116 FIRST COUNTY PARK SYSTEM 
possible or probable park sites were receiving attention dur- 
ing 1895, no suggestion had come before the new commis- 
sion favoring a “West Side” park, and not one of the com- 
missioners had advocated such a location. 
This was the status of affairs when, on January 30, 1896, 
a letter from Mayor Lubkuecher was received. It called 
attention to the need of the “Hill section” of the city for a 
park and bespoke favorable consideration of the claims of 
the people in that vicinity. Active agitation toward press- 
ing those claims did not, however, begin until it became well 
known through the local associations in that district that 
the Kast Side park had become an established fact. Then 
the trouble began, and extended “all along the line.” 
If there was ever a public board literally bombarded with 
communications and delegations by which a strenuous con- 
stituency can bring pressure to bear toward favorable offi- 
cial action, it was the Essex County Park Commission, as 
the recipient object of that attack and siege during the 
year 1896. 
First, on March 12, came a committee of citizens urging 
that a park was “a necessity in the West End.” This visit 
was followed two weeks later by a resolution from the New- 
ark City Council favoring the project for a park in the 
western part of the city. On the same day a committee rep- 
resenting the West End Improvement Association, includ- 
ing Mayor Lubkuecher, A. B. Twitchell, Commissioner 
Frederick Kuhn, of the Board of Works, E. G. Robertson, 
president of the association, and George H. Forman, made a 
forcible presentation of the subject before the commission. 
The speakers dwelt at length upon the imperative need of a 
park in proximity to the large public school there; they 
referred to the healthy location of the “Hill” district; con- 
tended that there were “close upon 70,000 people in that 
western portion of the city, or nearly a third of the popula- 
tion of Newark;” and added that it was their belief “that 
ninety per cent. of the people of Essex County were op- 
posed to the Waverly Park site.” They asked for a park 
“eonyenicnt to the population,” such as the proposed site in 
