Lunch atop a Skyscraper – A sandwich at 69 stories high

Taken by photographer Charles C. Ebbets on September 29, 1932, Lunch atop a Skyscraper is an iconic black-and-white image capturing eleven construction workers dining on a steel girder 69 stories above New York City. Staged during the final months of the RCA Building’s construction at Rockefeller Center, the photograph was published shortly after in the New York Herald Tribune. Despite its massive popularity as a poster, the image was often misattributed to Lewis Hine or listed as “Unknown” for decades; it wasn’t until a 2003 investigation that the Bettmann Archive officially recognised Ebbets as the creator behind this daring piece of American history.