Metz - Killing the poormaster: a saga of poverty, corruption, and murder in the Great Depression

This map was produced by the Federal Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration for the State of New Jersey. It has been modified to include locations mentioned in Killing the Poormaster and to indicate the citys division between uptown (east of Willow Avenue) and downtown (west of Willow Avenue) prior to and during the Great Depression.

1. City hall, the Hall

94 Washington Street, headquarters of the poormaster, mayor, police, and the Recorders Court (the municipal court.)

2. Jersey Observer

111 Newark Street, newspaper with a cozy connection to the Hall.

3. Home of Joseph Scutellaro

611 Monroe Street, home of the man accused of killing the poormaster.

4. Apartment of Herman Matson

812 Willow Avenue

5. Apartment of the Hastie family

1203 Willow Avenue

6. Volk Mortuary

631 Washington Street, where the poormasters funeral was held.

7. Church Square Park

Where Herman Matson held his first public meeting.

8. Hudson Square Park

Where Herman Matson attempted to hold a second open-air meeting.

9. Pier at the east end of Fifth Street

From which longshoremen descended into Hudson Square Park during Matsons second meeting.

Map layout by Rose Daniels Design; original map 1939 by New Jersey Guild Associates, Inc., reprinted 1986 by Rutgers University Press

THE METAL SPIKE, PROPELLED with weight and force, punctured the poormasters striped dress shirt at center chest, slicing through his undervest. It tore through downy chest hair and age-toughened skin, the accumulated fat of years, cut through membrane to pierce muscle. The skewer punctured bone; with great velocity it clipped through the cage meant to protect the heart and lungs. The spike tip continued, lancing the sac enclosing Harry Barcks heart, and then, with its sudden, sharp withdrawal, ripped a jagged hole in his aorta.

Now the swift gush of blood could not be routed but flooded into the gap between Barcks flailing heart and its fibrous sheath. Blood rushed and pooled inside the girdling case, pounding the contained muscle, desperate to work and failing.

This was the deadly sequence determined at autopsy, for the bodys exterior had displayed little of the violence the medical examiners later found within. The puncture wound to Barcks chest, an eighth of an inch in diameter, had issued virtually no blood. But inside, the doctors discovered the cause of the poormasters death: the massing force of his own blood had compressed his heart and choked it, until its beating ceased.

THE MORNING THE POORMASTER was killed, twenty-three men and women were waiting for him outside his office. Just a few weeks earlier, a nationwide recession had returned them to the desperation of the Depressions early days, when millions had been forced to scavenge for scraps of food. Grim, already exhausted despite the hour, they lined the reception room and the walls of the narrow adjoining hallway. They waited to plead with Harry Barck for some bread tickets, or a check for a few dollars. Their spouses and children waited, too, on the other side of town from city hall, in tenement rooms gone cold and dark through unpaid bills.

The poormaster made quick work of the line that morning. In fewer than fifteen minutes he had dismissed six aid-seekers, not even bothering to fill in the section on his printed Relief Client list that called for the number of relatives dependent on each interviewee. Next case! the waiting men and women heard him shout each time his door was opened by a rejected applicant. Next!

Around 9:30, at the sound of the interior door suddenly yanked ajar, sixteen men and women turned their heads expectantly, listening for the seventy-four-year-old poormasters customary dismissal of the last applicant and his summoning of the next. Instead, there was a womans indistinguishable shouting and the huffing sound of someone moving quickly. Young, dark-haired Lena Fusco rushed from Barcks inner office

Lock her up! Barck ordered Carmody, who grabbed Fuscos elbow as she swore in an Italian dialect he didnt understand. The elderly poormasters face was colored with anger, and flecks of the womans spit were splattered on his tweed suit. He had removed his round, wire-frame glasses. Take her out! he demanded. Then he added, starkly, I wont give her any more [bread] tickets.

View of the poormasters private office from the waiting room, showing the secretarys desk. Forensic photograph taken by a police photographer on February 25, 1938, following the killing of Poormaster Barck.

From the case file State v. Joseph F. Scutellaro,