15

TEN PLAGUES

We had been to the hospital with Daddy several times in the recent past—what with his near-gangrene experience and the complications from his diabetes. So on October 22, 1987, when Daddy woke up early in the morning and had trouble breathing, it meant just another trip to the hospital.

I got into the ambulance with Ma and sat next to Daddy on the stretcher. He was wearing an oxygen mask and his face was very pale. But his eyes were open and he was breathing all right. Though he was suffering congestive heart failure, the paramedics didn’t seem too worried. He was only fifty-nine, after all. They stopped at red lights and drove slowly through Jersey City’s streets. No siren necessary. I should have made them run all the lights and head straight for the Holland Tunnel, to a hospital on the New York side.

When we got to St. Francis Hospital in downtown Jersey City, there was no doctor in the emergency room. While Ma and I waited in the long, dim hallway, the code-red light began flashing and nurses started to run back and forth. Still, no doctor arrived. Before I knew it, my mother was fainting onto the waiting room floor while I tried to pull her up by her armpits and tell her that Daddy would be okay. But she saw the nurse’s face before I did. And understood. My father had been right here minutes earlier and now the nurse was telling us that he was gone.

I thought she meant they had transferred him somewhere, to another floor or to another room. But in a terrible moment of recognition I figured that my mother was on the floor for a reason.

The nurse meant Daddy was dead. That was what she meant by “gone.” He was gone for good. “No longer with us,” she added for clarity.

I couldn’t cry, since I had to finish picking Ma up off the floor, make sure she didn’t collapse again, get her seated in a safe place, and then call Stanley and Paula from the pay phone. I dialed without thinking and delivered the bad news as if it weren’t happening to us. I felt like I had that day I got stoned at Carvel, watching my body perform various tasks from afar, listening to words leave my mouth without even knowing that I was speaking.

When I hung up the phone, the nurse asked me if I wanted to see my father. I didn’t really want to, but I had read somewhere that seeing a loved one’s dead body helped with closure. I had never had closure, had never been wide open enough to need closure, and wasn’t sure if I needed it now. But I nodded and drifted into the curtained emergency room alone.

When I saw Daddy there on the gurney, I still couldn’t cry. I was too confused. I had seen dozens, if not hundreds, of dead people at all those wakes but had never really thought much about them. I realized now they had been all made up, in fancy clothes and pancake makeup, with cotton in their mouths to keep their cheeks from sinking. They looked more like big dolls than dead people.

From movies, we’re taught to think that when people first die—before the cotton and makeup—they look like they’re just sleeping or, at worst, unconscious. But that wasn’t true at all. Daddy didn’t look like he was sleeping or knocked cold. He looked dead. Gone. No longer with us, just like the nurse said. The blood was drained from his face, and his mouth was wide open—something Daddy never allowed to happen, even when he was asleep.

I was confused, because I knew this dead man. I loved him. But this was not him. Daddy had been right here minutes earlier, and now, now that he was dead, he was inexplicably gone. In a flash. Just like that. This body was here, but Daddy was missing. Where had he run off to?

I looked nervously around the emergency room, then up above me, thinking I might see Daddy hovering there, smiling down with that toothless grin of his. But all I could see was the harsh fluorescent light buzzing overhead. I thought about Blue Hair from my Italian class laughing and saying so confidently that there was no such thing as life after death. I wished she were here right now so that I could punch her in the mouth. Fuck you, I thought, shaking my head. Fuck you.

Though I wasn’t sure exactly where Daddy had run off to, his body was taken to the Bromirski Funeral Home on Warren Street, the street where you could get a good glimpse of the Statue of Liberty. My mother, the lover of wakes and funerals, had Daddy laid out for three whole days. She didn’t want to part with him, and since she was closer to a nervous breakdown than I was, I didn’t argue with her.

But it was torture. For three days and three nights I had to sit in the front row of the funeral parlor and stare at Daddy’s body while people came and went. They said things like “Oh, he looks so good. So peaceful.” No, I wanted to say, he looks dead. Can’t you see? He’s dead. It’s not even him, really.

