This Incredible 'Lunch Atop a Skyscraper' Bobblehead Puts All 11 Ironworkers on a Beam, Limited to 1,932 Pieces

The National Bobblehead Hall of Fame and Museum has unveiled the first bobblehead version of "Lunch atop a Skyscraper," the 1932 photograph of 11 ironworkers eating lunch on a girder 850 feet over Manhattan, in the week of the picture's 94th anniversary. All 11 men have bobbing heads, the scene is 13 inches long, and the run is limited to 1,932 numbered pieces at $100 each.

The Milwaukee museum announced the piece on Friday, September 18, timed to the anniversary of the photograph, which is traditionally dated September 20, 1932, and was made on the 69th floor of the RCA Building during the construction of Rockefeller Center. Recent research by the center's own archivist places it in the last week of that September, around the building's topping-out, so the exact day is one more thing about the picture that is not settled. The scene puts the 11 figures on a beam in front of a New York skyline backdrop, stands 7 inches tall, and is sold only through the museum's online store, with a flat $8 shipping charge per order. The museum expects the bobbleheads to ship in January 2027.

"We are thrilled to unveil this replica bobblehead scene replicating the 'Lunch atop a Skyscraper' photograph taken in New York this week in 1932," said Phil Sklar, the museum's co-founder and CEO. "Called the 'most famous picture of a lunch break in New York history,' the iconic image has become a symbol of the city's and country's resilience and determination."

The photograph the bobblehead copies is one of the most reproduced images in American history and one of the least understood. It ran in the Herald Tribune's Sunday supplement on October 2, 1932, under the caption that became its name; the picture's original title was the less memorable "Builders of the City Enjoy Luncheon." It was not a candid. The shot was staged as a publicity photograph for the new skyscraper, now known as 30 Rock, and three photographers were working on the building that day: Thomas Kelley, William Leftwich, and Charles Ebbets. Which of them pressed the shutter has never been settled, and it is not the only open question. Rockefeller Center's archivist, Christine Roussel, has put names to only two of the 11 with any certainty, Joseph Eckner and Joe Curtis; the other nine remain claims and family stories. The figure at the far right end of the beam, bottle in hand, is believed to be Gustav Popovic, a Slovak ironworker whose family found a print of the photo in his estate with a note on the back: "Don't you worry, my dear Mariska, as you can see, I'm still with bottle."

I went through all of this last month in Lunch Atop a Skyscraper: Photography's Unsolved Mystery, including the 2012 documentary "Men at Lunch" that took the search for the men and the photographer further than anyone before it, the missing construction records for a project that hired more than 40,000 workers, and the reason a picture arranged by a publicity department still reads as the most honest image of the Depression. If you want the full story of the beam, that is where it lives. The short version is that the photograph is real, the men were real ironworkers drawn from a Rockefeller Center workforce of Irish, Italian, Scandinavian, Eastern European, and German immigrants and Mohawk steelworkers, and the danger was real too, even if the lunch was scheduled.

The museum, on South 1st Street in Milwaukee's Walker's Point, opened in February 2019 and produces its own limited editions alongside custom pieces for teams and organizations. It is releasing this one as part of a series marking the country's 250th anniversary. Time magazine included the photograph in its 2016 ranking of the hundred most influential images in history, and construction crews have been recreating it on beams of their own for decades. The store link is here.

Lead image courtesy of the National Bobblehead Hall of Fame and Museum. Source.