Waiting for Westinghouse Wevivaw (9 pix)

There's a children's joke from when I was a kid (or even before) that is still around.

A woman opens her refrigerator and finds a wab...rabbit inside. Startled, she exclaims, "What are you doing in my refrigerator?" He responds, "This is a Westinghouse, isn't it?", to which she replies, "Yes." "Well, I'm westing."

I even found one webpage that illustrates it with a foto. (It is so cute! Search for "westing".)
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My late father had a negative view of Westinghouse. He mocked the company with its own motto, still in use, "You can be sure if it's Westinghouse" by adding, "... that it's a piece of crap."
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Well, Newark developers are westing when it comes to wevamp...revamping the old Westinghouse factory next to the Broad Street Station, Downtown, where the electric company used to make electric meters. What could be a terrific condo or loft development is instead the construction equivalent of a load of garbage at the moment. What is going on — or not going on? Is this building to be renovated and recycled, or torn down? Is it structurally sound? If so, but it's being left open to the elements, what with all the broken windows on all sides, how long will it remain structurally sound?
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In case you don't know the building I'm talking about, let's show some pix. I mentioned this structure as being portrayed in a kids' painting on the Broad Street fence around the Arena construction site in this blog's entry of January 31st. Here is a view of a cluster of those paintings. We know the one on the upper left is of the Westinghouse building, because it says "Westinghouse" within it. I suspect that the other two paintings are also of that building, tho the colors are different and they have plantings around the main structure. Perhaps these are paintings of a different structure. Perhaps they are kids' speculations about what the building could look like if renovated and landscaped.

This is what the building actually looks like, as seen from diagonally opposite the factory's southeast corner. Mies van der Rohe's Colonnade Apartments building appears at the visual end of Orange Street on the far left.

Here is a view of that corner from head-on, showing both the Orange Street and University Avenue sides of the building, balanced. The structure is so large that I can't fit it all in the picture. (My Olympus neither has a wide-angle lens nor allows exchangeable lenses, so even if I could afford a wide-angle lens, I couldn't attach it to my current camera.)

Below, we see the sign that appears in the top left painting.

This next picture shows how close the Westinghouse building is to the Broad Street Station. Again, the factory is so large that I can't fit it all in the same frame with the Station.

The following picture shows the Lackawanna Avenue side of the factory building, which is right alongside the Broad Street Station, lite-rail station. Note that the windows are different, and the brickwork is less fine, as tho this side of the building was obscured from view in earlier years, tho I don't see how that could be, since it is exposed to view by thousands of rail passengers a day passing on trains or departing the railroad station. Why, then, wasn't this side also given facade-quality treatment?

There is a construction fence of some sort in that picture. Is that for paving or other work being done on the lite-rail station? Or is some kind of rehabilitation underway at the factory?
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Note the fancy top-row windows on the finished sides.

The kid who painted the view of the side with the vertical sign noted the arches, but got the exact pattern of struts wrong. I suppose s/he was working from memory. (Forgive the fuzziness. I didn't realize I would want to zoom in on this portion of the painting until I reviewed my pix of the building and painting. )

The last foto today focuses on how very close to the Broad Street Station the Westinghouse building is. Plainly this is a prime location for prosperous young commuters to Manhattan. They need do little more than roll out of bed to get to the train station and head to Midtown.

Let manufacturing's loss be housing's gain. After all, the name of the structure is Westing-house.

New Platform, Old Postcards

On October 18th I showed a foto of the Broad Street Station from the eastbound platform. Since then, a greatly improved westbound platform has been built, complete with sheltered waiting room. I present today two pix from slitely different vantage points and in slitely different liting conditions, showing the new platform, on the left, as seen from the old.

In the picture above, the converging lines of perspective make themselves felt. In the picture below, the structures and sky are more important.

I'm a little puzzled about this diagram of the reconstruction of the station, which appears in the original waiting room.

It shows, on the top, the old plan of the station, with three sets of rails between two buildings with peaked roofs, and on the bottom, the new form of the station, with two sets of rails between buildings and the third track beyond the narrower "New Shelter Building", which is now on an island. One track has been moved to the right of the island.
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When I was there at the beginning of October, the old structure on the top right of this diagram did not exist, and the new platform was already being built two tracks from the old. Perhaps there had been an old building that was torn down before I got there.
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Tho the new waiting room is still under construction, I suspect it will have none of the charm of the original.

(The plywood on the right is, I trust, temporary.) I'll check both waiting rooms after the new one is finished.
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The second foto above is very recent, but something about it strikes me as old. My big sister in Long Beach, California recently sent me the URL to a website that shows 13 old "penny postcards" of Newark plus postcards of other places in New Jersey. Check it out.
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I have noticed that there are very few (new) postcards of Newark available at newsstands and the like, perhaps because Newark does not yet have much of a tourist trade. I'd like to create a line of Newark picture postcards but don't have the expertise nor resources to do so.
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Months ago I chanced across an online site for The Clarion-Ledger newspaper of Jackson, Mississippi that lets visitors send a Jackson postcard by email. I'd like to have a feature like that for my Resurgence City website. At The Clarion-Ledger's site, you choose a picture, write your text, even choose some accompanying music, then send it to anyone who has email.
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Alas, when I tested it tonite, it didn't work. Too bad, because if it had worked, I would have had an easy way to convey to you one of the tunes that ice-cream trucks in my neighborhood sometimes use to call customers: Beethoven's Für Elise. To hear it, you could choose that as the background music to a postcard and send it to yourself. But it didn't work — well, not tonite at least. (I sent an email to the online editor of the newspaper to alert him to the problem. Maybe it will be fixed by the time you read this.)
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While it is very early (and much too cold) to be thinking about ice-cream trucks, in case you don't know what Für Elise sounds like, you can hear it in this little video of a ScanJet scanner that plays the song!

