Recent Press for the Sandminers Monument, Inc.

Sandminers Monument, Inc. recently began the construction of several updates to the monument, which they plan to have completed by the end of the month. The Sandminers Monument, located on West Shore Road just north of Northern Boulevard, was unveiled on September 25, 2010. The current construction, however, is the final piece of the initial proposal of the foundation. Thus, once the updates are finalized, Sandminers Monument, Inc. will cease to exist and the land granted by the town board in March of 2005 to the foundation will return to the Town of North Hempstead. The Board of Directors of Sandminers Monument, Inc. hopes to hold an additional unveiling of the monument in the upcoming months.

A new bronze plaque lies under the three statues commemorating the work of all sand miners.

Additionally, the parking lot has been repaved to allow for three newly marked parking spaces and one handicap spot. Two stonewalls, one small wall with a sign introducing the monument and one large wall with another bronze plaque, are to be placed in the site of the monument.

One of the major problems the directors found with the original construction of the monument was its inaccessibility to the public. The original gate to the site was constructed in 1972 during operations of the Colonial Sand and Stone Company, the last company to use the site for sand mining. The significance of the first gate to the history of sand mining in Port Washington was undeniable. However, the original welder of the gate, Carmine Meluzio, is also an honorary director of the foundation and agreed to refurbish the gate and hinge. The original gate will be cut and permanently set open.

Funding for the new constructions extend from the original, private donations to the foundation, a major contributor, Kenneth Langone, and the land from the Town of North Hempstead.

Leo Cimini, chairperson and member of the board of directors of Sandminers Monument, Inc. cannot overemphasize the importance of the history of the sand miners to Port Washington. And that history is demonstrated in every aspect of the monument. Six large timeline plaques guide viewers through the individual lives and stories of the men who helped to mine over 140 million cubic yards of sand or 90 percent of the concrete used in the New York City skyline.

The updates to the Sandminers Monument are symbolic to the history of the site as a whole. The monument is built around two pre-existing, historical structures, the gate and the tunnel, which were modernized and refurbished only to commemorate and educate. As viewers move throughout the site it becomes clear that the monument was erected geographically in the center of history, and as far as Cimini knows the only one ever to be dedicated to these workers. He believes this is, “something to be proud of,” not only for the foundation but also for Port Washington.

On Monday, Aug. 11 at 10 a.m. the Sandminers Monument committee will be holding a groundbreaking ceremony to be held on site on West Shore Road.

They will be inaugurating the ground clearing and preparation of the monument and piazza for a projected placement (Spring '09) of renowned sculptor Edward Jonas' tribute monument to the sandminer laborer.

Funding for this project has been largely obtained by a large private donation and individual contributions by the community over the past four years. Another fundraiser is planned for next spring and they are still soliciting contributions for personalized family and memorial plaques and bricks. Anyone interested can call Leo Cimini at 883-3826 or www.sandminers.com.
About the Monument

The maquette (photo) shows a diorama positioned in front of the last vestige of Port's vast sand mining operations; a remnant shaft opening that conveyed washed sand and sorted gravel toward Hempstead Harbor onto barges, then onward to New York City. Workman's hands are symbolically pouring Cow Bay Sand onto the lower tip of Manhattan to portray Port Washington's unique role in the building of the Empire City's skyscrapers, tunnels and sidewalks alike. Staged atop the shaft are bronze statues of three immigrant workmen who now hold a place of prominence and respect in gratitude for their long hours of hard labor under extreme outdoor working conditions year round. This monument may indeed be pre-eminent in all the U. S. A. to honor the common laborer and maverick industrialist. Port has a proud and important mining history that needs to be excavated from descendant memories and news chronicles of the past.

Concurrently, the committee has received enthusiastic support from local schools and teacher retirees who wish to expand upon the Port Washington Public Library's cache of documents, photos and recorded oral interviews, ( www.pwpl.org, Sand and City web link) begun at the eclipse of the working mines in the early '80s, to continue to uncover and develop a local history curricula of this legendary mining and labor legacy.

