Free City of Light by Lauren Belfer Page A

State Building were surprising additions to the park. The other park buildings, such as the boathouse and the bandstand, had been designed by Olmsted’s partner Calvert Vaux, and they retreated into the trees, leaving nature preeminent. But these two edifices dominated their hillsides as if trying to prove that man, not nature, was the most noble creation on earth.
    The gallery looked far less than noble this afternoon, however. Idled, horse-drawn delivery wagons surrounded it. A disordered collection of union men on strike marched back and forth in the mud. Some of their placards advertised the various socialist workers’ parties.
    Here and there on the construction site, Negro men labored, self-consciously ignoring the shouts of the unionists. The Negroes were strikebreakers, of course; unions did not accept Negroes as members.
    As I continued down the park roadway in the direction of the ornamental lake, I heard the protesters shouting at one another in languages incomprehensible to me. I spoke German, French, and Italian, but I couldn’t even identify the languages these men were speaking. Hungarian, perhaps, or Slovak.
    Reading the placards, I did understand that today’s strikers were stonemasons and plumbers. The gallery’s construction had been plagued by strikes, and people now accepted that the Albright would not be completed in time for the exposition. Whispered jokes claimed that Mr. Albright himself arranged the strikes, to deflect attention from the fact that he couldn’t afford to pay for the marble needed to complete the project. I had personal reasons for hoping these whispers weren’t true: Mr. Albright, the man who’d sponsored Tom at college and encouraged him to come to Buffalo (and who was also Grace’s godfather), was on the Macaulay board of trustees. I didn’t want to lose his yearly donations.
    I was about to cross the roadway when one of the strikers, a thin, small man with a neat beard, broke ranks and, still holding his union sign, ran across a field of metal pipes. Without warning he began to beat a colored worker. The colored man attempted to shield his head with crossed arms. Again and again, the striker lifted his placard as a weapon. Blood began to pour down the face of the colored man. Other Negroes ran from far-flung parts of the construction site to help, but they were so few compared to the strikers who now joined their comrade, shoving the Negroes aside, that nothing could be done. Two foremen, recognizable because they wore neckties with their work clothes, observed from a safe distance.
    The colored man was now on the ground. All I could see of him were his trousers, dirty and gray.
    What could I do?
    What could I do?
    I glanced around for assistance but saw no one.
    In a sick agony of helplessness, I turned away. I had read about incidents like this—many incidents like this—in the past few years, but I had never seen one. I felt as if there were a private civil war going on in the nation, one that people like me were sheltered from. Should I have thrown myself between the colored man and the striker? Would that have been courageous, or foolhardy? How could I judge? How do any of us make the judgment of how far to place ourselves at risk to help others? Finally I spotted a lanky police officer lounging nearby. He gave me a lopsided grin and shook his head, as if to say, what will these savages think of next?
    Shaken, trying to close my mind to the shouts reverberating behind me, I crossed the road and walked toward the broad flight of stairs leading down to the water, struggling to keep my steps straight and steady. I tried once more to surrender to Olmsted’s vision as it spread before me: the lake, curved and meandering; the bare trees, thick upon the hillsides; and on the distant shore, about a half-mile away, Forest Lawn Cemetery steeply rising, stone angels reaching their arms to heaven.
    Down on the lakeshore promenade, barricades blocked access to the ice as