I know there was a burial at Holy Cross Cemetery in North Arlington, out near where Daddy’s sister Terri lived, and a Hi Hat funeral dinner afterward. I don’t remember it. But I do remember thinking about Daddy being put into the ground. And I remember wondering whether he would be cold down there all alone now that winter was coming, even though I knew, really knew, and tried to convince myself that I knew, that the body wasn’t really him anyway. That he was gone.

I remember being comforted by the cemetery’s green grass and trees, which were in the peak of autumn, their leaves dying in vibrant orange and yellow. When I was a kid, skipping around the graves and past the lines of tombstones, I thought that all that nature was wasted on dead people. But now I knew better. The pretty grass and trees and flowers were not for the dead but for the survivors. I wanted to lie down in a pile of crunchy leaves and stay there for a few days.

When we got home, after everything was over, Marty, the dog, looked really depressed, as if he knew Daddy wasn’t coming home again. I was depressed, too, though I still hadn’t cried. I was exhausted from three days of smiling at my father’s friends and relatives. I couldn’t wait to go to sleep. I gave Marty a pat and looked over at the clock radio to see what time it was. And there, on top of the radio, was the lottery ticket that I had brought home for my father the night he died. He hadn’t seen it, and now he never would.

That’s when I started crying, and couldn’t stop. I cried in giant heaves, like when I was little, like the times Aunt Katie told me my eyes would shrink. I tried to catch my breath, but the tears kept coming, in waves. I cried for hours, the autumn afternoon turning to night, the stars coming out over our Summit Avenue porch. Between sobs, I took the Pick-It ticket off the clock radio, smashed it into a ball, then threw it away in the kitchen garbage. I didn’t even bother to check it against the winning lottery numbers.

Now that Daddy was gone, I couldn’t really move out. My plans for westward expansion were over. Stanley had gotten married a year earlier and soon had his first child, Nicole. My sister was busy with her own family. That left me to worry full-time about my mother.

Ma not only fell into a depression; she had to have major gallbladder surgery. She was sure she was going to go next to meet Daddy in the great beyond. It was my job to make sure she didn’t. For years, she had scraped together tuition money, raised the cash to send me to Italy, and protected me from a life of crime. I loved my mother. She never asked me to stay. But I felt that sticking around was the least I could do.

Most of all, I was afraid to leave her. I wasn’t just afraid that she would die. I was afraid of my own life for the first time. Just when I thought I had it all figured out, life came up from behind and kicked me right in the ass. I had seen death and tragedy and sorrow—our family had so much of it—but it always seemed to be whirling around me, never really touching me. Daddy dying left me stunned for the first time in my life.

Some fortunate nights, I even forgot he was gone. Waking up in the early morning, I thought I could still hear him shuffling in the kitchen, sneaking a coconut cupcake or some Sara Lee cheesecake. But then the reality would hit me that I would never see him again, and Daddy would die all over again for me, my soul curling back up into a ball and weighing me down in bed like a heavy stone.

I was stuck in Hudson County for the rest of my life, too crippled to limp away. The farthest I could crawl was Weehawken, where a friend and I rented a crummy, steamy attic apartment. Though I moved in on Independence Day, I felt no spine tingles of freedom. My street corner was almost as bad as the Majestic corner I’d grown up on. There was even a group of guys who played conga drums across the street in summer. I didn’t feel a bit nostalgic.

Since I wasn’t going anywhere, I completely surrendered and took a job at The Jersey Journal. People in Jersey City always made fun of the paper. They called it a rag and joked that the proofreaders were blind.

The office was housed in an old five-story building on Journal Square, one that I had passed thousands of times in my life. I had never once dreamed of working there. On top of the building stood the unlucky thirteen battered red letters that spelled out the paper’s name. The bottom two floors were reserved for the press, which made the building shudder at night. To get to the newsroom, I had to take the elevator to the third floor. I could see that it had once been state-of-the-art, with its big silver buttons and turquoise walls. But that was sometime back in the 1960s.

