It seems fitting that the technology for laying cobblestones, which until 1938 were the primary surface on the city’s streets, is a bit old-fashioned. One of its most important tools is a piece of string.

Since the beginning of June, three men have been using a single string, pulled tight across the width of Leonard Street, to guide them as they lay each row of granite cobblestones, inching their way eastward to West Broadway.

The roadwork is the final phase of reconstruction of the street and the utilities lines beneath it, part of a city project that includes Greenwich and Harrison Streets as well.

Anthony Alexander, the construction foreman, whose hair hung in long dreadlocks from beneath his green hard hat, estimated that it took three men laying stones to complete 500 square feet each day. A week and a half into the job, the crew was almost halfway between Hudson Street and West Broadway.

“This is a lot stronger than asphalt,” Alexander said of the granite stones. “But it’s a hell of a lot more work. With asphalt, we’d have this paved in one day.”

After a truck poured the cement, the  workers eased each stone into place and then laid a two-by-four across adjacent stones as a level. Others crouched along the edges, smoothing the mortar with flat, rectangular tools known as grouting floats. Workers, wearing hard hats and reflector vests, chipped away with sledgehammers at the stones to fill irregular spaces in the street, while others dumped bags of cement and shoveled sand into a portable cement mixer for the next batch of mortar.

It is repetitive and draining work. The men kneel or crouch during much of their 7 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. shifts.

“It’s the same thing every day,” said Antonio Paiva, a 38-year-old crew member. “You go one by one.”
Paiva and his co-worker, Alex Lopes, 32, both emigrated to the U.S. from Portugal in the 1990s, where they laid cobblestones on streets and sidewalks, occasionally incorporating designs and patterns. Both live in Newark with their families.

“It’s physical work, but when you look back at the end of a job, it looks good,” said Lopes.

Tony Rivas, 36, came to the United States from El Salvador in 1989, and lives with his wife and three children in Franklin Square, Long Island. He said  that compared to other street work, he liked laying cobblestones.

“When you’re digging in a hole, it’s different, because you don’t see what you’re working on. But when you do something like this...almost everybody who passes by is like, ‘Wow, what a beautiful job.’”

Indeed, throughout the day, onlookers peered, sometimes spellbound, over the orange netting and police barricades. The indisputable charm of cobblestones had yielded an anomaly: a piece of performance art whose effects would long outlast its presentation.