WHAT TIME FORGOT AND WE REMEMBER

(Excerpts from Electrical

Union World, Oct. 1,1962)

TIME Magazine of Sept. 28 contained a gorgeous 12-page section of color photographs depicting the fantastic amount of construction which has overwhelmed New York City in the last five years. Page after page showed superb photographs of vast new skyscrapers, airline terminals, Lincoln Center, housing developments, slum clearance projects, power plants, big stores, all of which have transformed the face of our city. We congratulate TIME on a strikingly beautiful job of color printing, photography, writing and editing and research.

Just one little demurrer. TIME credited the builders, architects, designers, planners for this unprecedented achievement. Only one group went unmentioned, the men who built these edifices—the bricklayers, ironworkers, plumbers, electricians, carpenters, painters, operating engineers, lathers, in short, the building tradesmen, those who brave freezing weather, driving rains, torrid sunshine and who sometimes gamble—and lose—life and limb to erect these grandiose edifices.

This is no invidious criticism. In referring to TIME’S omission, we express the normal desire of a labor paper to give an identity to the thousands of building tradesmen who helped make all this splendor possible. Perhaps these men will someday be forgotten like the faceless helots who built the awesome pyramids of Egypt, the beehive tomb at Mycenae, the Temple of Apollo at Baalbek, the Great Wall of China, those slaves of inscrutable tyrannies who toiled without recompense.

It seems to us worth noting that the men who built the New York buildings are free men, free trade unionists who send their children to college, who live in decent homes, who study after working hours to keep up with changing technology and modern invention, who have first names and last names, who have the right to vote and the right to protest, whose ancestors turned trackless forests into overlush wheatfields, prairies into grazing lands.

So give three cheers for the splendid color portfolio and then one cheer more for the men without whom there can be neither building booms nor color portraits about building booms.

A belated but rousing three cheers for all the men who make the skyscrapers soar.—ED.