New Voting Machines; Vote for Me! (and I'll Set You Free!)

I went on a little excursion today to the Weequahic section (pronounced WEE-quake) of Newark, about seven and a half miles from home, to see the new voting machines that Newark will be using later this year (but apparently not for the mayoral election in May).
+
This is an overview of the touch-screen machine (from Sequoia Voting Systems) that we will be using in future elections, shown with its privacy curtain thrown over the top to permit easy access for demonstration of its features.

The new machine has a couple of very good features that should make voting simpler, especially for write-in candidates. Rather than pushing down a lever to show an X by the candidate's name, you push a flat area by the name and a lited green X appears. You push again, and the X toggles off. The mere fact that the X is green makes it more conspicuous to the voter. Little things can mean a lot, and color coding is not just clearer but also more appealing visually.
+
The second advantage of the new machines is really striking: write-in voting is hugely simplified. First, write-ins appear at the very top of the list of choices! What a change! Second, instead of having to find a hidden compartment with a paper slip to write on with your own pen, there is a keyboard with which you can type the name. It is not a standard typewriter or computer keyboard, however, so people who don't type can use it readily, tho people who do type on a standard keyboard will find it hard to use at first. Look closely at the picture below, and you will see that the keys are arranged alphabetically from A-M on the top row and N-Z on the bottom row. The green window at the left shows what you have typed. Terrific.

Ms. Kathy V. Sumter Edwards, Deputy Superintendent of Elections, was on hand at the Seth Boyden Terrace demonstration and gave me permission to take the fotos that appear here. She is a pretty black woman with shoulder-length hair, almost in ringlets toward the front, and very pleasant and helpful. I asked how write-in votes are counted, and she said, 'exactly as written', except that if someone makes a typo, as for instance leaving out an L in "William Jones", they will know to count that vote with the others for Mr. Jones. Still, write-in candidates (as I might be for mayor in future years if not this year) will have to get the word out that only a particular form of their name should be written-in.
+
I rushed out of the house today without taking business cards for my Resurgence City website — I don't know where I put the cardholder, and had no time to create a bizcard specific to this blog, as I thought to do before I realized I had to vamoose to get to the demo on time — but told Ms. Edwards that I have a website about Newark and a blog on which I'd like to display picture(s) of the new machine. A woman opposite her at a table near the machine wrote down the name of the website, and I told her that there is a link to the blog at the very top of that site, but I don't know if Ms. Edwards will see this post. I'd like to thank her publicly, however, for her graciousness, not just in giving permission for me to take pictures but also for correcting a misimpression I had about what city office to go to in order to get information on the form of petition for candidates for mayor.
+
The woman who wrote down the website name inquired if I were interested in running, and I said yes. I should have said, "Yes, but not against Mayor James. He's done a very good job, but if he retires, as he said last time he would after this term, I would certainly like to replace him." But I needed to rush out to City Hall to get that info, so neglected to make that point.
+
I did indeed get the info I wanted about the form of petition for people running for mayor. However, I couldn't get it without myself registering to run for mayor! See my political blog of today for more on that candidacy.)
+
In any case, I wanted to see a few things in that part of the city before I headed to City Hall, and was favorably impressed. When I was first investigating the thought of moving to Newark (from far-west Midtown Manhattan), I started my quest in the Weequahic section but was dissuaded by some nice locals who warned me that the Osborne Terrace area was riddled with drugs, and the only place around there that I might want to live was very close to the Park. I later discovered Vailsburg, and settled there instead. But Weequahic has much to recommend it.
+
Here is a view of the public golf course that occupies the southern portion of Weequahic Park. It is fenced in to keep nongolfers from interfering with the game, and is apparently maintained beautifully. Maybe we can attract a major tournament to Newark's only golf course (tho there is another in the Belleville section of Branch Brook Park).

The unfenced portion of the park is, in places, plainly neglected and filled with litter. But you can see the potential of this splendid park.

