In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, students have been told to leave their student housing, including dorms, greek life houses, and leased housing. Without anywhere else to go, the students have resorted to building a shantytown on Palmer Lawn.
Built of old Stutes, stolen supplies from the construction of the incoming dorms, busted D3 trusses, and last season’s mechanical keyboard keycaps, the shantytown — dubbed Favardinville after the president whose leadership (or lack thereof) lead to this housing crisis — stands strong with about 85 lean-tos. Fears of students in such close proximity to one another sparks anxiety over them spreading COVID-19 among each other, but the only apparent epidemic is of the revival of newsboy hats and fedoras among Favardanvillers.
However, COVID-19 is not the only thing to fear in the slum. The telltale signs of mob activity are rampant in Favardinville. Cigarette butts littering the lawn. Campus PD has busted two moonshine operations posing as Senior Design projects already. Students living in Favardinville have reported visits from mysterious, shadowy men (let’s be real, the representation of women in mobs is even more measly than in STEM) who knock on their ‘doors’ (usually mildewy bath towels or sheets whose stains follow a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy) and demand protection payments. If students refuse protection payments, mobsters render their lean-tos into a Faraday cage so the student cannot watch his/her favorite Twitch streamer.
“They pay up after that.” A sophomore Mechanical Engineering student whose mobster name is ‘Slim Jim’ assured us. “Always.” However, like all good engineers, the mob has a contingency plan. If a student refuses to pay up a second time, mobsters would use their lean-to as a target for molotov cocktail throwing practice (which Slim Jim told us they were in the process of petitioning the SGA to turn into an intramural league (of course, any opposing team who attempted to join the league would, themselves, be used for target practice)).
There aren’t just mobsters to worry about. There are gamblers, too. You can spot clumps of students playing craps and/or D&D. The game is unclear except for the fact the students are playing with dice. We have not been able to question them about the nature of their game because any time we approach them they scamper off like a herd of startled guinea pigs, likely an instinctual reaction after their daily encounters with Chadwick Jones, the director of residence life, and campus PD who approach the Favardinvillers with a broom to try to ‘sweep’ them out while yelling “scram, hooligans! skedaddle!”
Next to Favardanville a protest has popped up. Around the base of Howe, now-redundant student workers are bracing the winds, staging a hunger strike to demand pay for lost time. To slash the unemployment rate, the administration stuck these students on projects like dams, bridges, and hundreds of thousands of miles of roads. Of course, the students could only work in shifts of 10 or fewer at a time to mitigate the spread of the dreaded virus which put all these students out of work in the first place.
Makenzie Macelroy, a 3/5 Civil Engineering student who has single-handedly repaved every single road in Hoboken, said, “When I enrolled to become a civil engineer, this is not what I had in mind.”
Mob Boss Fat Pete, while a fan of rejuvenating American infrastructure, wonders why none of the administration’s efforts have been focused at alleviating the desolate conditions of Favardinville. “Don’t get me wrong, I love Favardinville like my own granny, see,” he said in a thick-as-molasses Sicillian accent even though he reports he is pure-(soda)bred Irish, “but I’s gettin’ real tired of wakin’ up every mornin’ to my own roof fallin’ on my face.” Fat Pete told us to specifically tell you the following quote is not a threat, “but we’s startin’ to notice how easy of a target the Howe building would be for molotov cocktails is all we’s sayin’.”
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