mohawk people either already were ironworkers or learned it and built what was the longest railway bridge in the world when it was built in the late 1800s. It's called the Victoria Bridge. Wow. Yeah. God, I really want to learn more about the building of the railway system, that infrastructure project is nuts to think about. I'm sure in Canada as well,

but yeah, also in the U.S. Yeah, and this was a bridge where there was no bridge at all yet. It was a huge river. And so apparently did a lot to link Montreal to the U.S. and build the entire economy of Quebec and Canada. And so they have a huge role in that. It's a pretty, I think if I'm looking at the right bridge, it's a very pretty bridge. it's very long and sturdy looking to be yeah yeah it's it's not from the golden gate bridge era where you try to have big looping stuff it's a very impressive tough bridge if i'm looking yeah it's just like it's uh yeah it's cool i like it yeah and then that basically became an amazing resume for getting ironworking jobs and so then for the next few decades all over

Quebec and Northern New York, Mohawk people are doing all the ironwork to build everything. And then the second step here is in 1907, there was a bridge construction disaster. Oh, no. One of these projects, it collapsed partway through, 75 ironworkers died. Oh, geez. And of that group, 33 were a closely knit group of Kanawa K. Mohawks. And then after that, a lot of Mohawk families said, not all of our kids should be on exactly the same projects because it's dangerous work, and we could, like, lose everybody all at once, you know.

Yeah. If you are, like, sort of the community behind certain very high-risk work, just, like, losing a bunch of people all at once. Yeah, it's always been very dangerous and brave work. Yeah. And a lot of families said, let's try to convince our kids if they're going to be iron workers to, you know, work with people besides fellow Mohawks and spread out across the region. Yeah. And they did that in the early 1900s, right when Manhattan is in a huge construction boom. I see.

For really most of the rest of the century. Yeah. And that's such a tragic kind of pragmatism. Like, yeah, we don't want to lose all of our young men all at once. Yeah. It's amazing and really, it's not work I would want to do. I'm glad other people do it. No, no, no.

I mean, it's just, I mean, again, like I kind of like. Boy, oh boy. it's kind of funny because like there's like two main ways to look at it one where it's like wow these people are heroic and brave and amazing which i'm not saying they're not but it's also like yeah it's it's wild that people were in an economic position where doing this kind of dangerous work is like the best thing you can do for yourself and your family so it's like i feel like personally i feel like i hold both of those things at the same time where i like see the economic exploitation and I also see like how amazing and skilled and brave they are

at the same time. Exactly. I agree. Yeah. And they're not immigrants, but they've been put in a situation similar to a lot of new immigrants to the U.S. where you're under the thumb of everybody else and you either do dangerous work to get out of it or you don't.

And so then this creates a situation where they've been placed on reservations mostly near the Quebec and New York state border. And a lot of iron workers start doing a across New York State commute or fully just migrating where they're living between the St. Lawrence River and Brooklyn. Or they're just living in Brooklyn. And then they're doing the ironwork to build New York City. Yeah. Amazing. So because like this was like a time when you had a lot of buildings going up. Yeah.

And they could also travel up and down the Hudson River pretty easily. So it made all of that possible. and it's hard to understate how many buildings were going up. Apparently in the 1920s, about half of all the building grade steel in all of the United States went into New York City construction. Amazing, yeah. We had an entire steel industry

where half of it went into New York City skyscrapers. Yeah, I wonder how like when you look at like the distribution of construction over time because it does seem like it happened in kind of chunks, not just like a gradual building up of the city over hundreds of years. It's like, all right. And then in this like 50 year period, you had most of the buildings going up or something like that. That seems pretty wild. Yeah.

And yeah, that was New York, right? When these Mohawk folks were some of the most famous iron workers in the region. Yeah. Were people like aware of this like at the time? Were they like famous at the time? Yes and no. Like if you're in the industry, you would know because so many of your colleagues are Mohawk. And I think I said in the main show, the other big groups were Irish folks, German folks and Scandinavian folks.

