Milwaukee museum recreates ‘Lunch atop a Skyscraper’ as an 11-head bobblehead

The National Bobblehead Hall of Fame and Museum turned Lunch atop a Skyscraper, the 1932 photograph of 11 ironworkers eating lunch on a steel beam 850 feet above the street, into a bobblehead with 11 bobbing heads.

The Milwaukee museum unveiled the piece Friday, two days before the September 20 anniversary of the photo taken during Rockefeller Center's construction.

It is a single scene, not 11 separate figures. All 11 men sit on one beam against the New York skyline, and each head bobbles.

“All 11 of their heads bobble and it replicates the iconic photograph very closely,” museum co-founder Phil Sklar told Urgent Matter.

Each piece costs $100, plus a flat $8 shipping charge per order. The bobbleheads are individually numbered to 1,932, the year of the photograph, and sold exclusively through the museum’s online store. Shipping is expected in January.

Sklar said the image had been on his bobblehead list for years.

“I’ve always been inspired by the image and added it to a list of bobblehead ideas several years ago,” he told Urgent Matter. “When we visited Rockefeller Center in 2025 and learned a bit more about the history of the photo, we bumped it up on the list.”

He said the prototype arrived last week and the complexity of the 11-figure scene made it slower to develop than most of the museum’s bobbleheads. Asked who owns or licensed the photograph, Sklar said it is now in the public domain.

The photograph is widely treated as public domain because it was published in the United States in 1932 and its copyright was never renewed. Wikimedia Commons hosts it as a public-domain work.

It has been sold commercially for decades. Corbis Images owned the rights to the original glass negative from 1995 to 2016, then sold its archive to Visual China Group, which licenses images through Getty Images, Mental Floss reported.

The museum’s release recounted the image’s history, saying it was staged as a publicity shot during construction of the RCA Building’s 69th floor, now 30 Rock, as part of a campaign promoting the skyscraper.

The photo ran in the Sunday supplement of the New York Herald Tribune on October 2, 1932, and has been known as Builders of the City Enjoy Luncheon, Lunch on a Beam and Men on a Beam.

The men’s identities remain largely unconfirmed. No work records survive from Rockefeller Center construction, which employed more than 40,000 people, the release said.

The 2012 documentary Men at Lunch identified two of the 11 by matching them to other photos taken the same day: Joseph Eckner, third from the left, and Joe Curtis, third from the right. Rockefeller Center archivist Christine Roussel assisted the identifications, and the release said she has confirmed only those two.

Three photographers — Charles Ebbets, Thomas Kelley and William Leftwich — were present the day the picture was taken. It is unclear which of them shot it.

The image was credited to Charles C. Ebbets for years. Corbis, which then controlled the photo, hired a research firm in 2003 to settle the attribution after Ebbets’s daughter pressed his case, but the inquiry did not resolve it, Fstoppers reported.

Numerous other claims about the men’s identities have surfaced over the years, the release said, citing a New York Post survey.

The man on the far right, holding a bottle, has been identified as Slovak worker Gustav “Gusti” Popovic. The release said the photo was found 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.”

The sixth man from the left has been claimed as Peter Rice, a Mohawk ironworker and great-grandfather of Burton Rice of Rice Mohawk Steel, the release said. The crew included Irish, Italian, Scandinavian, Eastern European and German immigrants, along with Mohawk ironworkers from Canada.

Time included the photo on its 2016 list of the 100 most influential images. Construction workers have often recreated it.

“This one-of-a-kind bobblehead scene will be a valuable keepsake for both New Yorkers and fans of the famous photo,” Sklar said in the release.

The National Bobblehead Hall of Fame and Museum, at 170 S. 1st St. in Milwaukee, opened to the public in February 2019 and also produces custom bobbleheads for retail sale and for organizations and teams.

Urgent Matter is reader-supported. Please consider subscribing to support independent arts journalism.