After the short elevator ride back in time, I stepped out into an even deeper time warp. I had to walk down an eerily quiet, shaftlike hallway devoid of color. Everything was dingy off-white and brown, with a few old gray filing cabinets thrown in for variety. Though it wasn’t dirty, The Jersey Journal’s office seemed dusty, as if the newsprint from the press seeped through the floorboards into the rest of the building. It was hard to breathe.

In the long hallway, there were wooden doors with windows of frosted glass, with company names stenciled on them, like something out of a movie from the 1940s. I expected to see the name Sam Spade stenciled on one. Instead, at the very end of the absurdly long hallway, I found a door that said KNEWSROOM. Some joker had drawn a K in front of NEWSROOM.

As soon as I walked through that door and into the windowless knewsroom, I knew I wasn’t like the other young reporters who were sitting at their computers, busy writing the day’s stories. They were all just passing through on their way to somewhere else, like the Jersey City coal cars and freight trains whose contents were destined for fancy homes in New York. The other reporters were Columbia Journalism School graduates or people from Ohio or Colorado who thought that Hudson County was an exciting place to work. I had arrived by default.

My desk was right near the front door, so I could run out if I ever got up the gumption to leave. But I had a feeling I never would. I had walked the long shaft of the hallway, and now I was trapped.

The knewsroom was divided into two camps: the newcomers and the old-timers. I wasn’t sure which camp I fit into. Sometimes both; usually neither. I looked like a newcomer, but I felt like one of the old-timers. The new reporters called them B&Rs, for born and raised. When the young reporters used phrases like that in front of me, it was as if I were an undercover agent. I was born and raised, I wanted to shout at them. But was I bragging or complaining?

One B&R had lumps all over his body. There was the mumbling copy editor, who barked like a dog, and the narcoleptic, who would fall asleep at his desk while typing; the guy with the perpetual neck brace; the reporter with a truss who hadn’t had a byline since 1968, on a byline strike for a cause long forgotten; the guy who resembled a cadaver—he’d just forgotten to lie down; the reporter who chewed on his tongue when he talked to you; and the sixty-year-old night editor with the mohawk, who wore leather and chains.

They all scared me until I got to know them better. Eccentrics like them were slowly being edged out by smart-asses like me who had studied journalism in school. But we had a lot to learn.

I was hired as the new police reporter, replacing a guy who went on to work for the mayor’s office. In days of yore, he would have simply taken on both jobs, with the editor’s blessing. But things were changing. The year before I arrived, the new editor, Steve Newhouse, fired a reporter for being on the city payroll. The Jersey Journal wasn’t The New York Times, but it had its standards.

Each day, it was my job to cover crime, fires, and all the other breaking bad news in Hudson County. I was a very busy person, since there was always an abundance of bad news. As the police reporter, it was my job to interview people on the worst day of their lives. The police beat was like an extended hell week—the job the editors gave new recruits to see if they could take it. If you survived the Jersey City police, you could survive anything.

Every morning, I called the precincts to see how many horrible things had happened overnight. One morning, a cop picked a fight with me over the phone about a story someone else had written. I fought right back and called him an asshole before hanging up on him. George Latanzio, my city editor, had to field the cop’s complaint minutes later. When he finished calming the desk sergeant, George hung up politely and walked over to my desk. He was not smiling.

“Next time you have a fight with a cop,” he instructed, “hang up first, then call him an asshole.” George smiled.

To check up on my phone leads, every afternoon I drove around to all the precincts and read the police blotters. At the downtown precinct, there was a desk sergeant who liked to give me a hard time. I tried to pretend he didn’t bother me.

“Anything happen today?” I would ask, day after day, in as chipper a mood as I could dredge up from my shrinking, defeated soul.

“There was a rape,” he said one day as some of the other officers looked on. “Why don’t you come in the back and I’ll tell you about it?”

