June 2, 2017

Terence T. McDonald

The Jersey Journal

One Harmon Plaza

Jersey City, NJ 07004

RE: Rich Kushner & poor Jersey City -  Some comments on your article about how those “unlucky in life’s lottery” have not shared in the largess and lucre “created” by the conniving 1%ers.

Mr. McDonald,

Did you say the Trumpsters are renting apartments in Jersey City for $5,300 a month? Each month? Every month?

Are they anywhere near Henderson Street? I loaded trucks there for Merchants Refrigerating in 1961. I made $2.80 an hour. [Tony “Pro” was the local Teamsters President] To be fair, it was before the New Frontier and the Great Society kicked in. At that rate I couldn’t afford to drive past the place.

I was born and raised in Bayonne, NJ. And yes, I can tell you stories about Row A All the Way, about why the Hudson County jail was known as the Taj Mahal, about Snake Hill being sold for land fill, about Hague’s 3% kickback and how Beneficial Finance became, after gin mills, the largest commercial renter in Hudson County, about the $900 waste baskets and $4,500 school windows in 1958, and about Uncle Willie, my grandmother’s baby brother, and his time as a sand hog and beer seller in the Holland Tunnel.

After more than a century of modern American Liberal benevolent despotism sections of Jersey City, specifically the non-Trump sections, could be used as a back drop for a sit-com about being an obese, bullied teen in Kabul.

Is there a pattern here?

Chicago, AKA, Baghdad West. Detroit, once known as America’s Athens, now has its urban predators both, 2-legged and 4, Washington, DC, where the Mayor once said, “If you don’t count the murder rate it’s a very safe city”, can’t forget Newark and Camden, [I can’t leave Paterson, Passaic, and Atlantic City off the Garden State urban honor roll, can I?]  St. Louis, Baltimore, Los Angeles…… and on and on and on and on

It would be offensive to Logic to confusingly conflate correlation with causation but I see a pattern developing here.

Where Democrats rule, chaos reigns.

If you have evidence, empirical data as real as your boot, to contradict my imperfect thesis please present it for my perusal.

Do you remember when Hoboken declared itself a nuclear-free zone? I miss the moral clarity of the good old days, don’t you?

Kevin Smith

PS – Do you remember when the Jersey City Medical Center was run by Jersey City? There was a Mayor, would you believe one of 3 who went to prison in a period of less than 20 years with another one having to resign because he wasn’t a citizen, who Xed out the Psychiatry department saying “We’ll have none of the voo-doo in Jersey City”. $63,000 a year in rent? Thank God we have, as you tell us, “Chris Perez, a 40 year old community activist”, to remind us of the fundamental unfairness of it all.

One more thing. 

How in the name of Gene Scanlan, Fred Cranwell, and Cas Rakowski did the Jersey Journal wind up in Secaucus? Why not Short Hills or Essex Fells?