TOY OFFICIALS 



253 



mission^ for its own credit and honor, must accept or repu- 

 diate the responsibility of an employe now so discredited in 

 his own commimity as to make his retention in the Park 

 Board a serious and growing menace." 



And, on December 16, I wrote: "As the action of the 

 Orange Conncil last evening will tend to accelerate rather 

 than modify the situation you are placed in by the action of 

 your counsel, I deem it just to yon and to myself to state 

 some of the causes leading up to the situation briefly indi- 

 cated in my letter to you of the ninth instant." I then re- 

 ferred to the statements made by Counsel Munn to some of 

 the members of the East Orange City Council while the rail- 

 road ordinance for Central avenue was there pending; 

 quoted the statements of the freeholder in Branch Brook 

 Park, as above mentioned; referred to the commission's 

 "emphatic declarations" regarding the avenues for park- 

 ways, and to "their o\vn counsel, whose statements and acts" 

 had for months contradicted those declarations; and en- 

 closed a copy of the statement of E. H. Snyder, of January 

 15, 1897, as quoted from at length in Chapter XII. 



TEAXSFER OF HIGHWAYS. 



I was advised on December 24 that the communications 

 "had been received and placed on file." And the plans of 

 the traction company for appropriating the parkway con- 

 tinued to move directly forward, as before. 



It may here be of interest to note, with what facility and 

 readiness existing public highways, avenues, or streets may 

 be transferred, and have been transferred under the Essex 

 County Park Commission's charter, when such contem- 

 plated action on the part of the interested governing bodies 

 is not subject to the demoralizing influences, which delayed 

 for years and finally prevented the transfer of one of the 

 two vitally important parkway avenues. Within ten days 

 after the passage of the parkways resolution by the Park 

 Board in November, 1896, H. H. Hart, then president of 

 the South Orange Village Board of Trustees, called a spe- 

 cial meeting of that board to act upon the question, and at 



