When I told my friends and roommates I was going to Rutgers University with my a cappella group last weekend, they each gave me the same response: “Why would you ever go to New Jersey?” I hadn’t previously spent any significant time in the Garden State, but I assumed there had to be something redeeming about it other than that silly movie from five years ago. It turned out to be, of all things, a sandwich.
After the competition was over, our host, who was in an a cappella group at Rutgers, offered us one tip. “Before you leave,” he said, “you have to go to the grease trucks.” The name is self-explanatory: These are trucks that sell very unhealthy food, and they are a Rutgers legend, as well. We found the grease trucks arranged in a little circle in an otherwise forlorn faculty parking lot near the center of the school’s College Avenue campus.
The place was mobbed by students at 1 a.m., drunk and hungry for sandwiches with names such as “Fat Bitch.” Picnic tables were set up for eating, and an adjacent bus stop brought in a constant stream of kids going to and from the fraternity parties a block away. I hadn’t even ordered a sandwich before I thought to myself: This belongs in College Park.
It wasn’t just the food they serve – so-called “fat” sandwiches containing various combinations of chicken fingers, mozzarella sticks, French fries and sauces – or the fact that all this can be had (with a drink) for roughly $6, a price that would give the weekend buffet at Panda a run for its money. It was the feeling I had walking around the grease trucks. The grease trucks were Rutgers’ town square, a marketplace for midnight munchies, a very simple measure that turns an otherwise unassuming parking lot into a makeshift gathering place for college students.
You can already go to a food truck in this area. Just five minutes west of the campus, you can buy pupusas – small, pancake-like patties made of corn dough and stuffed with meat or cheese – from trucks lining the streets of Langley Park. Aimed at the large Latino community in that neighborhood, the pupusa trucks are a cheap, easy way for people to start a business and for busy people to get a fast meal within walking distance of their homes or workplaces.
I can only imagine how much “grease trucks” or something like them in College Park could revolutionize the way students hang out in their downtown. A grouping of food trucks could appear on any of the main downtown parking lots: behind the Maryland Book Exchange, next to Santa Fe Cafe on Knox Road, next to Applebee’s or – the biggest one of them all – the College Park Shopping Center at Route 1 and Knox Road. Almost always congested with both cars and people, this parking lot is our town’s de facto town square, a place everyone’s been at one point while running errands or after drinks.
It’s so popular, in fact, that the city has erected a “no loitering” sign in the lot. But we shouldn’t be trying to steer people away from the places where they naturally congregate. Instead, we should be making them as hospitable as possible. While a sandwich truck does not a town square make, it’s definitely a start to making downtown College Park a better place to be.
Dan Reed is a senior architecture and English major. He can be reached at reeddbk@gmail.com.
Esti Frischling is a sophomore studio art major writing this semester from Thailand. She can be reached at estidbk@gmail.com.
