Bethany Baptist

It's Sunday again, "Church Day" here at Newark USA. Today, I present a picture I took last Wednesday of Bethany Baptist Church as seen from the Market Street Side.

It vaguely reminds me of the Roman Catholic cathedral in Brasilia.

There was something about the liting when I took that picture late in the day, with red dust (it was the dry season) in the air, that gave a redder hue to this picture than the human eye perceived.
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The bulk of that building is below ground, and only the 'crown of thorns' rises aboveground. The spaces between ribs of the Brasilia cathedral's roof are filled with glass, which makes the views from inside much more striking than those from outside.

I have not yet gotten inside the Bethany Baptist Church, and its roof is solid, but there may still be an elating spatial experience viewing the roofline. If ever you are in San Francisco and have not yet been to Saint Mary's Cathedral there, be sure to stop in and look up. That is some spatial experience!

Handsome firehouse

I chanced across this dignified fire station last week. It is at West Market and Warren Streets east of the northern edge of UMDNJ in the University Heights district.

A whole lot of nothin' (Essex County parks)

I have passed by a number of the Essex County parks on many occasions, and most of them are pretty much empty all the time. The one exception is Branch Brook. Here, however, are a couple of pictures of Vailsburg Park, a mile from me. The building is elegant but boarded up. I don't know what it once was, but it's not now.

There are a few people in that picture, on a basketball court. But looking the other direction, here's what you see.

While that expanse of lawn is a pleasant spatial experience, it's a little dismaying to see that the parks in this area are so underutilized. West Side Park and Irvington Park are much the same: big expanses of nothing but grass and trees.
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In part that is because most houses in the vicinity have their own yard, where small-scale outdoor activities can take place. But the county parks are too big and too far apart. We need more "vest-pocket parks" with individual basketball courts, handball courts, etc., scattered across the city in those many vacant lots that still exist but are being filled in fast. We should also have more organized activities, including bus transportation, to bring people to these big empty spaces. And we should redevelop the areas bordering these big parks to put close by, larger numbers of people to make use of them — even if that should mean reducing the parks slitely by a margin around them for high-rise market-rate apartments (rather than demolish existing housing that may be in good shape).
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On my block, there is a private basketball hoop that is sometimes placed in the street, and kids often play at it or toss a football in the street because there is no little park nearby for them to play in. We should fix that.

Mystery tower

On April 24th I showed two pix of a big new building going up at Norfolk and West Market Streets, as seen from Norfolk Street, and asked if anyone knew what it was. Yesterday I got to the West Market side and saw a sign that clarified the issue. It's "University Housing" for UMDNJ (dorms). I solved my own mystery. I've got another for you, this time an old structure that someone might know about.
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I noticed the tower shown below along the roadside of I-280 years ago. From that vantage point it looked to me sort of like the stupa of a Hindu temple. A week or more ago I tracked it down on local streets but saw no monumental entrance nor sign/plaque announcing what it was. When I was exploring yesterday, I looked more closely and still couldn't see an explanatory engraving or sign, so turn to you. Do you know what this building was before it became a manufacturing site, now apparently wholly or partly vacant?

Tulips (closer view)

Here is a closeup of the front of my yard, showing the densest area of tulips that came up this year. The display is actually just past its prime, but I didn't take pix earlier because of rain and gloomy liting. Some of the tulips that came up are compound, with ruffled edges. When they open fully, they look almost like roses. Mixed in with the tulips in the bunch of bulbs my friend gave me were some small-bloom daffodils, which in prior years had sent up only skinny leaves but this year produced flowers.

All you people stuck in Manhattan pining for a garden, take heart. You can probably buy a house in Newark, with small yards on every side, for little money down. Your mortgage payment, with property tax built in, might be much lower than the cost of even a studio apartment in most Manhattan neighborhoods. My monthly housing payment is about $800. Many Manhattanites pay twice that for a studio!

Tulip time (wide view)

My early-spring flowers have died back, and we're now in the mid-spring group. The first spring after I moved from Manhattan to a semi-suburban area of Newark, in large part to have room for a garden, a friend from Manhattan rescued bulbs that a rich church in his neighborhood (Gramercy) had dug up after one year's bloom and put out at the curb for garbage pickup. When fall rolled around, I dug a trench most of the way across my small front yard and planted these many bulbs. But perhaps because they hadn't been allowed to die back naturally all the way, many of them did not produce flowers the first couple of years. This year, however, I've had the best display ever.