Please come and witness this celebration of getting under way with this monument tribute to our worker past. The community at large, invited supporters, county and town supervisors and other officials are asked to please park at the Harbor Links Executive Golf Course Parking lot and walk from within the course onto the site.

Shifting Sands and Fortunes
Immigrants toiling in Port Washington's sand pits help create Manhattan's canyons

The story is told of the Italian immigrant in the late 1800s in New York who learned three things on arrival: ``First, the streets aren't paved with gold. Second, they aren't paved at all. And third, you're expected to pave them.''

The thousands of immigrants who came to work in the sand mines on the Port Washington peninsula could claim to have a hand in paving the streets of Manhattan as well as building skyscrapers, bridges and subways. From the late 1860s through the 1980s, more than 200 million tons of sand were dug from the peninsula and ferried to the concrete mixers of the burgeoning city.

The story of Cow Bay Sand, as it was called, began 20,000 years ago when the glaciers that formed Long Island retreated, leaving mounds of glacial sand and gravel. This is not the powdery stuff found on beaches but a mixture of grain sizes and shapes. ``It has life in it . . . just the right combination of coarse and fine grains for making concrete,'' sandminer Al Marino told Elly Shodell for a Port Washington Library oral history called ``Particles of the Past, Sandmining on Long Island 1870s-1980s.''

Another factor was cheap transportation. The Port Washington peninsula juts into Long Island Sound 17 miles east of Manhattan. By the 1920s, 50 barges a day left Hempstead Harbor delivering thousands of yards of sand.

Sandmining started in 1865 on the western rim of the peninsula and moved to the eastern shore, where tall bluffs stretched for almost three miles. The work was low-paying and dangerous, and miners were recruited from Nova Scotia and Europe.

Pockets of sandmining developed all over Long Island, in Huntington, Northport and Oyster Bay, but Port Washington was the major center.

While the industry fed the local economy, there were outcries against the gouging of the land. In the '50s, when the post-World War II building boom caused a spurt in sandmining, Francis Wood, a Newsday reporter who lived in Port Washington, wrote a series called ``The Rape of Long Island.'' ''We're being gouged, chewed, gobbled up, torn, flattened and shoveled away - in broad daylight,'' Wood wrote.

Large sections of Port Washington were leveled, according to geodetic surveys. ``Port Washington before sandmining probably resembled present day Sea Cliff with 80-foot cliffs dropping off at the water's edge,'' local historian Mitch Carucci wrote in a study of peninsula sandmining.

Early sandmining had minor impact. The sand was shoveled onto wheelbarrows to schooners and scows beached at low tide. The vessels would return with a load of horse manure for peninsula farmers. As technology advanced in the 1900s, sand was moved on rail cars to the processing area, later by giant conveyors tunneled under West Shore Road to waiting barges. Movie companies used the sand canyons for western desert scenes.

Sandmining became Nassau County's largest industry. As many as 800 workers were housed in barracks on the Port Washington sand banks. Some brought their families to live in company-owned cottages rented for $3 to $5 a month. Marino recalled that his father rented small houses to immigrant families who would buy their groceries from his store. The Goodwin-Gallagher Sand Co., once the largest in the world, built a school for miners' children in 1916.

The work was no picnic. Death from cave-ins was a constant threat. When an accident occurred, usually on sand cliffs cut back too sharply, all work stopped and men would come running from all the sand banks to dig for hours for the victims.

Though townspeople didn't want the jobs, resentment against foreign labor surfaced. In 1908, Italian workers staged a walkout demanding an increase of 25 cents over their $1.50 for a 12-hour day. The strike was broken in five days when the sheriff deputized 150 firemen and the sand companies hired 50 men from the Federal Detective Agency in New York City. Strikers were arrested, fired and fined $10 to $40 for ``disorderly conduct.'' Polish replacements were brought in.

Meanwhile, once-deep Hempstead Harbor was filling with silt discharged from the sand washers. Political influence was charged as town officials ignored residents' protests. The sand companies, who occupied half the shore by 1909, were granted 25-year leases to build docks and charged $25 to $100, an ``absurdly low figure even in those days,'' Carucci said.