But also, we've always not trumpeted the achievements of native people in the colonial United States. So in that way, no, people didn't talk about it. Interesting because, I mean, German, Irish, Scandinavian immigrants were also pretty looked down upon for a while. And then something kind of switched where the perception of them kind of changed from being like, Like, I don't know if it was exactly, you're not really American, but more just like really harmful stereotypes about various immigrants. Like, you know, the drunk Irish being like a thing where it's like, ah, you know, they're low class, they're drunks, they're violent. They're not someone we want here. Seems like that's been sort of the case whenever we have immigrants.

It's because, like, they're going to be poor often because they are coming here because out of economic need. We have all those stories, but then the stories of, you know, of tribes and Native Americans doing this just, it's almost like we just ignore it. Like, it's not even like a, you know, it's, it's weird. Yeah. All the takes are so generalizing about these groups on top of being fake. Like, they're not monoliths. They're not all one particular way, even if you thought it was a good way or something. Yeah.

They're just people. Yeah. there was also with the Mohawk ironworkers specifically there became a weird positive myth where people claim that mohawks have an innate sense of balance that is excellent and that's why they're doing the iron work yeah and it turns out no they're just people and they risked it yeah in as much risk as everybody else I think sometimes I think there's like mythologization I don't know if that's a word but like the myth like like making someone seem like a myth not human in a kind of supernatural way, they have extra senses, right? It's even if it's like a quote unquote cool thing, like, oh, they have like extra balance. Like you would think they would be like elves from Lord of the Rings or something, right? Even if it's kind of has that connotation, it's still dehumanizing because it's like, no, they're just guys doing something extremely dangerous.

And when they die, it's not like any less devastating, you know? Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it was really a self-serving myth to force those guys to do the job instead of other people. Yeah, yeah, it's not great. Like, oh, but they balance good. So, you know, it's okay. Yeah, yeah, it's, there are versions of stereotypes where it's like at first, you're like, oh, that sounds, sounds like a good attribute. And then you look into it a little bit.

It's like, oh, yeah, that's not. Yeah, because it's like, they're good at balance, like many animals. And you're like, I see. Right. Got it. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's a common theme.

Besides building the city, the other big footprint of Mohawk people in New York City is that at one point, an entire section of Brooklyn was the Mohawk neighborhood. A lot of Americans think no Native Americans exist anymore. Right. And there was an entire Mohawk neighborhood in Brooklyn. It was most thriving from the 1920s to the 1960s. It only really wound down because of gentrification and just people either stopped wishing to specifically live in a Mohawk neighborhood or couldn't afford it. Like there's still tons of Mohawk people in the city. Right, right.

But this neighborhood from the 20s to the 60s, it was called Little Kanawaga, which references the name of Kanawake near the St. Lawrence. It's like Little Ethiopia, Little Italy, Chinatown, anything. And it was located in a part of Brooklyn called Borum Hill. people who don't know New York, that doesn't mean anything. But if you're a current Brooklyn person, you know Borum Hill is a pricey and stylish place. Ah. Like a lot of cool parents with toddlers kind of thing. Right.

Brownstones, trees. I have a feeling that they might have gotten pushed out of that area, not benefited from gentrification personally. Yeah, it seems that way, yeah. Because as recently as the 1960s, it was a working class neighborhood of hundreds, if not more than a thousand Mohawk people. Right. And it was so Mohawk that the ironworkers had a dive bar that they nicknamed the wigwam. The grocery stores carried the specific corn meals for Mohawk breads. You would hear the specific Northern Iroquois dialect of Kanye and Kea on the street.

And also a guy named David Monroe Corey, he was pastor of the neighborhood's Presbyterian Church. And he learned the Mohawk language to give church services in Mohawk, even though he was an English speaker with no Mohawk. ancestry or roots. That's really interesting. There were just so many Mohawk people there. It was worth doing. That's for sure something that kind of systematic destruction of communities that occurs when people get priced out.

