The day they hung Martin Luther King.

February is Black History Month.  In light of that I thought it might be a good time to share a funny story that happened on one of my project. 

I was fortunate enough to do the design work on the Civil Rights Museum in Birmingham.  http://www.bcri.org/index.html  It was an interesting job both technically and politically.  Since it has been about 20 years ago some of the details and names of the people aren’t very clear any longer.  (This is my way of saying the names have been changed to protect the innocent.)   But as best as I remember the original design was way over budget.  I have been on both sides of projects over budget; what normally happens is the original design team gives the owner exactly what they ask for and no one remembers the project has a budget.  The original designers were replaced and I got the job.  I worked with an architectural team out of Atlanta.  I don’t remember the company’s name but they were very talented and could control the budget.  The building had a several unusual features.  One of the most striking is the monumental stairs that leads up to the rotunda at the entrance.  It provided an interesting design challenge to make the building wheel chair accessible and not detract from the entrance.  Rotundas are always an interesting challenge.  (That is structural engineer language for a pain in the ass to design and build.)

The building has a basement.  Well that may not sound like a big deal but believe me, every time it rained in Birmingham every gallon of water that fell in the city wound up in that hole.  It would take a couple of days to get it pumped out and then it would rain again.  They liked to have never got the building out of the ground.  When they finally got it so it wouldn’t fill up when it rained, the contractor had a big party with tee shirts for all of the workers.  The “Coming Out of the Basement” tee shirts had a cartoon character of a “frog man” climbing over a basement wall. 

I won’t completely quote Joe Biden, but constructing the Civil Rights Museum in Birmingham Alabama across from the 16^th Street Baptist Church was a “Big Deal”.  There were ground breaking events, dedication events, topping out events, grand openings, special exhibit openings, etc.  Never being one to shy away from a chance to eat, drink, be merry, shake hands, hand out business cards, I attended all of the events.  Of course you can rightly imagine at each of these events there were speeches, note the plural use of the word. 

As part of this project the contractor was required to renovate the Kelly Ingram Park which is across the street from the building.  In the park is a statue of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  The contractor was required to remove and relocate the statue as part of the project.  Now this is a bronze statue.  If not properly handle and dropped it would be an expensive mistake.  It is no telling what it would have cost to replace the statue and the new one probably wouldn’t have matched the old one.  It was just too big of a risk to assume, the contractor excluded the moving and relocating the statue from their construction contract.  (For those who are not in my world, it is not that unusual for items to be excluded from a bid.)  After some negotiation the City accepted the contract and agreed to move the statue with their crews.  You can probably guess where this is going.

The topping out party was one of the bigger events.  TV trucks, camera crews, live radio feeds, newspapers, and who knows what other media.  There were speeches by the board members and politicians.  I was standing by the construction superintendent in the back of the audience.  It was a standing room only crowd.  In the middle of Mayor Arrington speech we look across the street to the park.   The city had showed up to remove the statue.  They back a boom truck up to the statue.  A couple of guys pull out ladders and they boom over with a chain on the end of the boom.  The guys go up the ladders and wrap the chain around the statues neck and they proceed to lift the statue with boom.  For a few minutes the statue is hanging by the chain around the neck.  The superintendent is going crazy, he knows at any minute the camera will swing around and start filming the hanging of Dr. King.  His construction career is flashing in front of his face, he knows when the camera picks up the hanging his career is ended, even though he has nothing to do with it.  The city pulls in another truck with a flat bed trailer and they lower the statue on to the bed of the truck.  Dr King is safely resting on the trailer about the time the mayor finishes his speech.  I guess it must have been a long and interesting speech because I don’t know if anyone else saw what we saw.  Personally, I will never forget the day the city hung Martin Luther King. 

If you get a chance go to the museum it is an interesting place.  It depicts a time in history that we should all learn from and pledge to never return.  I don’t know if we can ever completely get rid of discrimination, I would like to think we can.  It is an issue that many struggle with and will be topic of another blog.