A new generation...
On a new frontier.
Rising into the sky
Gleaming towers of steels.
A bold new urban landscape.
That may be the world's greatest invention.
Manhattan island, New York.
This is the story of an extraordinary innovation.
The modern vertical city
One world famous icon has come to symbolize the modern American city.
But New York very nearly lost it.
It's 1885 and New York has a big problem.
A magnificent gift from one Republic to another.
Scattered across Bedloe's Island in New York harbor in 214 crates.
They contain the largest statue in the Western world
It's been donated by the people of France
to celebrate the centenary of America's Declaration of Independence
Built in Paris, broken down into 350 massive pieces
For the journey to America.
That's the problem.
The cost of reassembling it would be astronomical --
Money, New York does not have.
At least 6 other American cities are jockeying to give it a home.
New York is in danger of losing the Statue of Liberty.
Not if this man can help it.
Joseph Pulitzer, tenacious Hungarian immigrant and newspaper magnate.
He owns the biggest paper in America:
"The New York World".
And he's determined to keep Liberty in New York harbor
Through his chain of newspapers
Pulitzer launches the biggest fund-raising campaign,
Ever seen in North America.
"It would be an irrevocable disgrace
To New York city and the American republic"
"To have France send us this splendid gift"
"Without our having provided even so much as a landing place for it."
"We must raise the money!"
More than a million people read Pulitzer's papers every day
Enclosed please find 25 cents, is my contribution to...
It contains my little savings ...
...I resolved to send you the contents of the first jackpot
You will find enclosed 4 dollar
The money we saved to go to the circus with.
Donations flood in from all across America,
Rich and poor,
Pennies and nickels
5s and 10s. Even 1000s of dollars
In all, a staggering 121,000 donations.
More than enough to keep this iconic statue in New York
I think a statue is not just a statue.
I think symbols really matter
I think they signify, in a big way
In fact, may be they do more than reams and reams and reams of
Legislation and paper and print
Now the real work begins.
To hold a statue 46 meters high.
The pedestal will be the biggest concrete structure in the world
Over 200 men work through a grueling winter to complete it.
As the last of the cement dries
Workers toss in their own silver dollars for good luck.
Next, Liberty's enormous iron skeleton.
It's designed by Gustave Eiffel
Who will build famous Eiffel Tower in Paris.
The skeleton is 46 meters tall.
And with the pedestal, it's the height of a 30-story office block.
Now for the outer layer.
Wrapping around the skeletons are 28,117 kilos pounds of hand-sculpted copper
The sandal is 32 times bigger than a human foot.
Equivalent of the size of 879 shoes
Liberty's unusual
Makes safety scaffolding impossible.
So it's as difficult as it is dangerous.
They need to fix 300 pieces of copper shell to the framework
With more than 300,000 rivets.
Her robes have over 3,360 square meters of copper.
Her outstretched arm is 12.8 meters long.
A finger nail weighs 1.6 kilos.
After 6 months of hazardous construction
There's no fatalities and Liberties 5 meters face.
is finally winched into position.
It's said the sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi,
Modeled the face on his own mother.
It takes 25 years the Liberty to acidize and turn green
A functioning lighthouse until 1902
The statue's official name is: "Liberty, Enlightening the World."
At first, the symbol of the alliance and friendships
Between France, and the 13 colonies in the American Revolution.
It will come to represent much more
At the entrance to New York Harbor,
The Statue of Liberty becomes a beacon to the world
And a welcome to millions.
Later, a poem by American Emma Lazarus in Liberty's base,
Celebrates America as a land of refugees:
"Give me your tired, your poor,"
"Your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free,"
"The wretched refuse of your teeming shore."
"Send these, the homeless, tempest-toast to me,"
"I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
Over the next two decades, more than 12 million immigrants
Pass the statue of Liberty on their way to Ellis Island.
The first stop for most new Americans.
Imagine what it took for someone to leave eastern Poland or Lithuania,
Or some village in the mountains of Northern Italy
And come all the way to this strange place with nothing.
Today, more than 100 million Americans can trace the roots back to ancestors
Who came through Ellis Island.
