The building’s stately facade is covered in white stone panels engraved with clovers. In 2019, Skyline was hired to repair the facade of One Pierrepont Street, a 13-story prewar co-op with 24 apartments, which sell for more than $5 million, on average. Eric didn’t tell his mother about the danger of his work, but she saw the videos he posted on Facebook, some shot while he was suspended high in the air. He disliked the subway and bought a used car. As his skills grew, his earnings did as well. On weekends, Elizabeth said, Eric played soccer in Flushing and went fishing on Long Island with co-workers. With his earnings, Eric bought Hawaiian pizza and Mexican candy, and helped his mother pay their rent. (Skyline contends that Eric earned higher wages and was paid time and a half for any overtime hours he worked.) She said he was paid in cash, with no overtime pay, for shifts that could stretch to 13 hours. Initially, he earned $100 to $130 a day, according to his mother. In New York, union construction workers make $30 to $60 an hour, depending on the type of work they do, plus overtime. “It was not something everybody could do,” she said. According to his mother, Eric liked the difficult work. At first he cleaned debris from demolition sites, but soon he advanced to building and repairing brick and cinder-block walls. On workdays, Eric rose at 5:30, dressing in long-sleeved shirts, thick jeans, steel-toed boots, and a blue hard hat. Together, Eric and Elizabeth shopped at Home Depot for wire cutters, pliers, a drill, and a yellow-and-black toolbox, on which he wrote his name. The friend’s husband got Eric a job working for a subcontractor of Skyline Restoration, a Long Island City–based firm that specializes in restoring historic buildings, including the Plaza and the Flatiron. Soon after Eric arrived in New York, Elizabeth contacted a friend whose husband was in construction to ask about work for her son. She found him standing atop an irrigation system, laughing at the sky. Once, when he was a boy, a violent thunderstorm rolled across the farm and Elizabeth went searching frantically for Eric. ![]() Eric grew up in open spaces, she said, roaming fields with his ill-behaved dog, which ate the neighbor’s chickens and turkeys. “When he got to New York, he saw that this was a lot of pressure for an immigrant, and he cried,” Elizabeth told me. ![]() ![]() ![]() He held her thin frame and said, “You have to eat.”Įlizabeth took two days off from her job at a factory and together they rode the crowded subway from Queens to Manhattan. He arrived in the city on a Monday, at six in the morning, and saw his mother for the first time in more than 10 years. So Eric traveled to Florida, where more construction jobs helped him save for the $700 journey to New York in a raitero, a long-distance taxi filled with strangers. “He told me, ‘Mom, why can’t you come to me here?’” Elizabeth recalled recently, speaking through a translator. He said North Carolina’s open fields reminded him of home. On his new phone, Eric told his mother that he had finally arrived. At a Metro PCS store, he bought a cellphone for $100 so he could call his mother, Elizabeth, who had come to the U.S. From Texas, Mendoza traveled to rural North Carolina, where he built homes. Once in the United States, he worked construction jobs to pay his way across the country. I n 2014, at age 19, Eric Mendoza left his farming village outside Mexico City and crossed the Rio Grande.
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