I have heard from gardening programs on TV and other sources that whereas daffodils and hyacinths tend to increase in number from year to year by the bulbs' splitting, tulips tend to diminish over time, but that seems not to be the case in my yard.
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The picture above shows the full width of the display. (The colors are random, because the bulbs were all mixed together with no color shown.) I have daffodils and hyacinths scattered in both my front and side yards, but tulips only along the retaining wall that holds back the hillside above the sidewalk. Tomorrow I'll show a particularly productive part of that display up close.

Big new building going up

In heading to the Cathedral a couple of weeks ago I saw this tall building under construction at Norfolk Street and West Market Street. Tho I looked for a sign announcing what it is, I saw none. I checked the UMDNJ website, since it adjoins the University's campus, but there's just a big white rectangle shown on the map there. So I don't know what it is. It could be offices, dormitories, apartments, classrooms. I have no idea. Do you?
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Here's a wide view, showing the new construction beyond mechanical structures and a parking garage for UMDNJ.

Here's a closer view, showing the new building on the left, the Cathedral off in the distance in the middle, and a new high school going up on the right. The things on the roof appear to be solar collectors. I think this is to be a science high school, but I need to go back to get pix and more info.

You'd think the people building the New Newark would be proud to announce what's going up. Get with the program, people!

Mt. Olive

It's Sunday, "Church Day" in this fotoblog. I know I've shown a lot of pix of St. Lucy's this past week, as part of my attempt to get former Newarkers back to the city for the Cherry Blossom Festival (which ends today!), but I do have one picture of a different church, so might as well stick to my resolve to show a picture of a church each Sunday (unless I run out of church pix and don't have time to take more).
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When initially looking for St. Lucy's, I chanced across this bold architectural statement of faith, the Mr. Olive A.M.E. Zion Church on Stone Street a few blocks from both the Cathedral and St. Lucy's.

Striking, no?

Yup, brick

On March 28th, I speculated that the areas of the two houses going up three doors from me that were not covered with siding might be faced with brick. That was indeed the intention, and here's a picture of two workmen putting up the brick and two others who may also be involved in that project. Can you spot them all?

Now, if only they'd poke some windows thru those long outer side walls, and add some landscaping, I'd be happy with the latest additions to the neighborhood.

Making way

On my way to St. Lucy's earlier this week, I got stopped at a traffic lite and chanced to see a little building being demolished not far from the Colonnade Apartments (in the background, below) to make way for another piece of the New Newark. Out of sight of this picture to the right was a bulldozer actively clearing the back of the site, probably to make way for more of the low-rise single-family townhouses or apartment buildings that are springing up all over Newark like dandelions on a lawn.

Some people regard the proliferation of dandelions as a bad thing, because they think of dandelions as weeds. But I see dandelions as cheery yellow wildflowers with, as I recently discovered thru a little Internet research, not just edible leaves for salads but also edible flowers and root! Check out this website about the health benefits of consuming dandelion leaves, flowers, and taproot, as vegetables or tea, by Steve ("The Wildman") Brill, who led tours of edible plants thru New York City parks for four years: http://www.wildmanstevebrill.com/Plants.Folder/Dandelion.html I keep losing lettuce to rot. I buy a full head, which is much more than I alone can eat in a reasonable period, and lose most of it. But I've got a number of dandelion plants growing in my front yard, so maybe if I harvest just enuf for one meal at a time, I can make salad with free ingredients for half the year.
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The car ahead of me in this picture had three political bumper stickers you can see in this foto, but not read. On the right was a sticker proclaiming the driver's pride in supporting Sharpe James for Mayor in 2002. On the left was one for James 2006 — even tho Mayor James had removed himself from this year's contest a couple of weeks earlier. I think the middle one was a second 'James Team 2002' sticker.
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My friend Gaetano in the Ironbound is very enthusiastic about the candidacy of the present frontrunner for mayor, Cory Booker, in part because he's young, in part because he is rumored to be gay. But Guy (short for "Gaetano", which is pronounced guy-táhn-o) sent me a link to an article in which Booker is said to be eager to find a way to cancel the Newark Arena, which is now well under construction. Is he insane? The Newark Arena is a terrific project that promises to do great good for Newark, in bringing tons of white people into Downtown at nite, whereupon they will discover that the fears they have had about Newark as a deathtrap of urban filth and crime are just crazy!
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Worse, Booker wants to give vouchers to schoolkids to attend private or parochial schools, in a program that would not only drain money away from the public schools but also worsen de facto segregation, in empowering middle-class white people more easily to send their kids to private schools that today only upper-income families can afford. We all know what race the bulk of upper-income people in this city, who are inclined to remove their kids from public schools, belong to. In actuality, many if not most of the people who would use vouchers already send their kids to private or parochial school, and the bulk of people who do not presently send their kids to private or parochial school would not receive enuf in vouchers to cover all the costs of a private education. That means that either they would have to come up with additional money they can scarce afford or forgo making use of vouchers that are actually intended for use only by people who have a lot more disposable income than the bulk of parents in this city have to spare. The effect? The people who are already, without vouchers, sending their kids to private schools will get a windfall at the expense of poor families who will have no choice but to continue to send their kids to public schools, but those schools will have been newly robbed of contributions by the rich, who will take thousands of dollars per student out of the public schools that they now pay in.
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Even if a working family could, with some struggle, afford to send one kid to private or parochial school with the help of a voucher that does not cover all the costs levied by that educational institution, how many poor, working-class, or lower-middle-class families can afford to send their two, three, four, or more children to private or parochial schools? — unless vouchers were to cover all costs, which they most emphatically do not.
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If Booker continues to back those two hideous and unacceptable stances (canceling the Newark Arena and promoting vouchers as would subvert the public schools), I will feel compelled to vote against him on May 9th.

