Alice Durkin, Builder of Big Things
Alice Durkin (c. 1875 – 1934) built schools, hospitals, and other large-scale projects in the New York City area. “It is always the big work that attracts me,” Durkin told the New York Times. “I like the municipal contracts best, perhaps, but then I like anything big.” She also liked competing with and beating men on the big projects. “I know lots of them must be jealous, just because I am a woman. And I do enjoy showing them that doesn’t make any difference—that a woman’s work must be considered just as work, the same as theirs!”
Durkin’s interest in building began after high school when she joined a contractor’s office as a clerk. Because of her aptitude in math and her fascination with specifications and blueprints, she quickly progressed to preparing estimates for bidding. She spent eight years with her employer and became his “right-hand man.” Durkin described her mentor as “astonished” when she announced she was leaving his company to compete against him, although she said they remained “good friends.”
Durkin knew she would face challenges in the field owing to her gender and relative youth. She joined a company for which she was secretary, treasurer, and executive head, but used the firm’s name in the letterhead and contracts. Soon after establishing this arrangement, Durkin bid on the New York Public Library project at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. Although she was not awarded the project, Durkin’s bid was just $7,000 above the successful bidder’s more than $11 million bid price, earning her the respect of her eleven competitors.
After completing almost $2 million of contracts, Durkin reorganized her business under her own name in 1913. Her projects included large public schools in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Jersey City; a dormitory and school for nursing students in Brooklyn; and a convent in Staten Island. She had between 600 and 700 men working for her in 1912.
In a time of frequent strikes and labor unrest, Durkin described working with union delegates to “reach a reasonable agreement” when grievances arose. Durkin suggested that if there were more women contractors there would be fewer strikes. “Women are more reasonable than men; they don’t care so much about standing on their dignity,” she told the New York Times.
Durkin said when she first started her business, “People seemed to think that because I was a woman I could be cheated on in several ways, could be sort of generally imposed on. But no man ever made that mistake twice.” She thought any good businesswoman with an aptitude for math and details could succeed in contracting, and hoped more women would. “Personally, it seems to me rather easier and more womanly to be putting up buildings than leaning over a washtub.”
Although a magazine described Durkin as “among the big money-earners of New York, be they men or women,” she understood that many women endured hard lives of physical labor. In 1912 Durkin told a reporter that she wanted to build and run a hospital for women who were widowed or deserted, taking care of them and their infants until the mothers could take care of them themselves. “She believes the world does not know the sufferings of women and the needs of children in cases of this sort,” a newspaper reported.
Durkin and her business dropped from the headlines after 1914. At some point she married and had a son. When Durkin died in Staten Island in 1934 at about age 59, her death certificate listed her occupation as “House Wife.” Her death notice in the Daily News, however, mentioned her career as a contractor who at one time “had more than 1,000 men on her payroll.”
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Sources:
“Woman gets Contract to Build New York Schoolhouse,” New York Times, May 5, 1912: 67.
“The Romantic but True Story of New York's Woman Contractor, and What She Has Accomplished,” The Tamany Times, June 6, 1912: 55.
Edward Hungerford, “The Feminist Movement that Cashes In,” Munsey’s Magazine, April 1914: 470-483.
Ancestry.com
“Alice Walsh,” Daily News, December 18, 1934: 40.