The brick facade, the brick archways, the brick fence piers -- Joe Carter had a hand in them all.

A bricklayer for 36 years, Carter, 52, had been laid off from another job last March when a foreman called him to work at Oriole Park at Camden Yards. As many as two dozen bricklayers at a time spent a year at the site, where the brickwork was an

important design feature meant to link the new stadium to the old brick buildings around downtown.

"There are about 30 [actually 26] arches," said Carter, a member of Bricklayers' and Allied Craftsmen Union No. 1 of Maryland. "I guess I put in about 10 of them.

Carter, who lives in Anne Arundel County, has spent his career working on schools, office buildings and churches. But this job was different. This was a monument.

Video crews came to tape Carter at work, to record the construction for history. A presidential candidate stopped by: Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, on a campaign swing through Maryland. "He was there for one day, laying brick," Carter said. "He was pretty good."

Carter began taking a camera to work for pictures he could send to a brother-in-law, a Baltimore native who lives in California.

Now that the work's finished, Carter said he feels more than the usual sense of a job well done.

"I can ride by there for the rest of my life and think, 'I built that,' " he said. "It's a sense of pride. I feel like that about all my work, but this is special. People all over the world will see this when it's on TV.

* "It's a nice-looking job."