In the pre-dawn dark of a Sunday morning, on 14th Avenue, just past the Rica Beatty Jenkins Plaza—a name that promises a community that the reality stubbornly refuses to deliver—a different kind of light show began.
Not the gentle glow of Christmas lights, but the hellish glare of a vacant building, long left to the rats and the shadows, deciding it had one last thing to say. It went up like a sermon on civic neglect, and the wind, that great and impartial messenger, carried its fiery text to the homes next door.
They came, more than a hundred and ten of them, the firefighters of Newark, to battle a phantom that should never have been given a body…