Turner Construction started with a $690 concrete vault in Brooklyn
Henry Chandlee Turner’s company began in 1902 with a small bank vault and grew, on concrete and big civic jobs, into a giant of American building.
New York, NY
Turner Construction’s first job was a concrete vault for the Thrift Bank in Brooklyn. It paid $690. Henry Chandlee Turner had founded the company in 1902, with an address at 11 Broadway in New York City.
Concrete carried the young company a long way. Within a few years it went from that bank vault to factory buildings and subway stairs, and later to some of the best-known addresses in New York.
More than 120 years on, Turner is among the biggest builders in the United States. According to the company, Engineering News-Record ranked it the top contractor in the country in 2024, the fourth year in a row. It has been owned by the German construction group Hochtief since 1999. Much of its history, though, turns on smaller things, like an argument over a staircase and a row of empty desks in a Cleveland office tower.
The first big break came in 1904. Robert Gair, a Scottish industrialist, hired Turner to put up several concrete buildings in Brooklyn. One of them, a plant, was recognized at the time as the largest reinforced concrete building in the United States.
Around the same time, Turner was building concrete staircases for the New York City subway. The original design called for steel. Turner made the case for concrete, and the change brought more contracts for staircases and platforms on the Interborough Rapid Transit Company’s first subway line.
The company soon spread beyond New York. It started working in Cleveland in 1906 and opened branch offices in Philadelphia in 1907, Buffalo in 1908 and Boston in 1916. Within its first 15 years it had put up buildings for Western Electric and Standard Oil. In 1910 it took its first sports contract, the promenade at Harvard Stadium. Pitt Stadium for the University of Pittsburgh followed in 1925.
Turner grew steadily from World War I to the Great Depression. Then construction collapsed. By 1933 the company’s volume had shrunk to a fraction of what it had been, and it took until 1937 to make a real recovery. During World War II it set commercial work aside and built military camps, factories and government buildings.
In 1941, Henry Turner stepped down as president and became chairman so his brother, Archie Turner, could run the company. Henry retired as chairman in 1946 and handed that post to Archie. For the new president, Archie chose Admiral Ben Moreell, the man responsible for forming the Seabees. Archie died one month after Moreell was appointed. Henry Turner lived until 1954.
The decades after the war produced the buildings people still connect with the name. Turner was one of four main contractors, along with Fuller, Slattery and Walsh, on the United Nations Secretariat Building in New York, finished in 1952. It built One Chase Manhattan Plaza. It completed Madison Square Garden in 1967 and Lincoln Center in 1969.
The company kept adding cities. Between the early 1950s and the late 1960s it opened offices in Cincinnati, Los Angeles, Cleveland and San Francisco. Atlanta, Seattle and Portland came in the 1970s. Its work in that decade included the Vanderbilt University Medical Center Hospital in 1974 and the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library in 1977.
Turner also went public. It issued over-the-counter stock in 1969, and its shares began trading on the American Stock Exchange in 1972. Howard Sinclair Turner became president in 1965 and served as chairman from 1970 to 1977, when Walter B. Shaw succeeded him. Shaw named Herbert Conant president in 1984.
The 1990s brought a run of professional sports venues. Turner finished the Rose Garden in Portland, Oregon, in 1995 and built Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1996. It completed Sports Authority Field at Mile High in 2001.
In 1999, Hochtief bought The Turner Corporation, giving Turner access to Hochtief’s operations in Australia and the United Kingdom and to its heavy construction work. In 2002, Turner expanded around Washington, D.C., by acquiring J.A. Jones-Tompkins Builders. The business became Tompkins Builders, a wholly owned Turner subsidiary. The company’s centennial that same year got a book of its own, Donald E. Wolf’s 448-page history, Turner’s First Century. By 2016, Turner had 45 offices around the world.
In 2012, Crain’s Cleveland Business found six work stations sitting dark on the 14th floor of the Hanna Building, home to Turner’s Cleveland office. They had been empty for half a year. The cubicles were a swing area, a place where field employees landed between jobs, and every member of the local field staff was out on a site. The projects ran from the $465 million Medical Mart and Convention Center in downtown Cleveland to a job replacing the high school in Westlake. Turner could shift people around as local markets and specialized projects rose and fell, and the empty desks were the proof.
The man running the office, Mark Dent, had taken charge in 2008, as the recession gripped construction in Northeast Ohio and across the country. Four years later his office had 106 full-time professional employees, up from 45. Turner’s staff of general tradesmen there had grown from five to 50.
“My timing was perfect,” Dent told Crain’s Cleveland Business in 2012.
He had come to Turner from Bowling Green State University’s construction management program and spent two years with the company in New York City before moving to Cleveland. By 2012 he had been with Turner there for 25 years. The office could point to 51 projects in the immediate vicinity of downtown.
In 2016, Turner set up the Turner Engineering Group, an in-house team of architects, engineers, designers and building technologists. At first it focused on design-build projects. As the company describes it, the group’s design managers and specialists go through a project’s design one discipline at a time, down to soil loads, thermal performance and fire exit layouts, then review what they find with the designer of record, the engineer and the owner.
The large contracts have continued. In 2020, Turner and Flatiron won a $3 billion contract to build Terminal 1 at San Diego International Airport, due for completion in 2028. With Gilbane, Turner began the Buffalo Bills’ new Highmark Stadium in Orchard Park in 2023. A joint venture of Turner and AECOM Hunt started the Tennessee Titans’ new stadium in Nashville in 2024. That one is due in 2027.
Henry Turner’s first contract was for a single concrete vault in Brooklyn. His company’s first sports job, eight years later, was a promenade at Harvard Stadium. The stadium in Orchard Park is scheduled to open for the 2026 season.