If you go back only 150 years
In our 200-and-almost-50 years history
95% of the people were not here
They are no roots, they all came from someplace else
So, to me, America represents
The best of the human's spirit
A guidebook prepares arrivals for a new life in a new world.
"Forget your customs and ideals,"
"Select a goal and pursue it with all your might."
"You would experience a bad time"
"But sooner or later, you will achieve your goal."
"Don't take a moment's rest. Run."
And from Ellis Island, they spread out across the continent.
For the most part, Irish, Russians and Italians to big cities.
Germans to the Midwest.
Scandinavians to farmland
At the dawn of the 20th century
Eventually, there will be more Italians in New York than in Rome.
From 1880 to 1930
Nearly 24 million new immigrants arrive in the America.
A new era in US history is about to begin.
By the early 20th century
All around America cities are bursting to the seams
And look to expand in a new direction:
Up.
But building these great towers
Demands a critical ingredient that's much too expensive.
Steel.
One man will change all that.
And with it, the face of America.
Its 1872.
And Andrew Carnegie,
A Scottish immigrant to America.
Is in Sheffield, England.
He's looking at the future.
A revolutionary way to make steel.
Steel has been around for thousands of years,
But so expensive to produce, it's always been a luxury item,
2,000 years ago it's used in Oriental swords.
It is even used in designer jewelry
But America stands at the brink of a new age
To build it, they need steel-- and lots of it.
It's the only material strong enough to build these new skyscrapers.
A British inventor is showing
Carnegie a new method of producing steel.
Blast hot air through molten iron
Carbon impurities burn off
You get the wonder material
Steel...
For the first time, it can be produced quickly and inexpensively
If Carnegie can use this Bessemer process to mass-produce steel,
He can supply America.
Carnegie returns to America,
To Pittsburgh, to start building the biggest steel plant in the world
It'll be larger than 80 football fields
It's a massive gamble.
Carnegie risks everything he's got on the new plant.
But only months into construction...
Disaster.
a catastrophic stock-market collapse.
The American economy is in free fall.
he has to borrow even more money and barely scrapes through.
August 1875.
Against all odds
Carnegie's giant furnaces are ready to test.
steel production is phenomenally dangerous.
Inside, 5 tons of molten metal.
1650 degrees Celsius.
Hot enough to vaporize a man in seconds.
If it works, it will make Carnegie one of the richest men in the world
But there's a lot more at stake.
Skyscrapers, cars, washing machines, airplanes,
Even space travel,
None of it can happen if steel can't be mass-produced.
It's a success.
Carnegie is the first ever to mass-produce steel.
In America prices plummet by over 80%.
Output rockets from a few thousand tons in 1860
To 11 million by 1900.
So many American stories of success
Are diligence, are perseverance,
But there's an awful lot of luck involved too
His timing couldn't have been better
It was steel that built American cities,
It was steel that built American railroads,
It was steel that built American shipping.
By the beginning of the 20th century, he was one of the wealthiest men in America
Pittsburgh transforms from a sleepy town
To the industrial heartland of America.
Its Population triples.
Driven by a new steel railway.
Millions of tons of steel are transported across America
The raw material to build the modern city.
And the grandest of all is New York.
New York is a playground for super rich industrialists and financiers.
Widely extravagant, they smoke cigars rolled in 100 dollar bills.
Their wives' hats - studded with diamonds.
Land values are the highest in the world.
There's only one place to go
Up.
By 1902, 65 skyscrapers are being constructed in Manhattan
This is one of them.
It's called "Walking the steel."
This man is 30 stories above the street.
He's first time at this height.
No harness or safety rope.
One slip...
And he's dead.
Veterans are called "Fixers."
the novices are "Snakes"
Because working with them can be deadly.
The old hand knows just how dangerous it can be.
"The thing I hate worse than poison
"Is to take a new man when we're near the top"
"They all get used to it or get killed."
No hard hats, just an 85 meter drop
They're up here 8 hours a day
Meals when they can.
No toilet breaks.
