A new Seamless advert has parodied the iconic photo, Lunch atop a Skyscraper. The image known around the world shows workmen dangling above New York City in 1932, sitting on a girder of the Rockefeller Center.
The online food delivery company, Seamless, depicts two Irish workers eating lunch when one says, “Ah, look at it lads! New York City! It just doesn’t get any better than this!”
“Erm, actually it does,” his friend replies looking at his friend’s homemade sandwich. “With Seamless you can get all the best food delivered anywhere.”
A bell rings and a delivery man arrives with Seamus’s own lunch. It’s even gluten free we’re told.
Whilst the ad is a parody it can at least be said to be somewhat rooted in reality. At least two workers in the famous photo were Irish.
Cousins Pat Glynn and Patrick O'Shaughnessy adamantly maintain that two of the men in the picture were their fathers.
“Pat (Glynn) was working and noticed the picture. He saw his father looking right back at him holding the bottle,” filmaker Seán Ó Cualáin, who knew the pair, told our sister paper the Irish Voice in 2013. He tracked them down after seeing a signed copy of the photo in a bar in his native Galway.
“He went to his cousin like a child with a new toy and said he found his father.”
Glynn is wearing a hat on the right end of the beam, staring directly at the camera; he has a bottle in his left hand.
“When O'Shaughnessy saw the image he said that was the picture his father always spoke about it but at the time it wasn’t an important photograph.”
O'Shaughnessy sits second from the left getting his cigarette lit.
The two men immigrated from the parish of Shaneaglish, County Galway in the 1920s and took jobs working on the construction of the Rockefeller Center in New York City.
“Economics drove those men onto the beam in the middle of the Great Depression. Millions of people now look at that picture all over the world,” Ó Cualáin said.
Photographed on September 29, 1932, the image originally ran in the New York Herald Tribune and is now considered one of the defining images of the 20th century.
Whilst the ad is a parody it can at least be said to be somewhat rooted in reality. At least two workers in the famous photo were Irish.
Cousins Pat Glynn and Patrick O'Shaughnessy adamantly maintain that two of the men in the picture were their fathers.
“Pat (Glynn) was working and noticed the picture. He saw his father looking right back at him holding the bottle,” filmaker Seán Ó Cualáin, who knew the pair, told our sister paper the Irish Voice in 2013. He tracked them down after seeing a signed copy of the photo in a bar in his native Galway.
“He went to his cousin like a child with a new toy and said he found his father.”
Glynn is wearing a hat on the right end of the beam, staring directly at the camera; he has a bottle in his left hand.
“When O'Shaughnessy saw the image he said that was the picture his father always spoke about it but at the time it wasn’t an important photograph.”
O'Shaughnessy sits second from the left getting his cigarette lit.
The two men immigrated from the parish of Shaneaglish, County Galway in the 1920s and took jobs working on the construction of the Rockefeller Center in New York City.
“Economics drove those men onto the beam in the middle of the Great Depression. Millions of people now look at that picture all over the world,” Ó Cualáin said.
Photographed on September 29, 1932, the image originally ran in the New York Herald Tribune and is now considered one of the defining images of the 20th century.
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