I took a deep breath. I had had it with this guy.

“You dirty old man,” I said, loud enough so the others would hear. “What makes you think anybody would even look at you twice, never mind touch you, you pervert?” The other cops applauded and laughed. I bowed and walked out.

I put on a tough show. But day after day, whether I was on the street chasing down a story or at my desk in the claustrophobic knewsroom, I felt like I was drowning. When I was out reporting, I bumped into guys from grammar school who were now cops, whose faces I never wanted to see again, but whose hairlines I watched slowly recede week after week. I knew some streets so intimately, I could tell you where the cracks were and how many gum marks pocked the sidewalk.

Every time I referred to the paper, I had to catch myself and edit my words before they left my crooked lips. The other young reporters called the paper the Journal, a pretentious name that was usually reserved for The Wall Street Journal. When I was around them, I did the same thing. But like everyone born and raised in Jersey City, I wanted to call the paper the Jersey. I pronounced it with an accent, dropping the r just enough to betray that I was from this awful place. Some old-timers actually called it the Joisey. They were the same people who called the toilet the terlit and the refrigerator the frigidaire or the icebox.

What you called the paper was an easy test to see who was from here and who, luckily, was not. Jersey or Journal? I was very conflicted. The paper was, in spirit, the Jersey. It contained all that was wrong with Jersey City, wrapped up in a nice little ink-stained package that could be read well within an hour. Most readers thumbed right past the stories we wrote and headed straight to the obituaries, to see which of their friends and enemies had died.

Writing obituaries was the only job more depressing than mine. Each day, the poor guy with that job had to write one feature to lead the page, to try to make one dead person’s sad life sound interesting. The obit writer, Wendell, didn’t come in until 4 P.M., and for the first couple of hours he would use a desk in the back of the knewsroom, in the Lifestyles section of the paper. We called that section Life and Death. When I left after deadline, at around 7 P.M., Wendell would come and work at my desk at the front of the knewsroom. On my way out, I could hear him making the phone rounds, calling all the funeral parlors in the county, including Bromirski’s.

We often covered the same dead people in our stories, but since we worked different shifts, we barely waved at each other. The first conversation we ever had was about a story that came to be known as the Knife-Toss Murder. While writing the victim’s obituary, Wendell realized that the guy was only twenty-nine years old. He asked the funeral director what had happened.

“You better talk to the cops,” the funeral director told him.

Since I was the police reporter, Wendell asked me about it. I had just written the news story, so I gladly filled him in. A couple of guys in a Bayonne tavern were sitting on their stools, taking turns tossing a knife at a balloon floating above the bar to see if they could pop it, when the knife bounced off a glass hanging over the bar and landed in one guy’s neck, puncturing his jugular vein. He died within seconds as his buddies helplessly watched. The prosecutor indicted the friend who had tossed the knife, as if seeing his buddy bleed to death wasn’t punishment enough.

It was a terrible story, but it was fascinating in a gruesome sort of way. I spoke animatedly about it, waving my arms and talking with my hands, like I always did, trying to describe how it all happened, the angle at which the knife came flying down, and how stupid and senseless the whole thing was. And how stupid and senseless the prosecutor was.

That’s how Wendell and I met. After the Knife-Toss Murder, whenever Wendell came to sit at my desk at the end of my shift, we would chat about that day’s horror stories. One afternoon, Wendell came in a little early and we went on our first date, to Boulevard Drinks. The hot dogs and Journal Square were all new to him.

The Square was just as nasty as it had been when I was growing up. Maybe even worse. The bums were replaced by what everyone now referred to as the homeless. I wondered what had happened to Mary, the woman with the dirty raincoat. Had she gotten to wherever it was she was hurrying off to? The midgets selling the newspaper had disappeared. But they were replaced by a woman who looked like the Fat Lady at the circus, and a parade of misfits like characters out of a Fellini film. The crippled pencil seller was still there, as were the vast army of freaks with growths and tumors and the mumblers who walked around arguing with themselves. I was sure I was destined to become one of them.

