They can’t do it. They won’t even be able to do it.

And yet, there they are: two Latino men outside a (surely illegal) construction site on Spring Street between Mulberry and Lafayette. They wave their arms to help a bulldozer operator lift an unwieldy bundle of wood into the site.

The site is an open lot flanked by two brick buildings and blocked by a makeshift wall of thin boards, orange mesh plastic and scrawny-looking posts. Above and behind the wall floats the bulldozer’s bear claw. Winched to a bundle of 50 strips of wood, each maybe 30 feet long, the claw struggles to hoist the bundle over the wall.

It isn’t working.

See, the strips of wood are the same size as the width of the lot. So the bundle can’t clear the sides of the adjacent buildings.

I’m standing across the street. The ex-newspaper reporter in me makes me shake my head. The site is rife with violations of the OSHA laws (OCCUPATIONAL SAFETY AND HEALTH ADMINISTRATION); for starters, clueless pedestrians are wandering unprotected below the bundle of wood—a brown, wet-looking monstrosity—and only one of the workers is wearing a helmet.

But instead of asking where the foreman is or putting in a call to my old editor Gene, I just stand there in bewildered awe.

Suddenly, the bundle sways dangerously close to the face of Debra Messing. Well, not the Debra Messing, but her smiling likeness on a poster for her new series The Starter Wife that is stapled to the makeshift wall.

The bundle swings the other way like a giant pendulum over Spring Street, and a passing dumptruck comes to a wheezing stop. The white, goateed driver slaps the steering wheel and slumps his shoulders. His rig idles with the sound of coins in a coffee can. The driver looks set to shift into reverse should the bundle swing back his way.

Then the two workers get an idea. They find a long stick lying on the sidewalk. Using the stick, the men try to prod the bundle up and over the wall. The unseen bulldozer revs and squeals and farts and hisses, waving its bear claw. The ’dozer itself seems to be doing K turn after K turn.

At last, with much skidding on the sidewalk, the workers manage to turn the bundle perpendicular to the lot and guide it over the wall. One of the men lets go of the long stick and uses his bare hand to ensure the job gets done.

The bulldozer growls and backs up. The wood gradually disappears, and the workers file through a gap in the wall after it. The dumptrunk hums and proceeds down Spring. Scores of early-morning pedestrians march by the entire time. Some slow down to glance at the commotion, but none of them stops.

Debra Messing keeps smiling.

—Tim Coleman covers the pedestrian beat in “Foot It!”