Francis Wood in 1956 found that town ordinances to govern the sand companies were ignored and permit fees were never collected. ``You can't stop a man from digging a hole on his own property,'' then-North Hempstead Town Attorney James Dowsey Jr. told Wood. ``But what if a man digs a hole a couple of miles wide and 100 feet deep?'' Wood inquired.

If Town Hall was silent about sandmining, so were local newspapers. Another industry, housing, was taking hold, and sandmining didn't fit into the promotion of a tranquil suburban community. The sand companies themselves realized the potential profit in real estate development. Gallagher sold property to Miami Beach developer Carl Fisher for 20 exclusive summer homes.

Residents who complained about harbor damage as early as 1893 were told they would have the shore back in 25 years.

``The Rape'' that began in the 1860s would continue for some 125 years, until the sand banks were exhausted. The last company turned out the lights in the early 1990s.

TWENTY thousand years ago, the glaciers that formed Long Island retreated. The sand that covered the shores of what became Port Washington had a mixture of grain sizes and shapes, different from that typically found along the Island's Atlantic shoreline. Because of this quality, it packed together easily, and was well suited for making concrete. Years later, an industry grew.

Sand mining sprung up in Port Washington in the 1870's, when New York City's subways, skyscrapers, highways and bridges were first being built. The concrete of New York's infrastructure and buildings -- including the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, the World Trade Center, the Queensborough Bridge, the F.D.R. Drive and the West Side Highway -- contain some of the 140 million cubic yards of Port Washington sand mined over the years.

There were sand mines in Oyster Bay, Northport and Huntington, all part of a local industry that at its height supported dozens of companies, among them Colonial Sand and Stone, Metropolitan Sand and McCormack Sand, and thousands of miners. But Port Washington, with the largest sandbank east of the Mississippi River and easy barge access to New York City, New Jersey and Connecticut, was the center of the business.

''It was good sand, perfect for concrete,'' said 88-year-old John Murro, who worked in the mines for more than 40 years.

The industry faded by the 1980's, and North Hempstead now owns the land, which is mostly brush. Part of it is the Harbor Links Golf Course. But many here still remember the mines and miners. And those memories have inspired a local community group and a local artist to develop a plan for a monument.

The group, the Sandminers Monument Inc., has won the support of Jon Kaiman, North Hempstead's town supervisor, to build a memorial on part of the former site of the mines, along West Shore Road, adjacent to the golf course, in Port Washington.

''It will not only recognize the industry's influence on the local economy,'' Mr. Kaiman said, ''but it will memorialize a piece of our heritage and recognize the workers who had a hand in creating New York City.''

If the town board approves the plan, fund-raising will begin, said the group's lawyer, Robert Klugman. He said the fund-raising campaign would target both state and federal agencies. At least $100,000 is needed, he said.

Mr. Kaiman and Fred Pollack, a North Hempstead town councilman, plan to present the proposal to the town board in February, along with other preservation plans. Mr. Kaiman said he expected the board to approve the proposal.

The mines and the workers, mostly immigrants from Italy, Poland and Scandinavia, are a source of pride around here.

''If we don't do something to remember these workers, then people will forget them, and it will be as if nothing ever happened here,'' said Leo Cimini, president of the group that pushed for the memorial.

Mr. Cimini, of Port Washington, did not work in the sand pits, but said that as a former president of the local Sons of Italy chapter, and resident of the town since 1969, he has long been aware of the mines and their history.

The memorial is to be designed by Lauren Garofalo, 22, a graphic designer who grew up and lives in Port Washington. It will consist of a six-foot sculpture of an 1890's sand miner pushing a wheelbarrow filled with sand. Emerging from the sand will be the New York City skyline.

Ms. Garofalo, who is not being paid for her work, said the design had originated as an assignment for a graphics class she was taking while at Bennington College in Vermont. The assignment called for the design of a memorial. Ms. Garofalo discussed the project with her parents and older sister, who suggested she design a monument to the sand miners who worked in her hometown.

