Mohawk Ironworkers Have Been Building NYC for a Century

Today, American Indians are dispersed widely throughout the New York metro area, and can claim no ethnic enclaves along the lines of Chinatown or Hasidic Jewish neighborhoods. It wasn’t always like that, however, as there was a distinctly Mohawk community throughout much of the 20th Century, centered in what is now Boerum Hill in Brooklyn (formerly North Gowanus).

The community reached its zenith in the 1950s, when some 700 Mohawk men made their homes there with their families, mostly around Nevins Street. There was a bar in the area called the Wigwam. At a church on Pacific Street, the local pastor learned to speak Mohawk so he could better minister to his flock. It was in this church that a young Louis Mofsie (now in his seventies) practiced singing and dancing with his friends; that group would later become the celebrated Thunderbird American Indian Dancers, which still perform to rave reviews. Mofsie is Hopi and Winnebago.

The economic engine behind the Mohawk community in Brooklyn was steel. Over many decades, Mohawk ironworkers played key roles in constructing New York’s built environment, having helped raise the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, the Waldorf-Astoria, the Henry Hudson Parkway, the George Washington, Triborough and Verrazano-Narrows Bridges, and the World Trade Center, among many other structures.

More recently, Mohawks worked on the AOL Time Warner towers at Columbus Circle. Mohawks were also some of the first skilled workers to comb through the rubble when the Twin Towers came down in September 2001.

High-rise work has been a tradition among some Mohawk since the mid-1800s, particularly among men from the Kahnawake (pronounced ga-nuh-WAH-gay) reservation near Montreal in Canada. Observers have suggested that the dangerous, demanding labor is a natural extension of the Mohawk’s tradition of building 200-foot longhouses. Others have pointed out that when the Mohawk first entered the business, there weren’t many other jobs available to them. Over time, the high-stakes career was often passed from fathers to sons. In the building trades, Mohawk men earned a reputation as being sure-footed and excellent workers.

But then a building bust hit the Big Apple, lasting from 1985 until 1995. There weren’t enough high-rise jobs to keep the Mohawks employed, so most returned to Canada, or sought work west and south.

When the economy picked up in the late 1990s, some Mohawk ironworkers began returning to New York job sites, where they can make $100,000 a year. Sometimes the men stay in New York through the week, often in a boarding house or cheap apartment, then drive the 400 miles to Kahnawake every weekend.