Free Elizabeth Street by Laurie Fabiano Page A

least they labored standing in the cool beneath the earth. Nunzio and his co-workers entered hell each time they slithered under the tank bottom. The August sun baked the iron and the noise from the hot rivets being pounded into the metal from above created an ear-piercing, broiling torture chamber.
    Nunzio’s job was to crawl on his belly to the plate that was being riveted and position the anvil to take the blows and steady the tank bottom’s weight of two hundred tons. He felt like a worm. His mind flashed back to his fantasies of building the Flatiron Building. If he weren’t so miserable he would have laughed at the irony. He tried to cheer himself by imagining this project as one part of the web that was being spun throughout New York, spanning rivers, reaching into the sky, burrowing tunnels, and stretching in every direction. He tried even harder to convince himself that he was an important piece of this puzzle and not simply cheap Italian labor.
    Meatball had a heart attack the first week they worked under the disc, but he survived. He was now helping to sell fruit on Mulberry Street at half his paltry laborer’s wage. In the late afternoons, when Carmine and Nunzio made it back to Mulberry Street, they would head for Meatball’s cart. The garage behind his fruit stand housed Meatball’s friend’s ice truck, and he would take Nunzio and Carmine there to sit inside its cool walls and eat the bruised fruit that he had saved for them.
    Near the end of August, they finished riveting together the plates of the tank’s bottom. “Ah, just in time for winter, we’ll come aboveground,” Carmine mocked.
    They drilled holes in the plate to insert the jacks. The plan was for the scaffolding to be removed and for the jacks and screw logs to hold the bottom of the tank above the concrete floor. Nunzio noticed that Mr. Mulligan looked more worried than usual and was making many phone calls. When Nunzio couldn’t contain himself any longer, he asked what the procedure was going to be for lowering the structure onto the floor. One of the foremen grabbed him by the shoulders and yelled inches from his face, “Stop asking stupid questions!”
    In that instant, Nunzio realized the question wasn’t stupid, and he was not the only one who didn’t understand the mechanics of how this disc was to be lowered. Work slowed for a day or two, and another man in a suit showed up. Supervisor Mulligan and the man went into the construction office. Supplies were stored near the office door, so Nunzio walked over pretending to need a new drill bit.
    “Mulligan, we’ve got six jobs to worry about. If you can’t handle this one, let us know,” was the first and last thing Nunzio heard before a foreman walked by and snapped, “What are you doing? You’re supposed to have a runner get that.”
    Lowering the disc to its surface could be put off no longer. On the morning of September 2, the men arrived at work and were surprised to see an additional crew of twenty-five laborers on site. Mulligan called all the foremen and lead men together.
    “Alright, we’re going to lower this baby to the bottom today. I want one man to every two jacks and one to every screw log. We got extra men here to help. Take it down. Slow as you need to. And we’ll need a few men underneath to oil the cups of the jacks.”
    Go underneath when it was being lowered? Even the company’s foremen were stunned. Mulligan answered the silence. “The head engineer says that unless those jacks are oiled she’s not going to come down smooth and easy.” The silence continued, and eventually so did Mulligan.
    “Okay, let’s try it without men below the disc and see how it goes.”
    The men, including Nunzio and Pretty Boy, who was now also a lead man, broke from the circle relieved and went to round up the crews to work the jacks and screw logs. By ten o’clock the disc had been lowered two inches in a tedious, arduous process. The jacks and men groaned from the