CONTEST FOR PARKWAYS CONTINUED 197 
fluences referred to determined that the result should be 
otherwise. 
IN A COMMITTEE’S HANDS. 
The application to the Orange Common Council from 
the Park Commission for the transfer of the avenue was, 
on its receipt, promptly referred to the Street Committee. 
The chairman was Henry Stetson, who was one of the few 
men in Orange who had, with Mayor Seymour and others 
in Newark, strongly objected from the first to an appointive 
commission. “It’s all wrong,” Mr. Stetson said to me, 
when the plans for the first Park Commission were under 
way. He then assured me, as afterward, that he opposed 
that plan on principle. That he was emphatic in his ob- 
jections no one who knew him, I think, had any reason to 
doubt. His views were not in the least modified when, in 
1895, the second commission was appointed and the con- 
trol of that board and its large appropriation was made 
politically Republican. Like the Massachusetts Democrat 
in that far-famed home of Republicanism during the ex- 
citing 1860-65 war times, he was thereafter, in parkway 
matters, unceasingly, and it seemed almost intuitively, 
“agin” the prevailing order of things. 
The possession of the two ordinances, in January, 1897, 
apparently gave Mr. Stetson and his followers their oppor- 
tunity. They were not slow in availing themselves of it. 
Theretofore the rule of procedure in the City Council had 
been that when the owners of a majority frontage on an 
avenue or street petitioned for an improvement, unless 
some legal or financial obstacle were in the way, the request 
would be granted. There had then just been presented to 
the Mayor and City Council petitions from the property 
owners on both avenues in favor of the parkways and 
“against the granting of any and all franchises on Cen- 
tral avenue for any purpose whatever, as such action on 
your part would embarrass the action of the Park Com- 
mission.” 
This petition for Central avenue bore the signature of 