Because, like, I mean, like, there's a lot of, like, with gentrification, people will be like, well, what's wrong with an area being nice? It's like, well, because it's being made nice for new people who go to. to live there. And it's not necessarily like the new people's fault that this is happening, but it's like, you know, the people who used to live there don't benefit from the improvements to say infrastructure or nice new buildings. They just get, they just have to go somewhere else because they can't afford rent anymore. Yeah, exactly. Before this neighborhood was considered not so nice. It's been upgraded as these people had to leave kind of house by house. Or

brownstone by brownstone, I guess. Small economic. injuries that build up over time until the community is no longer there. That must just happen all the time. And it also seems like one additional piece is a thing that happens with a lot of working class families where sometimes they fund their child going into something more white collar or something with their extremely dedicated and hard work. And then that white collar child does not live in the same working class neighborhood. Yeah.

There's all sorts of factors that came in here. It's very complicated. Also just job availability, right? Like some kids might prefer to stay near where their families are, but then they have to go far afield. Like I think probably a lot of people our age and younger and maybe slightly older, like have that experience of like, yeah, you know, I'd love to be near family if like there were jobs there, like in my, in our field or in our industry or whatever. We're like, but you're kind of at the whims of where jobs are available. And that increasingly becomes somewhere where it's like across the country or in a different country entirely.

Big time. Yeah. So yeah, and I really like this story for how much Mohawks did to not only build New York City, but build the look of it, like that there being a skyline and the high upwork there. And I can't believe I lived not very far from Borum Hill and didn't know it used to the Mohawk neighborhood. It's not really talked about much. Yeah.

This was a thing at all. Yeah. It's cool. It's like there's this ephemeral idea of what is America, right? And part of the reason it's so ephemeral is that there's so many different people involved, you know, building and being part of America's history. And then when we get to nowadays, it's like there's definitely an attempt to make, to over, like literally like politicians.

and the Trump administration saying America was built by white Europeans. And like that is just, it's just not true. That's a lie. Yeah. Yeah. Saying it was built by any one group is fake. Like, what? Yeah.

Yes, white Europeans were involved for sure. But the idea that like this is just how it was. And God, this is definitely a tangent that we don't want to. I want to spend too much time on, but just like the idea of like, they'll start talking about the Roman Empire and then like connecting it to white Europeans. Like, what are you talking about? Like, that's not Western Europe. Anybody who starts freestyling about a simplified and them centric history is off.

Yeah. Yeah. History is really nobody centric. It's not. Yeah. There's like a lot of people. people. There's just a lot of people. There's a lot of people. And they were usually around doing things. Yeah, they existed. Yeah, it's, you know. There's not usually a group of people who

just like sat and did nothing as history was happening. That was not really a thing. So yeah, yeah. Well, that's a really cool story, though. I'm really happy to learn about it. Me too. And next time I'm around Brooklyn, I'll try to see some of this stuff. they should sue Lucasfilm for stealing the term Skywalker. Was that, like, was that a term that they used at the time to describe themselves, or is that more of a, like, modern term? Apparently amongst themselves, because, yeah, it's obviously not a traditional, traditional term prior to ironwork on skyscrapers.

They just coined it because it has the right vibe and it felt good, yeah. Do you think George Lucas got it from that? No, I think it just was parallel thinking, yeah. George Lucas did like he did do some interesting things where he was like making parallels to US history with the with Star Wars and stuff for sure so like I don't know maybe he did but yeah I've never heard any evidence that that was the case yeah and he he also kind of stole Dune and stuff I don't know what George is up to so to be fair if he stole Dune uh he made he turned Dune into a much more consumable story.

I can't blame the man for that. Like, Dune is great, but God, that is, it is a, it's a, it's not exactly a fun blockbuster hero's tale, even though they're going for it now. Well, I mean, I consider the Dune stories to be very relatable and normal. And, of course, I'm a sandworm with a human face. So. Right. Yeah.

No wonder you love to sing the Lister question songs. You got to have that rhythm. Oh. It's a Dune reference. Perfect. The thump for thing. Yeah. Yeah.

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