To try and avoid my sad fate, I got out of town as much as I possibly could, taking my first paid vacation to Miami. It was the first time I’d gone alone to Aunt Mary Ann’s. I thought the visit might give us a chance to bond and compare our many similarities—how I was skeptical about marriage and cynical about everything else, how I wanted to escape from Jersey City like she had so long ago. But before I got the chance to tell her, Aunt Mary Ann told me that I was just like my mother when she was in her early twenties. She couldn’t believe how much I looked like her, sounded like her, and acted like her. Ma had even wanted to be a reporter at one time.

I’d had no idea. Like most kids, I selfishly assumed that my mother had no ambition before she had me. I figured she liked Jersey City. But maybe she was stuck here because of us. It wasn’t easy to pack up and run with three kids.

I came back to The Jersey Journal a bit wiser and with a deep tan. But it soon faded. On my next vacation, I took a road trip along the West Coast with Wendell, my new boyfriend. The following fall we took a trip to Paris. Those vacations didn’t last nearly as long as I would have liked. The following Monday, we’d end up back in the dusty knewsroom.

Wendell, who loved newspapers, didn’t mind The Jersey Journal half as much as I did, and he almost convinced me I was lucky to work there. He got me to watch the press run, its clanging, inky parts miraculously belching out our words and bylines in a continuous blur. For about fifteen minutes, I was happy to be at the paper. But I hated Jersey City too much.

Around this time, strangely enough, Hudson County started to look a little better, around the edges anyway. While I had been at NYU, the brownstones on Mercer Street were restored as gentrification replaced urban blight. In the late 1980s, Jersey City had become a bedroom community, after years of being a toilet (pronounced ter-lit). I wasn’t sure which made me more angry, yuppies or drug dealers.

The waterfront’s burnt-out piers were being magically transformed into prime real estate for back-office space. New glass office towers were erected in Jersey City and Weehawken. Sidewalk cafés bloomed in Hoboken. Parks were built along the Hudson River. A mall was even constructed near the Holland Tunnel, in a development called Newport. In an effort to separate themselves from Jersey City, though, the developers asked for their own Zip code and tried to leave Jersey City out of their address altogether. They tried to say the mall was in Newport City, a fictional place. I was outraged, and suddenly felt protective of Jersey City.

But Jersey City’s planning board, bribes or no bribes, wouldn’t let that one slip past. Newport would take advantage of the city’s tax abatements, so it sure as hell would keep the name Jersey City in its address. And be proud of it.

Working as a reporter, I knew a little too much of what was going on behind the scenes. I wished I could just sit back and enjoy the new waterfront walkways, cafés, marinas, and boutiques along with most of the other Jersey Citizens. But some people were suffering because of the development, and I felt more comfortable suffering along with them. It was my nature.

In 1989, the Colgate factory was closed to make room for a new development project, devastating a large part of the downtown worker population—Stanley included. He had worked there for nine years and was forced to leave his job as a warehouseman. I was assigned to cover a worker résumé-writing meeting. I wanted to interview the president of Colgate so I could punch him out. How could I be objective when my brother was getting canned?

The counselors on hand were encouraging the workers to relocate to Kansas City, to the Colgate plant there, where several of Stanley’s friends got replacement jobs. But Stanley stayed and got a job in a machine shop in Rutherford. Good thing. A year after they relocated, his friends were laid off and left jobless in Kansas City, a strange new land, where they had just taken out mortgages on new houses.

It was another lesson in why you should never move away. You’d just wind up back in Jersey City, defeated.

Aside from the factory closings, I tried to convince myself it was generally a good thing that the waterfront was finally being developed after years of languishing under the control of corrupt politicians and rich railroad companies. But I knew that in typical Hudson County fashion, shortcuts were being taken, not to mention bribes and kickbacks.