They're called roughnecks,
European immigrants and Mohawk Indians
Many were sailors and bridge workers
So they're used to heights.
The guys balancing on the beams
I think it took a lot of bravery, I think it took a lot of skill,
A lot of physically--physically challenging,
But I also think it--you had to be a little crazy
The stakes couldn't be higher
It's a risk they're willing to take
The pay is 4 dollars a day, twice the going rate for manual labor
Foreman William Starrett sums up his dangerous job.
"Building skyscrapers is the nearest peacetime equivalent of war"
"Even to the occasional grim reality of an accident"
"Or a maimed body, even death"
"Remind us that we are fighting a war of construction"
"Against the forces of nature."
He makes it, many aren't so lucky
Two roughnecks out of five die or are disabled on the job.
Whether it's a builder or an architect
Or... whatever, whoever had the imagination to design and build
Some of the great structures of New York,
I'm inspired by.
In 1902, in New York, this is what the future looks like
the Flatiron Building.
Its triangular footprint
Determined by the junction of three streets.
The steel frame means the outside
Can be hung in sections like a suit of clothes
Now the walls don't take the weight, the steel does.
It's so radical, when people first see it
they think it will blow over and kill them.
Legal action is taken claiming
"Winds focused by this Flatiron's extreme shape"
"Damage to nearby shop"
Today it's one of America's best-loved buildings
Inside, the other breakthrough
That lets towers rise into the clouds.
The lift.
Before it, the tallest buildings stop mostly at five floors.
No more walking up stairs now, so the sky's the limit.
For the first time, the higher the floor, the higher the rent
You think it's a fairly humble invention,
But when Otis invented the first really safe elevator
It enabled the growth of the modern city, where people could come in,
Build much taller buildings, get a much higher density of people
And sure enough, by the end of the 19th century,
America's urban population has increased 87 times over.
In Chicago alone, in just 10 years,
They built 50 steel-frame buildings
And in 20 years, it's population more than doubles to almost 1.7 million
But for many, living in the shadow of these new towers
Will prove even harder than buildings them.
In America in 1890, crime and poverty are rife on the streets.
But these mavericks are about to make a difference.
In American cities gangsters, murders and thieves,
are creating fear on the streets.
News papers flash crime across the front pages.
In Chicago, you can rent a gun by the hour.
In New York, a policeman finds a list on a murdered gangster--
his rate card
Punches: 2 dollars
Nose and jaw broke: 10 dollars
ear chewed off 15 dollars.
The big job: 100 bucks and up.
Detective Bureau Chief Thomas Byrnes--
Is a man who follows his own set of rules.
He's shrewd.
And he's very tough.
Among his methods is a technique his detectives, call "The third degree."
First degree: Persuasion.
Second degree: Intimidation.
Third degree: Pain.
In 4 years, Byrnes claims he's arrested 3,300 Criminals
he solved the biggest robbery of the 19th century.
Nearly a 3 million dollar taken from the Manhattan bank.
Reporters called him the greatest crime buster
In the history of the New York City police force.
"His very manner".
"The size of him"
"His menacing shoulders and arms"
"The bark of his voice"
Pickpockets! Forgers!
Whoever cracked the safe, unscrupulous rogues
"Crooks are now afraid of their shadows."
They lead double lives.
But tracking down criminals isn't easy.
There's no identification cards.
No birth certificates or driver's licenses.
If a criminal is known in one town, he just moved to the next
Criminals are anonymous
Byrnes is tackling this problem head-on
And bringing police work into a new age.
This is his rogues gallery,
Photographs of 7,000 known lawbreakers
Using photography to identify criminals
Will change detective work forever.
Annie Reilly.
Alias Middle Annie,
Deceitful servant
The photographs are distributed to police departments around the country.
But these are more than just pictures
Byrnes is also building psychological profiles of criminals
Rufus Minor.
He comes from a very good family
It's a pity he's a thief
This is America's first attempt to create a national crime register.
A city as diverse as ours
Is going to have a significant crime problem
That you've gotta be on top of
Today, police photographs are still catching criminals.
12 million are taken every year in America alone.