''It would be a dream to have something I worked on actually be built,'' Ms. Garofalo said.
Her professor liked the idea and her work and suggested Ms. Garofalo try to have it built. She eventually met Mr. Cimini, and discovered that he was working on a similar plan with local residents. They joined forces and the sand miners monument group was established.

The group plans to assemble a pictorial history of the mines, to be displayed near the statue. The statue itself is to be placed in front of what is essentially the only remaining physical evidence of the mines -- a 48-foot long steel gate that was an entrance for Colonial Sand and Stone, one of the largest companies, and, behind it, a tunnel that housed a conveyor belt used in later years to transport the sand.

The first laborers dug the sand out by hand and pushed wheelbarrow loads up planks and onto schooners and scows in the Long Island Sound for delivery to Manhattan. Later, the sand was dug by machinery, and moved by rail cars and conveyor belts to the processing area.

''It was very difficult and dangerous, I've had quite a few escapes from cave-ins,'' said Mr. Murro, who was a miner and a switchman. ''There were so many bad accidents, but I was just one of the lucky ones.''

In later years, local sentiment grew against the mines, when some argued that the environmental toll on the land was too great.

George Williams, chairman of North Hempstead's Landmark Preservation Commission, said the mines were also the backdrop for early movies, including ''The Perils of Pauline'' (1914) and ''The Rose of the World'' (1918). But it is their history as part of the Island's industrial past that endures.
Elly Shodell, oral history director of the Port Washington Public Library, wrote for the library ''Particles of the Past: Sandmining on Long Island, 1870's-1980's,'' an oral history of the mines. The book includes an interview with Sabatino D'Amico of Port Washington, who is now 85, and who worked in the mines as a mechanic and foreman.

''It was good work, but hard work,'' Mr. D'Amico said in a recent interview. ''We did it with passion because we knew were helping to build New York.''

Supervisor Jon Kaiman and Councilman Fred Pollack are pleased to announce the Town Board's unanimous decision to provide a parcel of land to use for a monument dedicated to the Sandminers of Port Washington.

"This really is an extraordinary endeavor of people who had a vision and found others who supported it," said Supervisor Kaiman. "This monument is the beginning to help people understand the history of the Town and labor."

"I am very pleased with this decision," said Mr. Cimini, president of the Sandminers Monument, Inc. "The organization is looking to get funding and completion of the project as soon as possible."

The monument will be built on Town land adjacent to the Harbor Links Golf Course. The entire expense of the project will be met through private sources raised through and by the Sadminers Monument, Inc., a not-for-profit organization.

"Many consider that we have a monument to the sandminers already —we call it Manhattan," said Councilman Pollack. "This monument is an exciting prospect that is years overdue. It will take a significant part of the history of Port Washington and turn it into an educational opportunity."

"There were thousands of men employed and this was the biggest business in the Town of North Hempstead," said Dr. Williams, historian. "The sand was 140 million tons and most of the major construction in the city used that Cow Neck Bay sand. It will pay tribute to the immigrant workers."

Prior to construction, the Town will have to approve the plans to assure that it meets all of the Town's standards. Once the project is complete, the Town will accept ownership of the monument.

Sandmining rose from the Port Washington Peninsula and the sand there produced concrete for some of Manhattan's most famous structures, including the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, The World Trade Center, FDR Drive and the Queensborough Bridge.

The directors of the Sandminers Monument Inc. are proud to announce the establishment of the Foundation whose purpose will be to erect a monument to recognize the efforts of the individuals who assisted in the mining of sand in Port Washington. The sand mined from Port Washington was an invaluable component in the concrete used in the construction of many, if not all, of the important projects built in New York City from 1890-1970.

The directors are Anthony Scopas, Hon. Fred Pollack, Dr. George Williams, Saby D'Amico, Hon. Anthony D'Urso, and Robert Klugman. The president of the foundation is Leopoldo Cimini

Updates to the Sandminers Monument Depict Port Washington History