Island of serenity

Here are some more pictures of the wonderful private park around St. Lucy's in North Newark near Downtown. Let's start with a view of a statue of Saint Nazario and the church past the elegant brick and wrought-iron fence that demarcates the church grounds.

Here's a view of the same area, and wider, from inside the park. Note the plaques on the brick pillars of the fence. Tho I did not look closely at them all, they appear to represent the stations of the cross. The statues are of Saint Nazario and, farther on, Saint Anthony.

Note the townhouses on the right and both Pavilion Apartment towers peeking out from behind. This picture might be nicer if there weren't telephone and other wires in the background, but Newark doesn't bury these except Downtown. Besides, from this angle, it looks almost as tho the wires are lifted above the heads of the statues.
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Here's a closer view of the statue of Saint Anthony and two of the plaques, with brick-fronted townhouses beyond.

Moving farther along the outer portion of the park we come to a representation of the Crucifixion, with a plaque in memory of Rev. Joseph S. Nativo, who served the parish for 48 years, 1956-2004.

Unfortunately there is not just a telefone pole and wires behind, but also a transformer or some other bulky device of lite color that interferes visually with the lines of the monument. The church would do well to plant tall arbor vitaes behind this, and perhaps also behind the National Shrine of Saint Gerard (below) to preserve the visual integrity of the monuments against distracting clutter in the background.

Around the side of the church is this little shrine and a round stained-glass window above. I hope to get a picture of that window from inside some day. If I do, you'll see it here.

Here's a detailed view of the front facade of the church.

The front doors of the church contain this fine detail.

And finally, a view of the wonderful fence leading visually back to the Wynona Lipman Gardens townhouses and one of Mies van der Rohe's Pavilion towers.

Anyone who has fond memories of St. Lucy's from years back but hasn't been there since the dangerous slum of the Christopher Columbus Homes was replaced by the Lipman townhouses should venture back. You'll be pleasantly surprised. And anyone who still, despite all that has changed and what you can see plainly in this blog's many fotos, believes Newark is an urban hellhole, a paved-over wasteland, should see St. Lucy's in person.

Saint Lucy's

I skipped a day in this blog because I was out on a little fotograffic expedition and didn't have time for both taking pix and showing pix here. So I'll show twice as many fotos today to make up for playing hooky — well, going on a field trip — yesterday.
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I had long heard about Saint Lucy's Roman Catholic Church as a center of the old Italian community of the North Ward, but had never been there until yesterday. I chanced across its location on the .PDF map of the central business district that I long ago downloaded from GoNewark.com, so hunted it down late yesterday afternoon and was amazed.

The church stands in a parklike setting that includes a bunch of statues, plaques of the Stations of the Cross on the enclosing fence, and the National Shrine of Saint Gerard, who turns out, oddly, to be the patron saint of expectant mothers. A man. Hm.

