"Newarkology" Website

There's a new website being built that enthusiasts of Newark might like to check out: Newarkology. The approach of this Newark-history website is a neighborhood-by-neighborhood focus on Newark today that combines illustrative photos and descriptive text. The webmaster has never lived in Newark but nearby. Still, he is very fond of this city and optimistic about its future, as am I. His location makes him intimately familiar with my neighborhood, the once-independent municipality of Vailsburg, which South Orange adjoins to the west.
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Indeed, one of the items already up on his site is a tour of South Orange Avenue, the main drag of Vailsburg that starts in Downtown Newark on the east, proceeds thru the Central Ward, West Side, and Vailsburg within Newark, enters South Orange, and proceeds thence as far as Livingston. As county road 510, it then continues on deep into Morris County.
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Some maps erroneously label that road as "Orange Avenue South". No. It is not Orange Avenue. "South" is not a marker of some portion of the road, matched by "North" in another portion. It is an integral part of the name of the roadway, an avenue that leads to South Orange. When first I was finding my way around Newark, I too was puzzled by South Orange Avenue and Orange Street, which are nowhere near each other. I forgot about "The Oranges", four municipalities in Essex County: Orange, West Orange, East Orange, and South Orange. There is no North Orange. I don't know why.
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The Oranges are named for Britain's King William (of "William and Mary" fame), who came from the Dutch royal family, the House of Orange (and Nassau) — whose name, oddly, comes from Orange (pronounced Oeronzh) in southern France!
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"The Oranges" are one of various "the's" around here. We also have "The Caldwells" (Caldwell, North Caldwell, West Caldwell) and some others that do not presently come to mind. We even have "the Newarks", Newark and East Newark, tho nobody speaks of "the Newarks" because East Newark is tiny, and in Hudson County, not Essex.
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In this area of New Jersey, some roads have names that really do bear some geographic relation to their vicinity. South Orange Avenue is named not just in honor of the Township of South Orange Village (yup; that's really its formal name!) but because it leads to South Orange. This can get confusing if a roadway from one municipality to another bears that second town's name, even as a different road from a third municipality to the second bears the same name. There are, for instance, two Bloomfield Avenues, one that is a major road from Newark thru Bloomfield and on to the northwest at least as far as Montclair; and one from Belleville to Bloomfield.
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But there's only one South Orange Avenue that I know of, and it leads from Newark to South Orange going west, and from Livingston (and its mall) to South Orange going east. Very convenient. In fact, I sometimes joke that South Orange Avenue goes everywhere! In a sense, it does, because it connects with other roads that go to multitudinous other places. Lest you think all roads do, there are roads in some rural places that do not connect with other roads but only with the sea or an airport.
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In any case, Newarkology's South Orange Avenue page ends in an unfortunate way: "one is left with a sight of Vailsburg Park and a bombed-out office building." There's even a photo of that structure, which has been there for years, apparently destroyed not by a bomb but a fire. Newark is very good about tearing down abandoned houses that are destroyed by fire. We had one in my neighborhood that was burned beyond rebuilding one week and torn down the next. But the burned-out office building at the entrance to Vailsburg has stood for as long as I've been here, which is over five years now.
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I'm advised that the City may soon be tearing down everything on the entire block from Maybaum Avenue (site of the burned-out building) to Munn Avenue on the west, in order to build a new school. I look forward to that. It might be better for the city's economy, tax base, and reputation if that handsome stone-fronted building had been rebuilt as an office building, but if it's not to be rebuilt, it should indeed be torn down.
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I have a number of photos of some of the prettier things in Vailsburg on my own site, at the end of the home page. And I will be adding more. But mine is a booster site. Newarkology is a history site, which shows Newark warts and all. That's fine. There's a lot more face than warts, and Newark's face is getting clearer with each passing year.

Of Untranslated Latin Inscriptions and Hollow Cigars

I finally this past week stopped to look closely at a very grand statue-pedestal combination in a small triangular park across the street from Lincoln Park, to the north. I wanted to know who was portrayed and why.

The statue is identified on the front of the pedestal by this Latin inscription:

Unfortunately, Latin is so complicated a language, that even if you know every word, there are so many forms that determine the sense and how the words interrelate that I can't make any sense of this, despite five years of Latin, decades ago (four in high school, one in college). An online translator offers this unhelpful text, which merely validates my point: "concerning of a soldier sovereignty as best one can carriage".
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Because the forms of the words in Latin are supposed to show how they are used, it is not important to people who know the language what order the words are placed in. English is positional. We place words in a logical sequence and it is the sequence that shows the relationships. Wrong position, wrong relationship. With Latin, a word can be anywhere and still mean the same thing — or, to me in this case, mean nothing at all.
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Can anyone out there make sense of "ob militare imperium optime gestum" for me? [Update: I got two emailed translations of this inscription, given here August 19, 2008.]

The statue-pedestal combination stands almost 45 feet tall, I discovered at a Montclair State University webpage headed "The New Jersey Latin Inscriptions Project". Curiously, the Latin inscription is given there word-for-word — but not translated. That page does, however, provide some information about the statue.
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Commissioned by local brewer Christian Feigenspan, it was created in 1916 by renowned Scottish-American sculptor J. Massey Rhind* on the model of a Venetian statue started in 1488 by Verrochio, the man under whom the youth Leonardo da Vinci studied, and completed in 1495, after Verrochio's death, by Leopardi, an outside engraver and bronze caster. The original stands in Venice to this day.
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Rhind also did the George Washington statue in Washington Park, and a statue (of Crawford W. Long, a Georgian doctor who first used ether as an anesthetic) that is now part of the National Statuary Hall Collection in the Capitol Building, Washington, DC.

The Montclair State webpage says that the man depicted in the Newark statue is "Bartolomeo Colleoni, a mercenary army captain from Bergamo who served two great rival states, the duchy of Milan and the republic of Venice." As to why Feigenspan thought such a statue would be appropriate for Newark on the 250th anniversary of its founding, I cannot say. But it is a grand present, isn't it?

Shifting gears, let me speak briefly about an odd tobacco product I have seen people manipulating on the bus for smoking later. It apparently comprises some kind of hollow cigar with a plastic tip and loose pipe tobacco that is poured out of the package and then poured into the hollow cigar and packed down to the smoker's taste. I don't know if it comes prepacked in the hollow form or in a separate compartment, but it seems to me a very odd, labor-intensive product. What special character does the resulting smoking experience have that would make it worth all this trouble? And what product is it, exactly? Who makes it? Why is it popular? Anyone?
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* Tho I could not find online a comprehensive biography with photos of his works, a Google search for "John Massey Rhind" shows many prominent public monuments all over the U.S. and even in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The man was very prolific and very well regarded. Newark is lucky indeed to have (at least) two of his works.