All over this country there are fancy, expensive housing developments that back onto golf courses. Newark's splendid golf course has not, to date, attracted that kind of development, but it plainly should. Where is the smart money to buy out, at generous levels of recompense, the current owners of the low-rise housing near the golf course and replace it with deluxe townhouses and mid- to high-rise apartments?
+
Indeed, much of Weequahic Park is beautiful — rolling hills, tall trees, a fabulous lake filled with ducks, geese, and swans — but there's almost no luxury housing anywhere around it. There is this new arrival, at Pomona and Elizabeth Avenues. I don't know if it is a renovated old structure or a new building made to look old, but it sure does blend in perfectly with the buildings around it.

Having spent 35 years in Manhattan and seen how overbuilt and overpriced most of that island is, I'm astonished by how shortsighted developers are that they haven't hit upon Newark as a perfect mix of beautiful scenery and low price within easy commuting distance of Manhattan.

Tiny Terminal

Today, let's move to the extreme western edge of Newark, to the Dover Street terminal of the No. 31 line of the Coach USA bus company on South Orange Avenue. This tiny tile-roofed building houses a little office at the westernmost stop of most of that line's buses. Only one an hour during most of the day (more during rush hours) go beyond Dover Street into South Orange and on to Livingston Mall (Lord & Taylor, Macy's, Sears, and many specialty shops) thru South Mountain Reservation. The rest of the day the buses shuttle the four and a half miles between Dover Street and Newark Penn Station, straight down SOAv into Market Street. That trip is only one fare zone. The NJTransit No. 1 bus ride of shorter distance down nearby 18th Avenue is two zones, but because of congestion and traffic lites on SOA takes about the same time. The No. 1 is closer to me, but the 31 goes closer to destinations more people would be interested in along the way — the host of businesses along SOA, the main drag of Vailsburg (my neighborhood); the Boylan Street Recreation Center and swimming pool; Vailsburg branch library; UMDNJ; and the 24-hour Pathmark.

Newark's excellent network of public transportation makes it possible for people of modest means to get by without a car. Manhattanites thinking of getting away from the crammed-jammed "life" of noisy and expensive Manhattan, but who can't immediately afford to buy a car should keep this in mind when thinking where to move.

St. Stan

Yesterday I showed a picture of the Lyceum attached to St. Stanislaus Roman Catholic Church, and said I'd show the church itself today. Unfortunately, the pictures I have were taken in the afternoon (I'm not a morning person), and St. Stan's faces south, so I don't have good liting on the façade. (The Old Newark website offers a much better foto of the façade taken by someone who apparently has no difficulty getting up and about in the morning.) The foto of the school also left something wanting, because I don't have a wide-angle lens on my digital camera so could not take a picture from directly across the street but had to show the view from diagonally off to the left. In any case, here are two pictures of the church, one from the then-vacant lot across the street that is now being filled with houses (see this blog's entry of September 28, 2005), and one from the north side, showing the church and its school together.

Note how big it is. The little building off to the right is a 3-story police station.

I don't know if services in Polish are still being offered, but this sign on the front of the church suggests they were at one time.

Lyceum

"Lyceum" is a hifalutin kind of word outsiders wouldn't ordinarily associate with Newark. It has various meanings, first of which is "an institution for popular education providing discussions, lectures, concerts, etc." Another meaning is a homonym for secondary school.
+
Newark has at least one lyceum, which I chanced across in exploring new housing in the Livingston Street area of the Central Ward.

Perhaps you can't see the engraved name of the school in the larger view above. Here's a closeup.

Tomorrow, Sunday, I'll show a picture of the church it is associated with.

Changing Scene

One of the neat things about the Gateway Center is the constantly changing parade of small businesses that rent out a rolling cart outside Gateway Two for display of their goods on and around it. One day it's a men's neckware business. The next it's women's jewelry. The next it's original artworks of modest price. The next, women's purses and totes. And every couple of months there's a book sale that lasts two or three days and displays books of many types on stands around the cart. Office workers who get to the Center early have a few minutes to browse, and if they don't have time on the way to work, maybe they can check things out at lunchtime. In shopping at the cart, they are supporting local small businesses, and may find unique crafts items not available in stores.