The webmaster of the Newarkology website advises me that the new housing complex that adjoins St. Lucy's to the east, ending at MLK Boulevard, replaced a notorious public housing complex, the Christopher Columbus Homes, that the City had to demolish. The townhouses (and apartments?) that have replaced that slum are beautiful, and St. Lucy's now faces a much improved neighborhood. I showed fotos of the MLK frontage of that complex on April 14th, and Mies van der Rohe's Pavilion Apartments across the street from it on April 11th. You can see one of the Mies buildings in this foto.

St. Lucy's is also just down the hill, on 7th Avenue, from Mies's other Newark building, the Colonnade Apartments, so it is in effect bracketed by buildings designed by one of the great architects of the world. For its part, St. Lucy's is on the National Register of Historic Places. (Note the reflections, not just the text.)

The open area around St. Lucy's is a memorial park, filled with dedications to friends and relatives who are no longer with us.

Tomorrow I'll put up a few pix of some of the details of this extraordinary church. I went inside but there was a (poorly-attended) service going on at the time, so I couldn't take any pictures. It's a "Romanesque Revival" interior with stained-glass windows very different from those of Sacred Heart, and murals in its arched spaces. I will eventually get in to take pictures, but I have some exterior detail shots to show tomorrow.
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For those of you in the Newark Diaspora all over the country who have fond memories of St. Lucy's, I hope this gives a bit more incentive to get to the Branch Brook Park Cherry Blossom Festival in the same general area before it ends this coming Sunday.
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Let me close today's blog entry with a view of the church thru the colonnade of the Shrine of Saint Gerard.

If you can't make it to the Cherry Blossom Festival, perhaps you'll want to take a walking tour that the webmaster of the Newarkology site will be guiding in May. I hope to go myself. If you attend, say hi.

New turret

There is a lot of new housing going up all over Newark. On my way to the Cathedral earlier this month I stopped at a traffic lite and looked to the left. There stood a new house, probably a multi-family structure, that I'd never seen before. Tho new, it was built to look old, with a turret like those that mark many older houses in Newark.

Tho this view shows the unfinished back of the building as well as the more decorative side, it does hilite the gracious corner balcony off the second floor.

Sun gilds Sacred Heart

This "Church Day", let's take another look at the Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart. The building is constructed of lite-gray stone that picks up hues from ambient lite. At nite, it appears white in its floodlites. Late in the day, it can take on a golden hue, as below, and perhaps pinkish hues in a reddish sunset, tho I haven't seen that. But, then, I live over 4 miles from the Cathedral, so don't see it in many different liting conditions.

Note the flowering cherry trees on the lower right of this picture. The Basilica fronts on Branch Brook Park, and you might want to step inside as well as view it from the outside when you go to the Cherry Blossom Festival, which runs only until April 23rd.

Fotograffing the fotografer

It's the first full weekend of the Branch Brook Park Cherry Blossom Festival, so in hopes of motivating people to get themselves to the park, I present here a view of an ambitious fotografer (I'm a spelling reformer) who set up a tripod last Sunday, the first day of the Festival, to portray the line of weeping cherries along a watercourse on Mill Street, Belleville. Here he is lining up his shot.

Unfortunately, he is standing rufly where I would have to stand to show the best view. From where I was standing, only a tiny percentage of the blossoms are visible. The picture below showcases one of the many weeping cherries along Mill Street.

I'll have to wait till another time to capture the view that other fotografer had. Maybe tomorrow. See you there?

Townhouses opposite Pavilion Apartments

When I found Mies van der Rohe's mid-rise Modernist apartment buildings, I also found, directly opposite on MLK Boulevard, a townhouse complex I had seen going up between Interstate 280 and the Cathedral a few years back. I have long wanted to take a picture of that big development of new housing in the foreground with the Cathedral rising in the background, as one sees it from 280. But it turns out that there may be no place except the highway itself from which one can see that view. Certainly I saw no roadway alongside the highway, and it was nearly dusk when I got to that location. But the complex is very handsome, as these two fotos might suggest.

I did a Google search on Wynona Lipman Gardens to find out when the complex was built, by whom, but did not find anything in the first page or two of results. I didn, however, discover that despite the Jewish-sounding last name, Wynona Lipman was an Essex County Freeholder who became the first black woman elected to the New Jersey State Senate. She is no longer living, but would probably be proud to have such a handsome housing development named for her.

Updated view

In the second foto gallery on my Resurgence City website, I posted this picture of workmen installing the siding on a health center being built by the New Community Corporation at South Orange Avenue and Littleton Avenue.

I kept forgetting to take an updated picture until this past week. Here's what it looks like now.

