The Most Well Connected Poorman in America: Afterschool Staffer Creates School Mural with President Obama as Pied Piper

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Hawkins Street Mural Finished

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By Craig Schoonmaker ResurgenceCity@aol.com

On Tuesday I went to see and take pix of the mural that Ironbound artist Kevin Blythe Sampson did with a bunch of kids in the auditorium at the Hawkins Street Elementary School quite far east in the Ironbound, six miles from my house. I have an atlas that contains an inset map of the New York Metropolitan Area in which there are three labels for this city: "Newark", "Vailsburg" (my area, on the far west), and "Ironbound" (far to the east), and on Tuesday I passed thru the largest part of the city traveling between the two far ends.

Ferry Street is a bottleneck. Had I thought to Mapquest the route, I would have been directed to go via Market Street after Newark Penn Station until it joined up with Ferry Street past the congested area. But I didn't.

Kevin wrote a poem about his experience working with the kids on this project, which affected him more deeply than he had anticipated. I'm not going to show his poem here, because a folk-art magazine is planning to run it. They wanted "a really good picture" of the mural to show with it. The one foto I showed here that Kevin took didn't seem quite right for the purpose, so I offered to take some pix he could make available to the publisher. Kevin chose two, one wide and one detail view.

We'll see if the magazine's art director is satisfied with them or would like a professional fotografer to take better pix, perhaps using floodlites to bring out the colors. The (Haitian-Iranian) custodian, a cheerful, helpful guy who also teaches in a daycare center at St. Stefan's (the iconic church of the Ironbound, at the Five Corners) turned on such lites as are regularly available in the auditorium, but the mural would benefit from briter liting. (The fotos I show today are not the same as those sent to the magazine. )

The earlier foto wasn't appropriate in any case because the mural at April 11th was very different from the present, finished(?) version. The finished mural combines elements of reality with the Hollywood fable of The Wizard of Oz and the legend of the Pied Piper. Obama's music makes the children dance all the way along the yellow-brick road to the U.S. Capitol, shown here surrounded by the towers of the Emerald City.

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