Florida FAST Practice Test 2

Passage 1: Speech of Councilman Ambrose Fenwick, Fourth Ward (1908)

¹Mr. President, gentlemen of the Council: I rise in support of the resolution to purchase the forty acres of the old Bellamy tract along the river and to set them aside forever as a public park. I know the hour is late and the treasury is thin. I ask only that you hear me as fathers and neighbors before you weigh me as a ledger.

²Twenty years ago this city counted forty thousand souls. Today it counts eighty thousand. We have doubled, gentlemen, and we have done it the way a boy outgrows his coat—without asking anyone's permission and without anyone buying him a new one. Where have those forty thousand new citizens gone to live? Into the Fourth and Sixth Wards, into houses built back to back, into rooms where the sun comes once a day, if it comes at all, through a window the size of a hymnbook.

³I have walked those streets. I have seen children playing in the gutters of Canal Street because the gutter is the only open ground they own. I have seen them dodging wagons for the privilege of a game of ball. Is this the inheritance we intend to leave them—a city that has grown rich and forgotten to grow room?

⁴My colleague from the Second Ward will tell you that the riverfront is worth more as wharves than as grass. He may be right, if worth is counted only in tons and dollars. But I would remind him that the great cities of this nation that have set aside open ground—Boston with its Common, New York with its Central Park—have found the land returned to them a hundredfold in the health and temper of their people. A city is not a warehouse with families stored in the attic.

⁵Consider, too, the cost of delay. Today the Bellamy tract may be had for ninety thousand dollars. In five years, when the factories have crept up the river, as they will, no price will buy it back. Land, once given over to smokestacks, does not return to the people. We have one chance, and it is this one.

⁶I do not pretend that a park will cure every ill of a crowded city. It will not lower the rents on Canal Street. It will not mend a single leaking roof. But it will give a laboring man somewhere to walk with his wife on a Sunday that is not a saloon, and it will give his children a place where the sky is wider than the street.

⁷Gentlemen, we are the trustees of this city, not its owners. Those who come after us will not remember which of us balanced the budget in 1908. They will remember whether we left them a river they could stand beside.

⁸I urge the adoption of the resolution.

Passage 2: Speech of Councilman Cyrus Galloway, Second Ward (1908)

¹Mr. President: I yield to no man in my regard for the children of Canal Street. I was one of them. I learned to swim in that river when it was cleaner than it is now, and I learned to work on its docks at the age of eleven. So let no one say that the gentleman from the Fourth Ward has a monopoly upon compassion.

²He tells you, and rightly, that this city has doubled in twenty years. Forty thousand new citizens, he says, and he asks where they shall live and play. I ask a plainer question: where shall they work? Eighty thousand people cannot live on Sunday afternoons. They must eat on Monday morning.

³The Bellamy tract is the last deep-water frontage left within the city limits. The Hale Shipping Company has offered to lease it, to build three wharves at its own expense, and to employ, by its own estimate, six hundred men. Six hundred men, gentlemen—six hundred families who will not need the charity of this Council or the soup kitchen of St. Agnes.

⁴My friend admires Boston and New York. So do I. But Boston set aside its Common when it was a village of cows, and New York built its park with the profits of the busiest harbor in the world. Harbor first, gentlemen; park after. A city must earn its luxuries before it can afford them.

⁵Nor is the cost of the park measured only in dollars. Ninety thousand dollars for grass is ninety thousand dollars not spent on sewers for the Sixth Ward, where typhoid took fourteen children last summer. If we are to speak of children's health, let us begin underground, where the trouble is, and not on a lawn, where it is not.

⁶I would not see the river walled off from the people forever. Let the lease include a public promenade along the water—I will gladly offer the amendment myself. Let the wharves pay for the park that will one day stand beside them.

⁷We are trustees, as my colleague says. But a trustee who spends the inheritance on ornaments while the roof is leaking has not kept faith with those who trusted him. I urge the defeat of the resolution.