To the Unknown Man
The unknown man has been the backbone of civilization. Without him, nothing—from the pyramids to shopping malls to skyscrapers—could exist. He does the unseen work that turns imagination into steel, glass, and stone.
Day after day, throughout history, the unknown man woke, left home, and joined an orchestra of others like him. Their instruments were shovels, ropes, pipes, and hands—their true gift. His hands built worlds.
This is not about the Unknown Woman—though she is owed her due. She held homes together, labored in factories, and carried her own anonymous burdens. But here, I’m writing about the Unknown Man—because I have been one, and I know the shape of his shoes.
Our cities tell his story. The old buildings razed, new ones rising. The footbridge, the pool in the park, the playground by the fountain—every line of concrete, every brick in a wall was laid by some man whose name is lost.
The skyline of New York was born from millions of bricks set by anonymous hands. The Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan—all carried upward by bricklayers, welders, laborers, electricians, plasterers. Few left their names except scratched initials in wet cement. They worked with pride—or sometimes only with resignation, for the wage was the same either way.
In harder times, his life was cheap. Safety was an afterthought. If he fell or broke, another man would take his place. Yet he kept climbing scaffolds, digging tunnels, wiring grids.
The great families—Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan—left their names etched in marble. But the unknown man stopped traffic, drove the loader, poured the concrete, carried the pipe, cleaned the chimney, wired the switch. He was never the architect, but always the fabric. Never the lender, always the borrower. He hung from the bottom rungs, essential yet invisible.
He came from everywhere: Ireland, Holland, Puerto Rico, the reservations, the rural South, the small towns hollowed out by the very highways he helped lay. He was black, white, brown, native, immigrant. He followed the money because he had no choice.
Sometimes he had a good childhood, sometimes a broken one. Sometimes he was educated, sometimes illiterate. Often, he was just ordinary: average dreams, average families, average lives. But he had to work—so he dug holes, hammered nails, laid track, drilled oil, packed boxes, or showed up where a “Help Wanted” sign hung. He was a number, not a name.
The unknown man worked through hangovers, injuries, and fever. He dreamed of Friday, cursed Monday, spent his pay on family or whiskey. His vacations weren’t exotic. His hobbies were small, if he had any. He worked hard, played hard, relaxed hard.
And when he died, he left no empire, no monument—only the fragments of work absorbed into the world around him: a road, a bridge, a wall, a line of cable.
It was the unknown man who built the Sears Tower, Grand Central Station, the Golden Gate Bridge. He assembled carburetors, panned for gold, harvested fields, raised cathedrals, and built the Twin Towers. It was the average man with a lunch pail who paved the roads connecting every place to every place.
He may end under a cheap headstone, in a shelter, a hospital, or a cell. But without him, nothing stands.
So I tip my hat to the Unknown Man. I’d buy him a beer, shake his hand, and pause the world long enough to thank him.
For though we may not know his name, we are standing every day on his shoulders.