Landscaped Grounds

We're only a month from spring now, and the trees in front of the Mulberry Street entrance to Gateway Center will soon be green again. Office workers will soon be able to eat lunch at the outdoor tables, whereas the only people who spend any time outside now are smokers barred from office interiors. They mostly congregate in the driveway to the garage between Gateway Four and Two. Most people hustle out of the cold into the arched entryway now, but in a month or two, they will stroll, and chat with friends in the sunlite.

NCC Art

Most towns and cities have almost no public art. A few, like Mexico City, are filled to overflowing with murals and other artistic works intended to make a place for art in the daily lives of residents and visitors. Newark is midway between those two extremes.
+
As fotos in earlier entries to this blog and on the Resurgence City website have shown, Newark has what will strike many outsiders as a surprisingly rich and distinguished array of public art by distinguished artists — and some unknowns. I don't know into which category the statue pictured below fits. It is an abstract sculpture outside what appears to be an apartment in a New Community Corp. ("NCC") housing development on South Orange Avenue east of Bergen Street in the Central Ward. I'm not sure what it is supposed to represent, but it looks vaguely maternal to me. What do you think?

NCC is one of the brilliant responses of my magnificent city to the devastation caused by our notorious 1967 Riots. The Riots are long (decades) gone, but the coalition of religious, business, and nonprofit organizations, in cooperation with government, that arose in response to the Riots remains, building Newark far beyond the point of mere restoration of status quo ante. It would be a silly exaggeration to say that the Riots were the best thing that ever happened to Newark, for giving rise to NCC. But Newark is indeed blessed to have such a public-private partnership, and other cities have every reason to be jealous.

Newark 'Boom'

I was working at my computer in my hoffice (home office, an established new word) on the third floor of my house the other day when movement outside my window caught my eye. It was a mechanical arm poking up above the rooftops at the building site three houses away, lifting pipe or something into place.

When it first rose into sight, it echoed the point of the roof to the right of center, but by the time I found my camera, the angle had changed. It was still pretty interesting to see.

NJ Film; Another Skyway

Two items today. The foto of the day appears in the second.
+
NJ Film. Desperately channel-surfing for entertainment yesterday, I chanced across a film made in New Jersey, and watched it for that reason only. It turns out that I had stumbled on a wonderful little film from 2003 that I had never heard of. The Station Agent is a deeply touching film about a beautiful, ordinary man with a beautiful voice trapped in the hideous little body of a dwarf. I came in a little late, but recognized the Hoboken train station, so stayed around.
+
Set mainly in Newfóundland, Passaic County, The Station Agent is a touching film that some critics saw as a comedy, but I could not classify. It concerns a man whose way of dealing with the unwanted attention to his height that he has attracted all his life, is to try to avoid people by leaving crowded Hoboken for an abandoned train station in rural NJ. But he is drawn into very human relationships by a small number of New Jerseyans, white and black, who see him for who he is and find he fits perfectly into their lives.
+
I came across this unassuming film on Starz a bit late, but may someday chance across the beginning. If you haven't seen it at all, you may want to look for it. I was, and am, very sad for the protagonist, but was very glad to see that he found good friends who accepted him without regard to his appearance.
+
From a New Jersey point of view, this film sure blasts the urban-industrial moonscape perception of NJ to smithereens, because Newfóundland is very green, and very small-town. The star of the plot is Peter Dinklage (born in Morristown), but many people, of both genders, will have a hard time taking their eyes off Union City's own Bobby Cannavale.
+
Look for this film (for which I don't have any fotos, since I've never been to Newfóundland, even tho it's only a 45-minute ride away, about 36 miles from Newark. (Perhaps oddly, I have not just been to Néwfoundland, Canada. I have in fact driven the entire width of the province, twice, with a long sidetrip down to St. Pierre and Miquelon, the last remnants of France's Canadian empire.) Maybe this summer I'll get to rural Passaic County in the leisurely, exploratory drives I plan for good weather. I'll look for the train station, even tho the actors won't be there.
+
But the movie may well be easily accessible at a video store or via Netflix. So if you can face a film at once charming and sad, you may have the same reaction Slate reviewer David Edelstein had:

The Station Agent ends very abruptly, at a point where you're ready to hang out with it a while. I wanted it to go on and on, but that ending is right. It leaves you the way American movies almost never do: relaxed, receptive, and happy in the moment, not even caring if your train comes in.

