As people moved away in search of jobs elsewhere, the rats and rot that always threaten waterfront cities expanded unchecked.

Buildings quantum-leaped from full occupancy to abandoned ruin. Federal government grants allowed the city fathers to tear down most of the buildings, but there was no federal money to build new ones —and no people to move into them even if they had been built—and the skyline of Bay City wound up looking like a jack-o'-lantern's mouth, the wide-

open spaces of vacant lots interrupted only by an occasional building.

Most of the five thousand persons left had jobs in the factories of Jersey City and Hoboken. The rest were pensioners too old or poor to move and kids and hustlers and degenerates and hookers and bums who preyed on each other and had no reason to move.

While Bay City's decline was inexorable, it was also gradual and therefore was not covered by the press, which dealt only in stories featuring explosions or non-negotiable demands. The city was just another declining eastern seaboard community, too small to rate any television exposure, either as contrast or color.

Few people visited the city, so it was noticed when one day a long black Cadillac limousine with California license plates pulled up in front of the Bay City Arms apartment house.

The Bay City Arms remained the only apartment building in town fit to inhabit. It was now 67 percent occupied and when the figure dropped below 60 percent, the out-of-town owner was going to dump the building back to the city for unpaid real estate taxes. The building's heat was turned off at 10:00 promptly each night and only one of the two elevators worked, but the building commanded an imposing view on its easterly side of the New York City skyline and the decayed concrete piers of Bay City.