Steve Mensing, Editor and RFP Staff. Photographs by Scott Hunt
♦Get out your machetes and plunge along with our photo expedition into Salisbury’s Amazonia of yard high grass, weeds engulfing no parking signs. and railroad Locust trees rivaling redwoods in grandeur. See firsthand the meltdown of major city services created by Fibrant’s catastrophic nosedive and its impact on city worker’s jobs. Visit our city’s infamous “Spite Hole” at Vanderford and West Bank Streets where the undergrowth and weeds grow out of control around a malodorous pool that glows at night. Here sewer rats and snakes frolic, unencumbered by civilization or years of neighborhood complaints, in a green hell likened to the “Land that Time Forgot”. Last Friday it flashed before me that one day city medical examiners will enter this teaming bio-hazard and body bag the corpse of a giant man-creature, a distant cousin of a Yeti.
At last Salisbury will have it’s first true attraction to draw thousands to our humble burg. Look at what an alleged UFO accident did for Roswell, New Mexico in the 50′s and King Kong did for New York City in the 30′s. Salisbury don’t overlook our new Amazonia spreading throughout our forgotten neighborhoods. It is a tourism fact that people will drive hundreds of miles to visit a rain forest. Especially a new and unchecked one. Think too of the possible Federal grants if Salisbury was declared a national wilderness. Our forcibly annexed county prison couldn’t hold a candle to a national wilderness as a money magnet. Perhaps a greater mind was behind all of those “wrongful terminations” and saw the greening of Salisbury and the money magic it would produce.
No parking sign, swallowed up by green hell
The Spite Hole, a block on Vanderford Street, home of sewer rats and snakes
Standing pools of water glow at night in The Spite Hole
Standing water floods the bottom of the block-wide Spite Hole
Unsightly Neglected Streets
Grass grows in West Innes Street gutter
Grass grows on Old West Innes Street
Towering weeds at the corner of Partee and West Fisher
A sidewalk is shrouded by encroaching grass and weeds
No-one will be parking here