As Stella Papamichael of the BBC observes: "The Station Agent towers above the Hollywood mainstream." And some of it really was filmed right here in New Jersey.
+
Another Skyway. Gateway Center is not the only area of Newark that has skyways. There is, of course, the Pulaski Skyway, which soars over the Passaic in the far eastern end of the city, but that's not the kind of skyway I'm talking about. I mean elevated pedestrian walkways between buildings. The Gateway area has all-weather skyways connecting nine buildings, but four blocks west of Gateway Center are two MBNA buildings connected by this skyway over University Avenue.

The older of these two recent buildings is to the left. The one on the right was added within two years of the first, and both went up after I moved to Newark 5 1/2 years ago.
+
There is at least one more skyway that I can think of, and a picture of it appears on the first foto gallery of my Resurgence City website. Any others? The tracks of and to Newark Penn Station are also elevated above street level, but that's not exactly the same thing. Still, we do have more vertical separation of types of traffic than most cities our size, which helps the city to run more efficiently for drivers and safely for pedestrians.

St. James A.M.E. Church

Today being Sunday, I present below a picture of one of Newark's religious architectural treasures, St. James African Methodist Episcopal Church, at Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard and Court Street. This wonderful building was originally the Old First Presbyterian Church, but was bought by a black congregation for $35,000 in 1945.

More Luxury Apartments for Downtown Newark

In the January 9th-11th entries to this blog, I showed pictures of the Raymond-Commerce Building near the southern edge of Military Park, which building is now being converted from offices to apartments. Now I present a view of the Griffith Building, a 210-foot, 15-story structure on the western edge of the same park that is now being converted to residential use. (Sadly, the repetitive rectangular elements in this picture cause distortion when it's reduced in size. I don't know how to fix that. But you get the picture.) Emporis.com says:

- The Griffith Building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2001.
- An $85 million renovation into residential and retail use is scheduled to begin in 2005.
- The project will include the adjacent Hahne's Building and will comprise 500,000 square feet of space and 253 units of luxury loft apartments.

I understand that the renovation mentioned as being in the future at Emporis has in fact begun.
+
The tall structure below is the Griffith Building. The shorter, red-brick structure to the left is Hahne's, a better view of which appears in the third foto gallery on the Resurgence City website.

The Griffith Building is nextdoor to the Aljira gallery, a five-minute walk from NJPAC, ten-minute walk to The Newark Museum, and within at most a 15-minute walk of Bears and Eagles Riverfront Stadium to the north and Gateway Center and Newark Penn Station to the southeast
+
Once large numbers of prosperous tenants arrive at these renovated and retasked historic buildings, surely coffeeshops, clubs, and other amenities will follow. (Actually, Newark's one Starbucks is already in place, within the National Newark Building, five blocks away.) We can't have our yuppies bored, now can we?
+
Now that I think of it, I suppose such a new urban village could be very appealing to empty-nesters who see no need to maintain a big house in the suburbs but can eliminate the commute to the office in Downtown Newark, or substantially shorten the commute to Manhattan, and walk everywhere rather than hunt for parking. Science has told us many times of late that walking is really good for you, so it is especially important for older people, who can't readily jog, pump iron, or pursue extreme sports, to incorporate walking into their daily routine. The New Newark will be a place that New Newarkers will walk with pleasure.
+
I will be very interested, in strolling the Military Park area five years hence, to see what kinds of people and activities this surge in residential construction attracts.

Science Park center

Newark is a college town, with over 40,000 students in post-secondary institutions. Among those institutions, altho its focus is research rather than education, is the International Center for Public Health, a unit of UMDNJ (the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey).

Neglect

Some of Newark's heritage has been lost; some is endangered. Here's a closeup of the marquee and ornate decoration over it on the façade of what was built as the Newark Paramount Theater and is now, alas, an "Army-Navy + Leather Outlet" store.

