Greenwich's poll tax for beaches
After Black Americans were given the right to vote, many Southern states and towns imposed “poll taxes” — “which often included a grandfather clause that allowed any adult male whose father or grandfather had voted in a specific year prior to the abolition of slavery to vote without paying the tax” — to keep them from exercising their right to vote.
Well, after the courts forced Greenwich, CT to open its public beaches to, um, the public, Greenwich created its own “poll tax” to keep out the rabble. Good luck using Greenwich’s beaches, writes Rabbi Shmuley Boteach:
We arrived at Greenwich Point Park, a jutting peninsula that looked pretty. They would not sell us a pass to get in. They told us we had to drive back into the city, go to some bureaucrat’s office, and pay $20 for the car and $5 for each person to sit on a beach. We were happy to pay but couldn’t we do it right there? No, the attendant explained to us that we had to follow this map back into the city and go to an office that hopefully was open on Memorial Day.
The children and I were deflated. We gave up on the park and proceeded to drive around Greenwich looking for a pretty place to stroll. We found a gorgeous coastal walk, parked the car, and climbed over a small stone fence onto a tiny and mostly unoccupied beach. Immediately a man in a suit and a tie alighted on us to tell us that the beach was private. He was the manager of a club that owned it. We had to leave immediately. We climbed back on to the sidewalk.
But the manager was not finished with us yet. We had to leave the street as well, he told us. Turns out we had driven into a private community and the very street and sidewalk were off limits. By now I was getting tired of this. I asked the manager how a street could be private. He explained that the residents paid a special tax. I responded that I had the misfortune of living in a city in New Jersey that had some of the highest taxes in the nation. Still, we didn’t close our streets to visitors. He proceeded to call a patrol car that was driving by. Within minutes the police officer was telling me, right in front of my kids, that if I did not leave he would arrest me. ‘But there was no sign saying any of this was private,’ I objected. ‘No one stopped to tell us we were in a private area. We just wanted to go to a beach. We drove up, parked, and started to walk. Is that a crime?’ He told me I had received my first warning and this was my final chance. He reached for something in his pocket to begin the booking process. I thought to myself, ‘if I’m arrested my children will be stranded in this private community, they won’t have anyone to drive them off, and soon they’ll be arrested as well. Then my wife would come to find us and she too would be arrested. The whole family would be behind bars.’ I politely agreed to leave. The policeman smiled warmly and politely gave me directions to a ‘public’ beach in a nearby town. ‘It’s where I take my grandkids,’ he told me.
Posted by James on Thursday, June 02, 2011