The image first appeared in newspapers around September 30, 1932, distributed by Acme Newspictures. The New York Herald Tribune published it on October 2 with the now-famous caption: 'Lunch Atop a Skyscraper.' No photographer was credited. For decades, it was misattributed to Lewis Hine, a Works Progress Administration photographer, largely because people assumed the building under construction was the Empire State Building. In 1998, a woman named Tami Ebbets Hahn noticed a poster of the image and suspected it was her father's work. Charles C. Ebbets had been photographic director of Rockefeller Center in 1932. She found his paycheck -- $1.50 per hour -- and a photograph of him holding a camera at what appeared to be the same location. Corbis, the image archive, initially accepted his authorship. Then researchers discovered that photographers Thomas Kelley and William Leftwich had also been present that day. The image is now officially uncredited again.

Identifying the eleven ironworkers has proven equally difficult. They were immigrant construction workers, accustomed to walking along open girders at heights that would paralyze most people. The 2012 documentary Men at Lunch confirmed two identities by cross-referencing other photographs from the same shoot: Joseph Eckner, third from the left, and Joe Curtis, third from the right. The first man on the right, holding a bottle, was identified as Slovak worker Gustav Popovic. A photograph found in his estate bore a note on the back: 'Don't you worry, my dear Mariska, as you can see I'm still with bottle.' The sixth man from the left is claimed to be Peter Rice, a Mohawk construction worker -- the photograph was once produced in court to demonstrate the Rice family's expertise in steel work at height. Numerous other claims have been made by families from Ireland to Sweden, but most remain unverified.

The photograph was a publicity stunt, but that has not diminished its power. It was taken during the Great Depression, when Rockefeller Center represented one of the few massive construction projects still underway in America. The men on the beam were among the lucky ones -- they had jobs, dangerous ones, building something monumental while the economy collapsed around them. Other photographs from the same shoot show the workers throwing a football on the beam and pretending to sleep on it. The nonchalance was the point. Ken Johnston, manager of Corbis's historic collections, put it this way: 'There's the incongruity between the action -- lunch -- and the place -- 800 feet in the air -- and that these guys are so casual about it. It's visceral: I've had people tell me they have trouble looking at it out of fear of heights.'

The original glass negative broke into five pieces at some point in its history. It now resides in a climate-controlled vault at the Iron Mountain storage facility in Pennsylvania, part of the Bettmann Archive of over eleven million images. In 2016, Visual China Group acquired the archive and licenses the photograph internationally through Getty Images. Sculptor Sergio Furnari created a 40-foot statue based on the image, which was displayed near the World Trade Center site after September 11. Time magazine included it in its 2016 list of the 100 most influential photographs. In December 2023, Rockefeller Center opened an attraction called the Beam on the sixty-ninth floor, allowing visitors to sit on a replica steel girder and recreate the pose. The photograph has been parodied, colorized, and reimagined countless times -- most recently by Time in 2025, when it replaced the workers with AI company CEOs for its Person of the Year cover.

What gives the photograph its enduring hold is not the stunt but the men. Their expressions are distinct -- some laugh, some stare ahead, one lights a cigarette. They wear caps and work boots and suspenders. You can see their characters in their postures. They are identifiable as individuals even as their actual identities remain mostly unknown. Johnston observed that 'you feel you get a very strong sense of their characters through their expressions, clothes and poses.' These were immigrant workers who risked their lives daily for wages that seem impossibly small by modern standards, building a skyline that would define a city and a century. The beam they sat on became part of 30 Rockefeller Plaza. The men who sat on it mostly disappeared into history. The photograph made them immortal anyway.