mine street

I haven't been able to find on the web what, exactly, was mined in or near Mine Street, New Brunswick (maybe copper?): I think that if it was an enterprise that involved extensive underground tunnels this house would probably have fallen into it by now. I was on an expedition to look at the outlying houses that are occupied by the English Department, to see what can be patched and mended and propped up and guarded against raccoons (I learned that one reason for the strange plywood boarded up holes in the ceiling in the building that houses my own office, in Union St, was that they had put a trap up there - I thought, indeed, that the noise of energetic raccoon sex had diminished of late).

My first Rutgers office was in Mine Street, and the house still seems to reek of dank depression, to me - I don't think just my own, in 2001, for it surely had some utterly miserable inhabitants within it before its academic appropriation. The greenish stained glass, and the nearly elegant fireplace in a front room - it could be lovely, but the period tiles are a seedy yellow - give a very bilious air to the whole building. And this is intensified by the creepers that actually make their way through the window frames and into the rooms. Since, outside, the house has a little turret, the whole effect is very Grimms Fairy Tales - as though it could be lived in by malevolent, non-princely frogs. Union Street, in an amphibious parallel, bears a new sign outside announcing that it is inhabited by a Toad (yes, as in Parp-Parp!). Sigh.