The good news is that the theater, tho gutted, was not entirely demolished. The bad news is that its current owners are allowing the building's historic façade to deteriorate. Perhaps public interest and pressure can rescue this historic structure before it is hopelessly ruined
+
Some people may think that there are more urgent needs in a city than preserving old buildings, but history has value, not just to people's self-esteem but also to the appeal of the city as a prospective tourist attraction. This building is little more than a block from the site of the Newark Arena now being built. Wouldn't a brilliantly restored façade of a historic structure be better for visitors to the Arena to see than one that is crumbling and rusting away?
+
This is the kind of issue not being adequately addressed by present officeholders in Newark, and part of why I'm investigating what is involved in running for Mayor myself.

(Really) Broad Street

When we say "Broad Street", we ain't just awoofin'. As you can see from the foto below, Broad Street, Newark, really is broad: 7 lanes in this area.

If you don't walk very quickly, you'd best wait at the curb and step off for the other side instantly upon the "walk" icon's liting, or you're not going to make it to the other side before traffic comes barreling along.

Greater Newark Conservancy Mural

Let me use a foto of an outdoor mural on Prince Street to mention a community organization you might never have heard of.

This mural lies to the left of the old synagog on the block of Prince Street that runs between Springfield Avenue and South Orange Avenue and is now part of the Prudential Outdoor Learning Center.
+
When I first saw it, I was struck by the term "Greater Newark", and now use it as the term for a geographically larger Newark we could create by annexing towns around, starting with depressed East Orange and Irvington. (See this blog's entry of October 24th, 2005.)
+
The Greater Newark Conservancy works to "help[ ] Newark to stay green". An admirable aim.

Blizzard '06

Those of you who live around here know firsthand what fell on Newark this past weekend. For those of you who retired to places like Florida, here are a few images from my house. The snowfall varied by several inches from one place to another in this "thundersnow" event (yes, I saw the sky lite up and heard thunder seconds later while working at my computer late that nite). Tho the location of the weather station seems to have received over 21 inches of snow (and Central Park, Manhattan, got 26.9 inches), my house got away with far less — tho still a lot, as you can see from these fotos.

I sank the tape measure into the snow atop trash cans by my back door. The snow turned a cluster of utilitarian objects into a semi-abstract image.

The snow had not definitively stopped until almost 3pm Sunday (from about 4pm Saturday). I waited, puttering around the house and watching weather reports, until I felt sure that my work in clearing the porch, stairs, and a path down my sidewalk would not be undone by more snow. By the time I finished shoveling (47 minutes later), the lite was failing, but you can see that the cut thru the snow is pretty clean. That is, the high sides to the cut are not snow piled up from where it had been removed, but the undisturbed surface of the blanket of snow that lay all about.

High temperatures today are expected to be slitely above freezing. Tomorrow and Wednesday should be in the low 40s, Thursday above 50, and Friday should bring rain enuf to clear away all but the highest shoveled or plowed piles of white stuff. Thank goodness this didn't happen at the beginning of winter. As it is, we had snow on the ground for several weeks in November and December.
+
I suppose we should be grateful for cold weather. If the Tristate Metropolitan Area had year-round warm weather, we would have, instead of 22 million people, perhaps 50 million. Newark weather isn't for sissies.

Church? Not a church?

It's Sunday again, so here's a picture of what is, or used to be, the Second Presbyterian Church in Downtown Newark on Washington Street at James Street. If you look at the lower left of the picture, you can see a FOR SALE sign, so I don't know if the church, which I have also seen called the Presbyterian Center, is still in use as a church. It was apparently the third building to bear the name "Second Presbyterian Church" at that site, constructed in 1930 to replace one that burned down. That one had been completed in 1886, to replace the first, built in 1810. I hope Newark has protections for distinguished landmarks, and even if the present building is sold, it will not be demolished. It is, after all, in the James Street Commons Historic District.

