On a broad Berlin avenue, several workers break up and shovel the old cobblestone pavement in summer 1955; one man swings a sledgehammer while others move rubble and sand. The turn-of-the-century façades in the background and a modern new building on the left attest to the juxtaposition of war scars and beginning reconstruction typical of West Berlin in these years. Heavy manual street construction work in the open air, largely without machinery, characterized the everyday reality of reconstruction ten years after the end of the war. The image exemplifies the extensive infrastructure measures that Berlin advanced in the mid-1950s, also with support from the Marshall Plan.