And it all began with the rogue's gallery over 120 years ago
Any questions?
But crime isn't the only problem plaguing urban streets.
In many cities, slums are growing uncontrollably.
Multiple families crammed into one small tenement room.
Human waste into the streets, alleys and open courtyards
people were crowded in, there were windowless tenements.
Sometimes you had no internal plumbing.
Just provides in the basement, in the backyard
And the Lower East Side during these years
Was the single most crowded place in the entire world
Jacob Riis, Danish immigrant,
Crime reporter, photographer
He gets leads for stories from Chief Inspector Byrnes.
Now he's about to expose the hell of tenements.
Jacob Riis knows what it's like to be poor.
15 years ago, he lost his job in a stock market crash.
It's midnight, but Riis has a new technology
That will change the public perception of poverty.
An explosive powder that produces enough light
To photograph in the dark.
This is one of the first-ever photographs of slum life.
It shocks millions.
Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Jacob A.Riis
And this is how the other half live and die in New York City.
Magazines refuse to print his work
So Riis puts on his own "Magic lantern" Shows.
His mission: to show the nation's wealthy
Something they've never seen before,
filth and desperation on their doorstep.
In this block, nine dead were carried out this year alone.
Five in baby coffins.
What he demonstrated was that there is another reality,
That all that prosperity didn't trickle down all the way to the bottom,
And there was some deplorable living conditions, and this country
Was not just forced to confront those conditions
But then was moved to begin to deal with them.
Riis publishes his pictures in a book called "How the Other Half Lives."
It will sell more than 28 million copies world wide.
Within 2 decades, the worst of New York's slums are torn down
Tenements sell at auction for as a little as a dollar
Riis' campaigning forces all New York schools to build playgrounds
And landlords to install toilets inside apartments, not outside
It is the first step in tackling the slums
But as cities keep on growing, an even bigger challenge remains
In New York alone, nearly 40,000 die in one year from diseases
Because of this...
Filth.
It's 1895. A large parts of America's major cities are becoming unpleasant.
120,000 horses dump 200,000 kilos of manure.
Into the New York streets every day
Wagons are blocked by meter-high piles
Of human and animal waste
Into this world steps a man on a white horse
Colonel George Waring.
Civil War veteran,
And legendary sewer engineer,
He's the Head of New York Sanitation Department.
"The city's stinks with the emanations of putrefying organic matter"
"Black rottenness is seen and smelled on every hand"
"The crowded streets are a veritable hell."
Wearing recruits an army of
2,000 sanitation workers in white uniforms.
Some dismiss him as a crank.
They call his men "White Ducks" but Waring means business.
Tons of garbage, normally dumped into the river, is recycled
Ash becomes land fill.
Organic waste is boiled into oil and grease.
Waring's men clean 697 km of street.
Death rates decline, water quality improves.
Waring save the lives of thousands
The measure spread across America
Just 16 years after Colonel Waring,
Half of all American cities have waste collection.
By 1907, every large city in the nation has sewers.
By 1909, there are 67,642 km of sewers in America.
The battle against filth, crime and poverty has begun.
But one of the city's greatest innovations is still in its infancy
One man will change the urban landscape forever.
1879, Menlo Park, New Jersey,
51 km from New York.
Thomas Edison: inventor, entrepreneur, showman
He was taken out of school as a boy
But that won't stop him from becoming synonymous.
With inventions that define the modern era.
He pushes his team hard, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week..
In one of the world's first Research laboratories.
Generating over 1,000 patents.
The world still lights the night
In the dangers flickers of candles, gas and kerosene
Edison has a better idea
If he can get a filament to burn slowly in a vacuum
The electric light bulb
Platinum.
Edison locks himself in his lab, doesn't sleep for days
The stakes are high.
His backers have sunk 130,000 dollars into his research,
Millions in today's money.
He claimed to have gone through 6000 materials
from the plant world alone in his search for the perfect filament
Turn on the lamp, Jack
Spruce
Beard
Fish line
Thread Teak
Boxwood
Celluloid, parchment
Then something extraordinary happens.
