Nick Davis led a crew working on high floors at One Vanderbilt. With deep family roots in Ironworkers Local 580, he has the craft of construction in his DNA; working for Permasteelisa’s installation component, Tower, he made foreman in just five years. After observing a welder perched on a perilously cantilevered hydraulic lift 57 stories above 42nd Street, he supervised two journeymen and an apprentice in guiding curtain-wall units into place. These 1,750-pound unitized panels of steel, glass, and terracotta were brought up by elevator to the next floor below, then hoisted up one last level by crane, with a 180-degree rotary flip on a count of three right before placement, so the cable-attachment points put tension on metal rather than the ornamental terracotta spandrels.
