CROSS COUNTRY
233
For over thirty years now, visionaries have been intrigued by the
possibilities of building a Great City here, an industrial center close to
Manhattan, near waterways, railroads, and now ·the airport: a cold vision
of a blueprinted, robot city.
The original settlers of Newark divided their land by lot. For the
marshes they had only one use: it was a splendid and fertile source of
hay. This land too, then, they divided amongst themselves and set up
boundaries; but that division was ignored and whoever came first took the
best hay available (at that time most of the land could only be entered
when it was frozen solid) and soon the markers were destroyed and no
one knew or cared who owned most of the meadows.
But though the landmarks were forgotten and the borders divided
nothing, possession of that territory mattered to their descendants, and
there were court fights. It mattered a great deal ·when a scheme for a
Great Canal (never built) was being promoted and it mattered when the
railroads fought the canal people for their own purposes, and it matters
yet, because the land is still the object of intrigue and graft and
Great Plans.
Once the salt marshes were much larger, but for over 250 years the
"ork of reclaiming this area has been progressing slowly; and long before
that this treeless expanse was occupied for many hundreds of years by
monarch cedars that still lie, perfectly preserved, beneath the muck of
the marshes, close to the surface.
Despite all the signs of activity (there are a few factories along the
edges) and the visible skyscrapers of Manhattan and the planes flying
low and often and the cars and trucks moving in assembly line fashion
over the highways (and over Pulaski Skyway built with every safety
measure and now called by the newspapers
Death Skyway)
the meadows
remain among the ugliest, most barren looking stretches of land in all the
world. Only if you go deep into the tundra, among the weeds grown to
twice a man's height, and the small islands and the wild grass, to the many
kinds of birds, some almost extinct that have found refuge here, only then
can you find some beauty.
The landmarks have been forgotten.
Where is the upper green and the lower green? The traffic tower that
used to be at Broad and Market Street"s (America's third busiest corner)
that was supposed to control traffic but only got in everybody's way? Now
it
is
a decorative piece in a cemetery.
The postoffice that overlooked the canal is gone, and in Newark a
IUhway runs on the bed of the canal, a speedway above it. The first Ger·
man and Irish immigrants, damned as aliens, dug the canal; the wops and
Diggers made the subway and speedway.
In
the elbow at the end of Saybrook Place is the deserted Landing
Place Park: a tiny triangle containing a white, squat, scarred shaft:
Up
Ibis
slope from the river came the founding fathers .
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