When Newport Mall was built, construction crews forgot to bait for rats, so an army of rodents invaded downtown—just like in Gammontown’s heyday. A pack of rats ran past the candy counter in one of the mall department stores one afternoon. Then a small boy was bitten while sitting on the toilet in his own home, in the mall neighborhood. The rat had come up through the pipes and into his bowl. Firefighters visited nearby St. Anthony’s High School, where Paula worked as a teacher, to make sure the nuns had all their toilet seats covered.

The Newport rats were only the first round of development woes. While Hudson’s politicians turned their heads, buildings were constructed on top of and next to contaminated land left over from Jersey City’s industrial glory days. But people were so used to hearing about toxic waste that they simply shrugged. If they weren’t dead by now, they were probably immune, they thought. Everytime I looked at Hudson County’s rising skyline, its blue and green gleaming buildings growing taller each day, all I could think of were the dirty deals the politicians were making.

I wound up uncovering stories about the toxic waste that lay beneath lots I had played in as a kid. I had memories of playing bartender in one of those lots, pouring dirt—now known to be contaminated—into a Coke bottle while my brother played baseball a few yards away.

Cancer-causing chromium was buried all over Hudson County, left behind by three companies that produced chemicals for paint, ceramics, and ink. Sodium dichromate, their main product, was used for the ink on money. Gammontown was one of the few neighborhoods in the city that contained no chromium, simply because the adjoining brownstones there, crowded together with no empty lots in between, were built long before the city starting burying tons of the industrial slag.

But the downtown school where Hague had been hit by an egg back in 1949 was built next to a chromium dump. The Liberty Science Center, a showcase for the entire East Coast, visited by 850,000 kids, teachers, and parents each year, was built on top of a contaminated parcel of land owned by the state. Before construction, the site was covered over with clean soil and deemed safe by the state Department of Environmental Protection.

I wrote stories about chromium found under the drive-in where Stanley had taken his dates, under the Gregory Apartments, where my best friend, Liz, had lived. Chromium stalactites dripped from the ceiling of the newly renovated Newport PATH station, where I had waited for trains to NYU. A friend and fellow reporter, Dan Rosenfeld, collected some of the crud in a jar and had it tested. He found that the chromium levels were dangerously high. The DEP did its own test and pronounced the station safe.

I covered the chromium stories as if I were on a mission. Which I was.

Objectivity was never an issue.

I remember having an argument with the flack for a Society Hill development project planned for the old Roosevelt Stadium site, next door to the biggest chromium site in the city, where a million tons of waste lay buried and covered over. The flack accused me of having a chip on my shoulder. I wanted to dig up the contaminated dirt and shove it down his throat. That Beansie temper was rising. And the more I learned, the angrier I became.

Some friends and I, frustrated that the DEP would never get anything done, banded together and formed a guerrilla group called Chromium Underground. We stenciled the name at unmarked tainted sites using spray paint the color of chromium slag—fluorescent green. We made flyers designed like PATH newsletters and handed them to commuters outside the cruddy train station.

One night, during one of our spray-paint runs, an off-duty cop on his way home from the precinct stopped his car, pulled out his badge, and asked us what the hell we thought we were doing. We weren’t your typical graffiti artists but three smug white women in our twenties.

When I saw his badge, all I could think was how much a conflict of interest this was for me, how The Jersey Journal would fire me when they found out I was spray-painting messages at night about subjects I was writing about during the day.

“Officer,” I said, trying to sound respectful. “There’s chromium buried on this lot and we just wanted people to know that it’s here, so . . .”

“I know all about chromium,” the cop said, waving at me to shorten the speech. “I’m an environmentalist too.” He looked around at the empty streets. “Just hurry up, before somebody else sees you.”

He pulled his Pontiac Firebird out onto Grand Street, and left us standing there, spray paint in hand, in disbelief. “Nice cop,” I said, ashamed at myself for thinking that was an oxymoron.

Since I had such a problem with authority, objectivity, and keeping my opinions to myself, the wise editors at The Jersey Journal gave me my own weekly column. I could pick my subject matter from a wide variety of everyday scandals and then complain about it as much as I liked. As long as it all fit inside nineteen inches.

