In September 1932, in the middle of the Great Depression, one of the most iconic images of New York City was taken atop one of the buildings that would make up Rockefeller Center: Lunch atop a Skyscraper The Lunch on a skyscraper. In the photograph, 11 workers appear having lunch on a beam hanging 250 meters high, without security measures and showing an astonishing tranquility. The protagonists are Native Americans, Irish or Slovak immigrants and, according to all indications, there is also a Basque immigrant, Natxo Ibargüen.
The Ibargüen family had known for decades their family’s connection to this historic photograph, although the news was not made public until this week. Once the checks have been carried out, the Harresi de Balmaseda Association has released this surprising story and the particular biography of its protagonist.
The Basque Natxo Ibargüen offering fire to Matty O’Shaughnessy
“We have no doubt that it is Natxo Ibargüen. First of all, we have the testimony of one of his sons, Dani, who told his family in Euskadi decades ago. In addition, we have photographs of Ibargüen in which it is seen that he is the same person. Finally, we have verified through a registry that at that time he was living with his family in Brooklyn ”, indicates Juan Tomás Pikizu Sáez, from the Harresi Association of Balmaseda.
The Basque protagonist of Lunch on a skyscraper, Natxo Ibargüen Moneta, was born in 1899 in the Biscayan town of Balmaseda. At just 19 years old, he headed to Argentina, since he had to do military service and in all probability would be destined for the Rif War. Later, as documented by the Harresi Association, “taking advantage of a strike by English sailors, he enlisted on a ship bound for England” and settled in Bristol, from where he sailed around the world. Finally, in the early 1920s he crossed the ocean again to settle in New York.
Natxo Ibargüen, with his wife Esperanza Ojinaga and one of their children.
In the city of skyscrapers, he met Esperanza Ojinaga, an employee at the Mexican Embassy, with whom he married and had four children. In New York he began to work in construction and, already after the ‘crash of 29’, he would become the casual protagonist of one of the best-known images of the city.
After Natxo Ibargüen’s death in 1957, his wife and, shortly after, one of his sons, Dani, decided to visit their father’s land of origin and reconnected with their paternal family. From those visits, the Ibargüen family learned about Natxo’s experiences in New York and its history linked to the construction of Rockefeller Center. A story that had gone unnoticed until the Harresi Association made it public.
The image is not spontaneous, the workers were asked to pose
This photograph was taken on September 20, 1932 and first published in the New York Herald-Tribune on October 2, 1932. It is known with certainty that the place where it was taken is the RCA building at Rockefeller Center, in concrete, the 69th floor, even though many people think it is the Empire State Building.
The image does not respond to a spontaneous moment, but it is a staging. The author of the photographs asked 11 workers to pose for a photo report. However, there are doubts about the authorship of the photograph, the most founded hypotheses believe that it is Charles C. Ebbet.
The objective of the photographic report was to promote the new Rockefeller Center, which would be inaugurated in 1939. The image became an icon for its visual power and for what it was intended to symbolize: the ability to resist and reinvent itself in New York, and in the United States. in general, after the debacle of 29.
–
