Ground broken for monument to immigrant sand miners
BY RHODA AMON | rhoda.amon@newsday.com
August 12, 2008
After living under four dictators in distant lands, Anthony Scopas found freedom and a job that lasted "until we ran out of sand."

Scopas, 85, was among a small cadre of former sand mine workers and families of miners who took part in groundbreaking ceremonies yesterday for a monument to thousands of immigrant workers who, over a 125-year period, moved the sand that built Manhattan's concrete canyons.

Among the widows was Maria Madeddu, who brought a portrait of her husband, Antonio, who worked for 39 years as an operating engineer, mainly loading the barges that transported the sand. She recalled waiting for five years in their native Sardinia from 1947 while her fiance labored in Port Washington to earn enough to bring her here in 1953.

Like hundreds of immigrant families, they rented a small one-bedroom cottage near the sand mining operation on Hempstead Harbor. Single men, as many as 800, were housed in barracks.

"This is special because it built New York," she said.

The bronze monument will be part of a 2-acre park surrounding the last remaining conveyor shaft through which sand was tunneled under West Shore Road to 50 waiting barges. A horseshoe walk will lead visitors to the two-part monument. Figures of three sand miners will be seen atop the shaft; in front, bronze hands will pour sand on a miniature city.

The $300,000 monument will be funded by an anonymous donor, said Leo Cimini, president of Sandminers Monument Inc.

Jon Kaiman, North Hempstead supervisor, said the town, which owns the property, decided to keep it parkland for recreation, "but we had to do something more ... It was important to recognize our history."

It will remind future generations of workers who "contributed to the United States," said George Williams, head of the town's Landmark Preservation Commission who proposed the monument in 1996.

As for Scopas, a mining engineer, he was born in 1923 near Trieste, then under Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Trieste was seized by Adolf Hitler in 1943 and claimed for Yugoslavia by Marshal Josip Tito in 1945. Scopas went to Argentina, then under Juan Perón and to the United States in 1952, where he got his "first real job" as design engineer in the sandpits in 1958.

Pointing to the town's adjoining Harbor Links Golf Course, he said, "Green hole 3 is where my office was for 25 years."


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