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Two decades ago, no artist would have depicted Jersey City like this. Hudson County was resistant to glamorization. Instead, artists who engaged with the town— photographers Ed Fausty and Shandor Hassan, for instance—favored a stark realist approach so keenly and meticulously observed that it attained the alien quality of dystopic science fiction.

A rally against the expansion of Liberty National Golf Club drew hundreds to Liberty State Park on an unseasonably warm January morning.

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.

Caven Point is a small, ecologically sensitive twenty one-acre piece of land.  It is unique, precious and fragile.  There isn’t room on it for herons, falcons, seals and golfers.

“‘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.