It was a lucky break, since continuing to cover crime would have been a major conflict of interest. To get back on her feet, my mother had applied for a job as a file clerk in the prosecutor’s office. When she went for the interview, she was asked about her relationship to the criminals in the family. A background check was part of the usual procedure for the prosecutor’s staff. They asked Ma if she was related to Beansie. Was Henry Stapinski her husband? Satisfied with her answers, the investigators hired my mother. It was her first non-DMV job in more than twenty years.

After a few months, the prosecutor’s biggest fear wasn’t whether Ma would tip off any criminals during an investigation but whether she was tipping off her daughter at The Jersey Journal. I kept my distance, though, with my new beat. Ma had been through enough. I didn’t want her to lose her job because of me.

I chose my subjects—and my causes—carefully. The Loew’s Theatre, my childhood refuge, was in danger of being torn down. The thought of a wrecking ball bashing through its coffered ceilings and golden-tiled alcoves made me feel woozy. So I covered that story. Hartz Mountain Industries—makers of dog collars and the corporate parks that had replaced Secaucus’s pig farms—wanted to replace the theater with an office building. The theater had closed in 1983 after showing its final unlucky movie, the last installment of Friday the 13th.

I attended more than a dozen planning-board meetings, where the fate of the theater was being decided. Jersey City’s few political activists—Joe Duffy, Ted Conrad, and Colin Egan—organized a preser-vation committee to save the Loew’s. It was because of people like them, who were still fighting the good fight, that Jersey City had any bright spots left.

While at the paper, I got to know Ted well. He was an architect and lived in a plantation-style house in the Heights, overlooking the Hudson River. His home was filled with architectural models he had built over the years and refurbished antique car seats from the 1950s and 1960s that he had mounted and which he used as love seats. He was tall and lumbering and often wore a cap over his white hair and suspenders to hold up his drooping pants. Ted drove a banana yellow Cadillac and loved to take me out to lunch, where he would fill me in on the latest worthy cause. He lectured me in his gravelly voice and begged me never to leave Jersey City.

Joe Duffy was the physical opposite of Ted. He was a small, nervous ball of energy, with glasses and a combed-over strand of hair that fell in his face when he became agitated. He walked very quickly and carried around a huge stack of documents and newspaper clippings. Joe always seemed flustered, but he was on the ball and got right to the point.

Joe and Ted made sure that every planning-board meeting was packed with people like me, with fond memories of the Loew’s.

The Stanley Theatre had been saved by Jehovah’s Witnesses, who had turned it into a Kingdom Hall. It was one of life’s ironies that the Stanley, the theater that had showcased a naughty Bill Holden and the rabble-rousing music of Bill Haley and the Comets, wound up in the hands of evangelical Christians. Working their way into heaven with each brush stroke and swipe of a rag, the Jehovah’s Witnesses shined the copper outside, refurbished the cloud-covered ceiling inside, and painted clothes on naked cherubs and classical figures. But at least they had managed to save the theater from the wrecking ball, something Ted, Colin, and Joe were trying desperately to do with the Loew’s.

Ted had successfully saved the old domed Hudson County courthouse, a palatial marble masterpiece, with a rotunda painted in the high classical style, with angels and signs of the zodiac floating in delicate colors above.

Two other activists, Morris Pesin and Audrey Zapp, had saved the historic railroad terminal, through which Vita and Irene had passed a century ago. While everyone was focused on preserving Ellis Island, Audrey and Morris knew that the railroad terminal was sacred ground, too. If not for them, the terminal would be a pile of rubble at the water’s edge.

