Last night, over five raucous hours punctuated by cheers, boos, and admonitions from City Council President Joyce Watterman, residents of Jersey City trudged up to the in the podium in the Council chambers to vent over the mayor’s proposal to turn the board of education into an appointed body.

From the beginning, Reservoir 3 had good bones (if an unpoetic name). It’s enclosed by 20-foot-tall Egyptian Revival stone walls and features Romanesque Revival style pump stations. The historic setting has attracted birds ranging from swans to great blue herons to peregrine falcons who now call the six-acre manmade lake inside the property home. It was the space’s very beauty and potential that, in 2005, led a group of local residents to form the Jersey City Reservoir Preservation Alliance to protect it.

In November, the city held a ceremonial ribbon-cutting for the latest addition to the Jackson Square campus: a new four-story building that will front MLK Drive and Kearney Avenue and will accommodate the newly created Division of Affordable Housing, other municipal offices not yet specified, a public meeting space, and a parking deck that will be opened to residents during non-business hours.

How seriously is the city committed to pursuing an accurate count? City spokesperson Kimberly Wallace-Scalcione told Jersey City Times that the city has budgeted $100,000 “for census 2020 efforts.”

“‘Slave Play’ is a radical study in American memory, the psychologies of the prized and the oppressed; the grateful and the entitled; who’s top, who’s bottom; who speaks, who can’t, and who betta listen,” wrote American poet Morgan Parker. And I would have to agree. “Slave Play” is not for the hard of heart, the hard of “hearing” or the weak in spirit. However, Mr. Harris’ play must be seen as part of the overall process of awakening, healing, and making sense of it all before it is too late.