232
PARTISAN REVIEW
Several people have heen drowned in the lake, usually on account
of some foolishness or other, and once a seventeen year old hoy ran amuck
in a horrowed car and killed or injured some mothers and their babies
sunning themselves on the grass. But no suicides; these, somehow, choose
Branch Brook Park at the other end of town. And no meaningless vandal·
ism, only tame flower stealing. One wild night twenty.nine benches in
Riverbank Park were destroyed
by persons who apparently wielded sledge
hammers,
but no one would come to Weequahic Park for anything
like that.
In the last couple of years the two noteworthy things about Wee·
quahic Park are: the bicycle craze which sends maniacs on two wheels
whizzing around you no matter where you go; and the virtual occupation
of the park by negroes. You can see white people muttering and shaking
their heads about what they consider a usurpation, but the negroes are
the fastest growing group in the city.
Not so long ago the number of cases of rabies kept making the first
page, but the city nurtures within itself possibilities....
Rats are increasing.
... At the Newark Housing Authority site at
Orange and Nesbitt Streets, hefore the old tenements were torn down
fumigators invaded the whole block with poison gas; a recent law require3
such extermination before wrecking is permitted.
Police roped the area
off and warned people away and the gasmasked men destroyed an esti·
mated half million rats in that small enclosure. There is no one who can
dare to guess how many millions of rats there are in the whole city. So far,
apparently, they are free of the dangerous ratReas that feed on the rats
until they are dead and then move on to that final assault that we know as
the plague.
In one of the city's department stores the night watchmen get a bonus
of fifty cents for every rat they kill in the tunnels below the lowest base–
ment (a dead mouse is worth only a dime) and in a large factory in The
Ironbound the watchmen relieve the night's tedium by pouring oil on the
rats in the cages that trap them; then they drop matches into the cages
and wait for the rats to nibble a matchhead into flame....
In the third ward, not far from the neat, well ordered Frederick
Douglass and Richard
B.
Harrison apartment house units owned by the
Prudential Insurance Company and inhabited by over 1,400 middle class
negroes, there is a certain single block where there are 467 people over
ten years of age and 152 of these people (or
32~
%
if you like your fig.
ures that way) are known to have syphilis; and there are stilI 37 people
in that same 467 whom the authorities have been unable to persuade to
submit to a Wasserman test.
Between Newark and Jersey City lie the meadows like an enormous
thumb pointing into Newark Bay, bounded on each side by the
thin
trickles of the Passaic and Hackensack Rivers. Southwest of that pointed
thumb is Newark airport surrounded by the huge area of the great Newark
and Elizabeth meadows, thousands of acres of mostly idle, marshy land
alongside a natural bay with two navigable tributaries.