Some buildings were beyond saving, like the old Margaret Hague maternity hospital. It sat abandoned on Clifton Place, sad and haunted looking, its windows broken and doors boarded up, not a newborn baby in sight. The rest of the Medical Center was in rough shape as well. In 1982, the public hospital went bankrupt. Since then, the new, private owners had been trying desperately to find a location for a new state-of-the-art facility. Meanwhile, asbestos was found. Concrete was eroding. Then, in 1991, a brick fell from one of the buildings, totaling a car below. Roofs leaked, floors sagged, and walls cracked. The building’s boilers were so antiquated that hospital workers had to make their own replacement parts. Since there were only a few elevators, patients on their way to surgery would often ride up with hospital visitors. Hague’s grand Art Deco masterpiece was obsolete. But there were other structures in Jersey City that were worse.

In 1990, The Jersey Journal staff covered the closing of the sixty-four-year-old Hudson County jailhouse, one of the most overcrowded and decrepit in the nation, where inmates were beaten to death and a fire had killed seven prisoners. Inmates were always trying to escape. You really couldn’t blame them. Three of them succeeded one night, tying bedsheets together and dropping down from the fourth floor onto heavily trafficked Pavonia Avenue, right next door to the courthouse, where my mother and all the judges worked.

Some days I felt like one of those prisoners, waiting for the warden to turn his head so that I could leap out the window on my bedsheets. I was the only reporter, I realized, whose relatives had spent considerable time inside the jail. My mother had waved up to Grandpa from Pavonia Avenue when she was a child. He had waved back from behind bars.

No one complained when the jail was finally destroyed—least of all me and my family, who were happy to see a bit of our criminal history crumble.

The building that brought me—and the city—the most grief, though, was the Union Terminal Cold Storage, where Daddy had worked, the big red building at the mouth of the Holland Tunnel that I saw every time I drove to New York. The building was still standing, but it had closed soon after my father died, its big refrigerator switch flipped to off. The abandoned building reminded me of more innocent times: eating stolen lobster tails that Daddy cooked and slathered in butter and lemon; cases of shrimp and steaks; the dry ice for our Halloween parties.

The city’s board of health closed the warehouse down after ammonia leaked from a faulty cooling system and sickened some of the toll collectors. They vomited and had to be evacuated. But when the building was closed, someone forgot to remove the 10 million pounds of frozen food inside. Oozing calamari and decaying frog’s legs were finally hauled out in the sweltering month of August. Special chemicals were spread to cover up the odor.

The smell lived on. For nearly two years, the wretched stench of rotten fish was the first thing that hit you when you got anywhere near the Holland Tunnel. The approach ramp was unbearable. It was worse than the Newark bone-rendering smell on a bad day—much worse—and forced drivers to close their windows when the wind blew the wrong way. I thought the odor wafted over from the river, from a large pile of dead fish murdered by the PCBs in the water.

Even worse than the smell were the flies and rats that invaded the tunnel toll booths like the ten plagues that had invaded biblical Egypt. It wasn’t long before some unlucky son of a bitch discovered the origin of the smell and the flies: One last freezer full of thawed fish had been left inside the building and thousands of bloated, foot-long rats had eaten themselves to death. Food poisoning, experts said.

It turned out the one locker had not been emptied because a three-foot ice floe had frozen outside its door. The ice was no challenge for the rats. An army of them gnawed through that, and then the six-inch layer of insulation around the locker, to get to the rotting treasure inside. Men in moon suits were called in to clean up the mess. They made the front page of The Jersey Journal. I tried to imagine what their job was like.

I wasn’t sure there was such a thing as heaven. But now I knew there was a hell.

The story ran for several days, with follow-ups about the president of the cold-storage company, who was arrested, spent the night in jail, and was released on a half-million dollars’ bail. To get sprung, he had to put up his house—in suburban New Milford, not smelly old Jersey City. The charges against him were dropped after he agreed to pay for the cleanup and the $10,000 extermination bill to get rid of the last of the living rats.

It was one of the worst stories I’d ever heard. But it aptly described Jersey City—the incompetence, the neglect, the extreme ugliness—so close yet so far from wondrous New York City, threatening to wipe out even the tiniest fond memories I had of home.

I was glad Daddy wasn’t alive to read about it.