Nekkid Guys

Here is the last of the three fotos of the statuary cluster at the base of the flagpole in Lincoln Park that I said I'd show. For some reason, we are supposed to overlook public nudity when it's in bronze. I guess this is why the Framers of the Constitution did not protect art in the First Amendment, because some artists insisted on offending public sensibilities with nudity that the Framers granted officials the right to forbid.

What were the city fathers of Newark, an old Puritan town, thinking when they commissioned a sculpture of a bunch of nekkid guys?
+
On what battlefield, when, did men ever fight nude except for helmets and fig leaves? Plainly no such behavior ever occurred, so why this ridiculous statuary subject? Fiting men wore not just clothes but also armor, for obvious reasons.
+
Be that as it may, this Lincoln Park sculpture is remarkable for a flagpole, don't you think? The figures are perhaps 3/4 life-size, and quite beautiful in their way. Gutzon Borglum's enormous bronze statuary group, "Wars of America", in Military Park, less than a mile away, has fully clothed figures in contemporary dress appropriate to their actual role in American wars. Like this group, "Wars of America" was sculpted after World War I and before World War II. Borglum represented the reality of people in modern wars, wearing the clothing of the time. This group, by the distinguished sculptor Charles Henry Niehaus, tried to universalize the particularities of "The Great War" by casting the warriors in the Roman mold. "Wars of America" is a slice of history, with soldiers wearing the silly, and poorly protective, shallow helmets of WWI doughboys. "Planting the Standard of Democracy" strives for timelessness. Its figures wear little but symbolic helmets — of much more protective design.
+
Both sculptors are distinguished figures in American art. Borglum is by far the more famous, for his Mount Rushmore assemblage of monumental sculptures. But Niehaus is represented by EIGHT figures in The National Statuary Hall collection. Borglum is represented by only three.
+
I suspect very few people on this planet know how distinguished the sculpture in Newark's public parks is. You are among the elite.

Flagpole Base

Yesterday I showed Lincoln Park's 75' flagpole in its setting, but you could not tell from that picture that there is a statuary cluster at its base. In this second picture, you can see what I first noticed in passing by in my car.

For some reason, when I have been able to get to the area, the liting has not been conducive to showing the sculpture in detail. You really do have to see it for yourself. But tomorrow I will show the last of the three fotos on this subject I plan to put in this blog, a closeup of the sculpture from right front.

Magnificent Flagpole

There is a 75-foot-tall flagpole in Lincoln Park at the base of which is a statuary cluster called "Planting the Standard of Democracy". The Newarkology website has a feature on that statue with a number of closeup views, but its longer view is fuzzy. Here's a clearer foto of the flagpole in its setting.

Tomorrow I'll show a closeup from a different vantage point than shown on the Newarkology page.

Safe Streets

Here's a view of part of an interior roadway in the Kinney Gardens West townhouse development completed last year.

Unlike most city streets, the roads internal to this development are not thorofares, so there's no thru traffic racing hither and yon. Instead, there is a child-friendly low density and low-traffic enclave feel to the complex.

3 Ages of Architecture

Today's foto shows an 1857 church, an ornate 1929 office building, and a modernist concrete slab office building as seen from Atlantic Street in Downtown Newark near Bridge Street.

The steeple belongs to the North Reformed Dutch Church. The old office building is 15 Washington Street. I don't know the current major tenant nor owner of the more recent office building, which is one of three of similar style on both sides of Bridge Street. The tallest is the IDT Building, and one of the others (tho, oddly, not the nearer one) also says IDT on it. This one stands between the two IDT buildings.
+
In checking the Internet for the history of 15 Washington, I found a Rutgers University press release of only a few days ago (February 2, 2006):

Rutgers University today announced that it is soliciting proposals from five pre-qualified developers for the redevelopment of its historic building at 15 Washington Street in Newark. The 17 story towered building has been dormant since the Rutgers School of Law-Newark and the School of Criminal Justice moved into the new Center for Law and Justice at 123 Washington Street six years ago. The neoclassical style building has been owned by Rutgers since 1978; it was built in 1929 as a home to the American Insurance Company.

