Life At The Top - Hearst Tower

For many years, being a window cleaner in Manhattan was regarded as one of the most dangerous occupations in the world.

Life at the Top - What a window washer sees (by Adam Higginbotham) - Abstract: Our local correspondents about window washers in Manhattan. When the architect Norman Foster initially presented sketches for the Hearst Tower, the first skyscraper approved for construction in Manhattan after September 11th, one of the questions the building’s prospective owners asked was: How are we going to clean those windows?

In early 2002, Foster + Partners’ associate architects approached Tractel-Swingstage, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of scaffolds and window-washing platforms, to provide a solution. The result, a rectangular steel box the size of a Smart car, supporting a forty-foot mast and a hydraulic boom arm attached by six strands of wire rope to a telescopic cleaning basket, houses a computer that monitors sixty-seven electromechanical safety sensors and switches, and runs around the roof of the Tower on four hundred and twenty feet of elevated steel track.

The commercial window-washing industry in New York emerged with the rise of the skyscraper, at the end of the nineteenth-century, after one Polish immigrant organized a team of expert window cleaners whom he let out on contract. By 1931, when the Empire State Building was completed, there were between two and three thousand unionized window cleaners in New York. The size of any building cleaned by scaffold is measured in drops. Every three floors, Bob Menzer and his team at the Hearst Tower anchor the wire ropes from which they’re suspended to steel buttons on the façade, to prevent the basket from being pulled away from the building by the wind.

Every three floors, Menzer and his team at the Hearst Tower anchor the wire ropes from which they’re suspended to steel buttons on the façade, to prevent the basket from being pulled away from the building by the wind.

Once the glass has been wet down with a sponge or a wand, the water is wiped away with a squeegee. Given good weather, it takes a month to clean the whole tower from top to bottom. For many years, being a window cleaner in Manhattan was regarded as one of the most dangerous occupations in the world. Today, the work of washing windows in the United States is significantly safer than driving a cab. Most injuries on the job are the result of falls (from elevation). The culture of the trade has gradually changed. Many veteran window washers no longer expect their children to pursue the occupation.

Adam Higginbotham looks at the evolution of the commercial window-washing industry, as New York City has become “a crystal garden of geometric forms and irregular shapes,” owing to advances in technology that allow for more intricately designed architecture. Since the rise of the skyscraper, at the end of the nineteenth century, when window washers simply stood outside on a window ledge and gripped the frame, the profession has become less dangerous and more efficient. Modern-day buildings such as the Hearst Tower, which features “curtain walls of glass and stainless steel hung in a diagonal grid . . . known as ‘bird’s mouths’ by the architects,” require advanced window-washing technology.

Hearst Tower’s distinctive facetted silhouette rises dramatically above Joseph Urban’s existing six-storey Art Deco building, its main spatial event a vast internal plaza, occupying the entire shell of the historic base. Designed to consume significantly less energy than a conventional New York office building, it is a model of sustainable office design.

The rig that cleans the Hearst Tower, “a rectangular steel box the size of a Smart car,” took three years to design and was finally installed at a cost of three million dollars. When Higginbotham joined the window-cleaning crew to descend the tower, “a frigid wind scythed down across Columbus Circle, humming in the rigging overhead, and each time I shifted my weight the narrow platform swayed sickeningly, like the world’s most appalling fairground ride,” he writes. Although “the work of washing windows in the United States is significantly safer than driving a cab,” Higginbotham writes, “deaths persist.”

Hearst Tower is the first building to receive a Gold LEED certified rating for core and shell and interiors in New York City. In 2012, Hearst Tower earned a Platinum LEED Rating for Existing Buildings, becoming the first building to receive both Gold and Platinum certifications.

The window washers’ union has prided itself on its safety record, due in part to its apprentice-training program, which requires all new union window cleaners to take two hundred and sixteen hours of classroom instruction, followed by three thousand hours of accredited time with an employer. But a growing number of non-union workers aren’t held to the same standards, and they “were involved in roughly two hundred accidents, more than seventy of them fatal,” between 1983 and 2008. One widow, whose husband fell from a window at 40 Fifth Avenue, said, “People don’t realize . . . being married to a window cleaner is very much like being married to a fireman or a policeman.”

But the culture of the trade has also changed. “The recession has led to less frequent cleaning cycles on the big buildings, smaller permanent crews, and layoffs,” Higginbotham writes. “Yet the work of the men with buckets apparently remains just beyond the reach of technology,” Higginbotham writes. Although a glass manufacturer has developed windows with a self-cleaning coating catalyzed by sunlight, and scientists in Germany and Japan have built a series of costly façade-cleaning robots, “neither has yet gained a foothold in New York.”

The Hearst Tower is a building located at 300 West 57th Street, 959 8th Avenue, near Columbus Circle in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, New York. It is the world headquarters of the Hearst Corporation, bringing together for the first time their numerous publications and communications companies under one roof, including, among others, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Marie Claire, Harper's Bazaar, Good Housekeeping and Seventeen.

Six Facts About Cleaning New York City Skyscraper Windows: The current issue of The New Yorker has a fascinating (and, sadly, subscription-only) article about how the windows of NYC's skyscrapers get washed. It turns out newfangled skyscraper architecture can make it difficult to use conventional window-washing methods—and that's just one of many fun facts we learned from the story. Here are five more:

1) The Empire State Building is particularly tough to clean because tenants on higher floors often throw things out of the windows. "One time," says one building window cleaner, "they threw, like, twenty gallons of strawberry preserves—and it went through ten floors, all over the windows. And it was the winter, so it froze on there and we couldn't get it off."

2) Designing a cleaning rig that could that clean the Hearst Tower took the engineers at Tractel-Swingstage three years (and around $3 million); the company's vice-president of engineering had never seen anything like what Foster and Partners' called the building's "bird's mouths."

3) A building's size is measured, for cleaning, in "drops"—"a single vertical section of the facade running from the roof to the lowest point the basket can descend." That lowest point might be a setback or other architectural feature, or it might be the ground.

4) The city's first scaffolding for window cleaning was built in 1952 and used to clean Park Avenue's Lever House.

5) Because of the way they move, most window cleaners will end up leaving a "signature" on the window glass.

6) Cleaning the windows of Manhattan skyscrapers takes a long time: "One days' work on an average drop takes around four hours; given good wather it, it takes a month to clean the whole [Hearst] tower from top to bottom. Work on larger skyscrapers in the city takes much longer: a single cleaning cycle on the eighty-story black glass curtain walls of the Time Warner Center, where the central 'canyon drop' alone descends seven hundred feet, from the roof to the fourth-floor setback, can take six men four months."