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[[double line]] PREFACE TO FENCES Near the turn of the century, the destitute of Europe sprang on the city with tenacious claws and an honest and solid dream. The city devoured them. They swelled its belly until it burst into a thousand furnaces and sewing machines, a thousand butcher shops and baker's ovens, a thousand churches and hospitals and funeral parlours and moneylenders. The city grew. It nourished itself and offered each man a partnership limited only by his talent, his guile, and his willingness and capacity for hard work. For the immigrants of Europe, a dream dared and won true. The descendants of African slaves were offered no such welcome or participation. They came from places called the Carolinas and the Virginias, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee. They came strong, eager, searching. The city rejected them and they fled and settled along the riverbanks and under bridges in shallow, ramshackle houses made of sticks and tarpaper. They collected rags and wood. They sold the use of their muscles and their bodies. They cleaned houses and washed clothes, they shined shoes, and in quiet desperation and vengeful pride, they stole, and lived in pursuit of their own dream: that they could breathe free, finally, and stand to meet life with the force of dignity and whatever eloquence the heart could call upon. By 1957, the hard-won victories of the European immigrants had solidified the industrial might of America. War had been confronted and won with new energies that used loyalty and patriotism as its fuel. Life was rich, full, and flourishing. The Milwaukee Braves won the World Series, and the hot winds of change that would make the sixties a turbulent, racing, dangerous and provocative decade had not yet begun to blow full. -August Wilson [[double line]] [[advertisement]] PALIO [[image- series of four boxes containing alternating monochromatic patterns, the first a checker board pattern, then horizontal zig-zags, then horizontal circles, and finally triangles reaching to the top of the box]] Before of after the curtain be part of the most celebrated Italian scene in town. Palio Equitable Center 151 West 51 Street 212/245-4850 [[line]] A Tony May Group Restaurant [[/advertisement]] [[end of page]] [[start of page]] [[advertisement]] [[image - black box with diagonal white line reaching the top right corner]] MANUFACTURERS HANOVER Commitment We are pleased to carry on the tradition of private sponsorship of the arts for the benefit of the public. [[image - black & white photograph of painting - 15th Century: Lorenzo de Medici and his family lead the cultural flowering of Florence.]] [[image - black & white photograph of painting - 1508: Pope Julius II commissions Michelangelo to paint the Sistine ceiling.]] [[image - black & white photograph of painting - 1717: George I is honored by the composition of Handel's Water Music. [[image - black & white photograph of painting - 18th Century: Thomas Jefferson becomes a noted patron of the arts.]] [[image - black & white photograph of painting - 1826: James Smithson of London bequeaths his fortune to the U.S. to establish a museum]] [[image - black & white photograph - 1892: Andrew Carnegie provides the funds to build Carnegie Hall.]] Among the recent events which Manufacturers Hanover helped make possible: The Vatican Collections: The Papacy and Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Spring, 1984; Van Gogh in Arles, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fall 1984; Treasures from The New York Public Library, Spring 1985. Two ongoing programs for which we provide support are the American Ballet Theater and the subtitle program of the New York City Opera. [[Copyright symbol]] 1987 Manufacturers Hanover. All Rights Reserved [[/advertisement]]