Cardboard
A piece of carbonized cardboard burns for 300 hours.
It's going to change the way people live forever
What Edison does is nothing less than to banish the darkness.
Now think of meaning of that
Think of what that means to daily life
New Year's Eve 1879.
Edison shows off his new invention
Thousands of people flock to his lab
The Pennsylvania Railroad arranges special trains
To accommodate the crowds.
When Thomas Edison invented that light bulb, that electric light bulb,
What a-- how magical that must have been
You know, to sit there and just all of a sudden,
Without a match, without kerosene or gas, and just flip a switch and...
Light.
In just 2 years, Edison builds more than 5,000 power stations,
Generating electricity for cities like
New York, Boston, Chicago, Detroit,
St. Louis and New Orleans.
Over the next 5 years, he builds over 127,000 more
By 1902, 18 million light bulbs are in use.
The impact on America is massive.
Sports venues, factories and shops.
All can now operate at night.
And as electricity comes to the cities
More and more people arrive with it
By 1900, nearly 4 million women are working in American cities
In just 40 years, that figure has more than quadrupled
urban factories are pounding out.
75% of all consumer products in America.
Places like this, modern steel-frame buildings
Equipped with all the latest technology
Otis electric lifts, Bell telephones, Singer sewing machines.
But packing so many people into tall buildings
Is a disaster waiting to happen.
The United States is hurtling into the modern age
Cities are rising up all across the continent.
By 1909 Americans are spending nearly 23 Billion dollars a year
On ready-made clothes
This factory is producing 12,000 garments a week.
Known as shirtwaists, they're the latest fashion for the working woman.
New York City, March 25, 1911.
4:45 PM.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, 8th floor.
260 girls work here, most of them teenagers.
Someone-- we don't know who--
Tosses a match, or maybe a cigarette into the scrap bin.
Eva Harris, a seamstress, smells burning.
There's a fire, Mr. Bernstein
Production manager Samuel Bernstein grabs one of the three fire pails.
But the fire is already spreading.
There's a mad dash for the exit, but it is too narrow.
Only one at a time can pass through
It's been designed that way so their bags can be checked for stolen fabric.
There's a fire hose...
But it's not working
No water!
The only way to warn the floors above
is through the switchboard 2 floors up, on the 10th floor
Hello, switchboard?
10th floor
Fire, there's a fire.
Put me through to the 9th floor!
She drops the phone and runs to get help
The message never reaches the 9th floor.
Samuel Bernstein races up the main stairs,
To help the 160 workers trapped there.
But blocking the front door, there's a barrel of motor oil.
The girls on 9 rush to the fire escape, but it's locked.
Only 2 escape routes are left on the 9th floor.
The lift and the metal fire escape.
Kate Weiner makes it to the lift door
But she's lost her sister
"Everyone was knocking and crying for the elevator comes up.
"Suddenly the elevator came and the girls rushed in"
"I was searching for my sister, Rose, but I couldn't find her"
"The flames were coming toward me and I was being left behind"
"I felt the elevator was leaving the 9th floor for the last time"
She's the last person to get to the last lift.
More than 100 girls are left behind to die
The only escape route left
Is the metal fire escape but it collapses.
Firemen arrived with the biggest ladder in New York City
But it's 9 meters too short.
4:58 PM.
The girls trapped on the 9th floor are out of options,
In desperation...
they jump...
5.15 PM.
The entire blaze is over in less than half an hour
146 people die in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire
There's trial, but the owners walk free.
It remains the deadliest workplace disaster in in the cities history.
Until the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York in 2001.
This dramatic tragedy sparks a wave of reform,
So you begin to get new restrictions and a new conversation about what to do
To prevent this kind of tragedy from happening
But it did not stop, of course, that tragedy itself.
Unions force management to take responsibility
For the lives of their workers.
The Life Safety Code now used across America.
Is a direct result of this fire.
It's why doors now open outwards in public buildings,
Why automatic sprinkler systems or multiple exits are now the law.
America and the modern city grew up together.
Typically new, enormous and fast-paced,
The vertical city is one of the world's greatest inventions.