With recent expansion of the campus’ population and with the many developments in Newark that make it increasingly attractive as a residential community, the university is seeking innovative proposals to convert the historic building into graduate student housing.

Rutgers-Newark has long been a major center of graduate education, and currently enrolls, in addition to over 6000 undergraduate students, over 4000 graduate students in business, law, nursing, public administration, criminal justice, arts and sciences. With a growing demand for housing on and adjacent to campus, the location of 15 Washington Street has been seen as one that would be particularly attractive for graduate housing. Among the benefits of the location are its close proximity to downtown, to major institutions such as the Newark Museum, NJ Performing Arts Center, Riverfront Stadium, and to direct train links from the Broad Street station and the new light rail connection, to Penn Station in Newark and New York City. 15 Washington St. features dramatic views of New York City and the entire metropolitan area. A well known architectural landmark, the building was used extensively for the 1998 film Rounders, starring Matt Damon.

It also appeared in the background of an Advair commercial this past year.
+
When the conversion of 15 Washington is completed (around August 2008), a substantial resident population of grad students will enjoy not just the features mentioned above but also leafy Washington Park, directly across the street, which contains statues by Gutzon Borglum and J. Massey Rhind. Nice neighborhood.

Nite View from the Museum

The foto below was taken from the driveway of the Newark Museum, looking south and slitely east past the decorative lamp on Museum grounds to the lited top of the National Newark Building, which is partially blocked by branches of a young tree. I did not at the time know how to use the "Nite Scene" setting on my camera, so there is only a sense of nitetime in Newark. But that's enuf. The picture is, I think, sort of purty, and should suggest to the viewer that you can actually be in Downtown Newark after dark without getting killed. Think about that whenever you see a nitetime scene on this blog.

St. Nick's

No, I'm not talking about Kris Kringle's place at the North Pole but about St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church on Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard in the University Heights section of Newark.

MLK Boulevard might seem a strange place for a Greek Orthodox Church, but it was built when that roadway was "High Street", the British equivalent of "Main Street" but also, in the case of this old colonial town, a street that happens actually to rise up a hill.
+
Each Sunday I try to put up a picture of a church. I may have to take some more church pix sometime soon. Now, if only the weather would cooperate, I could take my camera in hand and head out. But when it's warm, it's been wet. And when it's sunny, it's been frigid. Maybe I have enuf pix to last until spring.

Bridge Street Beams

Unlike the Hudson, the Passaic River is a relatively narrow waterway thru most of its 80-mile meandering course. Even the longest bridge across it, a span of the Pulaski Skyway, is only 1,250 feet long. So there's no need of the grand, and beautiful, suspension bridges that grace other parts of the New York-New Jersey metropolitan area.
+
Instead, truss bridges abound around here. They are visually untidy, but to be inside one is a spatial experience worth noting. Here is a view from inside the Bridge Street bridge between Newark and Harrison, looking toward the southern portion of Downtown.

Ambient Art (2)

Yesterday I showed one painting in the hallways of Gateway Center. Here's another.

Sometimes the plants that appear in front of this picture are off to the side instead.
+
It's very pleasant to have art in the environment you pass thru on the way to work. Newark should have more such ambient art. But I'm glad we do have some.

Ambient Art (1)

Today and tomorrow I will present two pictures of paintings in the hallways of Gateway Center. This first is near the entrance to Gateway Two.

Cathedral House

Trinity & St. Philip's Cathedral House is a home for the performing arts under the aegis of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark.

This strikingly painted building sits on an inconspicuous sidestreet lot at 24 Rector Street, backing onto NJPAC. (It is the gray building in the circle on the map below. The Firemen's Insurance Company Building is the building shown in color to the left.) This coming Sunday, Cathedral House will host a Superbowl party.

The foto I selected for today formats fine on my machine at full size, but strange things sometimes happen when you try to reduce a foto to fit a monitor screen. Some fotos I would like to show here become impossibly deformed by a moiré effect, and the foto of Cathedral House above shows rough and broken letters in the words painted on the building. Be assured that they are actually quite smooth. See for yourself next time you're in that neighborhood.