One new structure blocks another

On April 7th, I showed pix of the UMDNJ Cancer Center during its construction, as seen from the parking lot of the Bergen Street Pathmark. You can no longer see the Cancer Center from that parking lot, however, because the parking structure seen at the left of the April 7th fotos has been extended all the way to the right, completely blocking that view. This is what you see now.

The weather on the day I took this picture was also rainy, but I assure you that we do have sunshine many days.

Other 2 Mies buildings

The April 3rd entry to this blog spoke to the fact that three apartment buildings in Newark were designed by the enormously important Modernist "starchitect" Mies van der Rohe, but I had pix of only one of them, the Colonnade. On Sunday, after I left Branch Brook Park, I went by the Pavilion Apartments, the other two Mies towers, and took several pix.
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This first shows the southern building as it appears in late daylite.

As you can see, it is a less lengthy building than the Colonnade (shown April 3rd).
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This second foto shows both buildings in relation to each other, slitely later, as the sun dipped lower to the horizon and the lite changed to a more golden tone.

This third foto shows the south building from the opposite side of MLK Boulevard, in front of a townhouse complex I will show here in time. Note the Welcome sign. Newark's a friendly place.

Here's a wider view of the same area, in slitely briter lite, which shows more clearly how close in to Downtown these apartments are. Note that you couldn't see much of the buildings if the trees had their leaves. There are a lot of trees in Newark, even this close to Downtown. Barely visible to the lower left of the apartment tower is the steeple of historic House of Prayer Episcopal Church. To the right is 30 Washington Street, which is next to the Newark Museum.

A slitely different vantage point shows the south tower in sunset hues and the distinctive peak of 15 Washington Street beyond.

And this last shows the north tower with the rising moon beyond.

I will be intrigued to see how much of the complex is still visible from the street once the leaves of the sycamores come in.

Cherry Blossom Festival arrives

Yesterday I was too busy taking pictures to post any here. So let me show four that I took in Branch Brook Park on the first day of the annual Cherry Blossom Festival. First, here's one view of the Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart.

Note the duckies. I got there after 4pm, and that whitish spot in the sky is the moon. Here is a view from a bit farther south on the west side of the lake. The Basilica itself is mostly hidden by leafless trees. Unfortunately, there are no large flowering trees directly in front of the Cathedral as seen from the area of the lions (see below), so to see flowering trees in front of the Cathedral, you have to walk farther along.

Directly across from the Basilica is a popular seating and gathering area for pedestrians behind a decorative concrete wall, punctuated by two stone lions. This next foto should give you a sense of the place and the people the park attracts during cherry-blossom time.

Note the biker in shorts (it was really a little too cool for shorts yesterday, unless you're actively biking).
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A while later, I got into my car and drove the entire length of the Park. There are weeping cherries along a watercourse on Mill Street, Belleville, and I got out to take some pix. Who should ride by but the biker from the lions, almost three miles away!

Good for him. I used to have that kind of energy, and a bike. I still have a bike, but since my three knee surgeries, have been unable to ride. Seize the day, people. That goes for getting to the Branch Brook Park Cherry Blossom festival while it's on as much as for riding your bike while you still can.

Passaic River mirror

Every place has its constants and its variables. The constants are the base contours of the view, the mountain peaks and slopes of an inland scene, jetties and curves of the shore, or ups and downs of a city skyline formed by the various buildings. In French, one word for a "building" is "immeuble", meaning "property that does not move". So, absent variables in liting, urban skylines would be static and uninteresting. Fortunately, there are lots of variables that change the look of skylines.
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What keeps living in one place from being monotonous is the variables of lite, weather, and the like that put a different cast on the familiar: snow on the branches, rough waves, a beam of sunlite hitting one point in the distance. In the case of the skyline of Downtown Newark as seen from the Jackson Street bridge, the three variables that have the greatest effect for me are the lite at different times of day, the appearance of the sky, and the smoothness or rufness of the water of the Passaic. There is the additional issue of where on the bridge one stands, which determines what shows between the clusters of buildings, most particularly the National Newark Building, with a pointed roof, or 1180 Raymond Boulevard, with a square roofline marked by points at the corners.
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Today's foto shows the skyline centered on the National Newark Building at dawn. The sun, behind me, lites up the reflective windows of the PSE&G building in gold, and the water of the Passaic is nearly as smooth as glass.

Geography does not permit a view of the sun rising over both the river and the skyline, and I have not yet found a vantage point from which to show the skyline in front of a rising sun. Maybe someday I will.