Page:The Green Bay Tree (1926).pdf/350



T was not until the spring of 1920 that work was at last begun on the new railway station in the Town. Months before the actual building was undertaken, the Town Council raised on each side of the triangular and barren park at Cypress Hill enormous signs with lettering three feet high. The signs faced the tracks of three great transcontinental railroads. Above the squalor and filth of the Flats they raised their explosive legends. Each read the same.

In the deserted park at Cypress Hill workmen appeared who cut down the remaining dead trees. The Venus of Cydnos and the Apollo Belvedere were pulled down from their pedestals in the dead hedge. One of the workmen, a Calabrian, carted them off, scrubbed them clean of the corroding soot and set them up in the back yard of his little house in the Flats. They came to a good end, for the workman cherished them earnestly. In the little garden behind his house, which by some miracle of devotion he managed to fill with green things, he placed the two statues on pedestals which he himself constructed of bricks and concrete. At the base he planted ivy which flourished and spread over the cracked marble and the adjoining fence. So in all the desert of the great mill town there was