Walking Tour (6 pix)

Newarkology's North Ward Walking Tour was, despite the frigid weather, a success. Five hardy souls joined our guide on a LONG walk thru Mount Pleasant Cemetery, up Broadway, across Elwood, down Mount Prospect Avenue and Bloomfield Avenue back onto Broadway as far as Technology High School, near our starting point. I took 118 fotos, 7 of which I later deleted as unneeded safety shots or unusable booboos. That leaves 111 pix to choose among for this blog in future months. (I initially thought I'd taken 189 pix, but I was reading how many pix I had left on the memory card, not how many I'd taken. You have to look at the stored pix and check the filename for the last number to see how many pix have actually been stored.)
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This is where we started, the former headquarters of the New Jersey Historical Society at 230 Broadway, at Taylor Street. Today I will just show some hilites of stops along the way. I'll give more detailed treatment of individual areas in future posts.

One of the tour participants lived nearby, and he has a very extensive collection of what might be called "Newarkana" ("Newarkalia"?), so we stopped in and looked at some of the hundreds of pix and such he has displayed in his house. I also saw there a book titled simply Newark, by John T. Cunningham, that might qualify as a coffee-table book, so perhaps there's no need for another. I'll have to get that book, perhaps from the library, and see if it has already handled nicely the matters I wanted to deal with. But it was published decades ago, so at least an update would be apropos.
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From there we walked to the neoclassical headquarters of the now-defunct Mutual Benefit Life Insurance Company.

We then proceeded to the magnificent Mount Pleasant Cemetery nearby, and spent a lot of time looking at the varied monuments and at burial places of a number of distinguished personages in Newark history. There is no traffic lite at that intersection, so we took our lives in our hands to cross. Perhaps the cemetery is trying to drum up business. People are still being buried there. The distinguished Newark historian Charles Cummings was buried there little more than a year ago, tho we couldn't find a monument for him.

After hiking thru the parklike cemetery (which must be verdantly splendiferous in the spring and summer), we were ready for a break. One of the streets along the route was Elwood Avenue, and there's a McDonald's near the intersection of Elwood and Broadway, so we stopped there. We warmed up a bit, then headed out into the cold again to walk a few blocks to Mount Prospect Avenue, a grand boulevard with a great many highrise apartment houses. Tho most of the rest of the city has been pursuing lowrise housing as a way of avoiding the concentration of the poor that led to the city's horrendous problems in the past, Mount Prospect has maintained both density and prosperity.

We then stopped at the only synagog presently active in Newark, Congregation Ahavas Sholem (pix this coming Saturday) and ended our tour at Technology High School. Here is most of our happy group at Tech High, except for me (I'm taking the picture).

Then Jule took a picture of the group, including me, with my camera.

I don't know why the group is so much cheerier when I'm not taking the picture. (I think Jule ordered them to smile. Or perhaps they are just so happy that I am standing near them. Yeah. Yeah, that's the ticket.) I also don't know why the same camera comes up with strikingly different pictures as regards detail, liting, and coloration. Note that in the picture I took, the statuary in the back is clear, but the same statuary in the picture Jule took is washed out, even as the foreground figures are clear in both. I suppose the massing (Jule's picture being more of a closeup) affects the camera's lite perception. If we had manual override of the camera's automatic exposure and focus settings, we might end up with comparable pictures. But my Olympus 810 is all auto. It does a pretty good job most of the time, however.
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(The service that hosts this blog has forced us to move to a newer version of its software, which allows ready adjustment of font size. My brother in Texas told me some weeks back that the type was too small, and I asked readers if they agreed. No one said anything, perhaps because they had no basis for comparison. (I got feedback on other matters, but not that.) Now you do have a basis for comparison, in that the body of this post is in a larger font, but I have not altered older posts. There is one extra step in making the font larger. I think it's probably worth the minimal trouble. Do you?)

Newark's Place in Film (Stock) History (7 pix)

This "Church Day" at Newark USA I present some pix of the House of Prayer, a refined stone church whose steeple, but nothing else, I had seen many times. The lower portion of the church had been hidden from me by train tracks, a highway, and a stairway down from the Broad Street Station. But when, this past week, I was in that area to take pix of the new platform of the Station, the Lincoln Motel, the Westinghouse factory, and such, I decided to track down the church too.
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One short block from the Station, just north of and concealed by the tracks of the Morris & Essex Line and an elevated portion of Interstate 280, lie historic Plume House and the Episcopal House of Prayer. I had never heard of Plume House, but it's worthy of note.

I checked the Internet as to the claim about film, and it is absolutely true. Moreover, the Reverend who invented it foresaw the problem of nitrate film breaking down, and was working on preventive measures. Alas, he was involved in an accident on the street near a construction site and died from his injuries before he could offer a cure.
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This is Plume House itself, which has stood for almost 300 years. You see why a great city builds in stone. Newark has some stone buildings, but the bulk of the new construction going up is wood frame. Nice enuf in the short term, and some frame structures do last a long time, but we need to encourage construction in stone and steel.

Below we see the House of Prayer on the right, Plume House in the middle, and the tower of Broad Street Station poking up behind trees on the left. Were this not winter, you would not be able to see it for the trees. (And it's not even a forest.)

I don't know if you get from this picture the sense I have that the House of Prayer looks like a witch with a tall witch's hat. Let's see if other pix can bring that out.

Still don't see it? How about this goblin in the peak?

Maybe it's just me.
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Here we can see 1850 architecture (by Frank Wills, a noted architect in his day) juxtaposed to 1960 architecture (Mies van der Rohe, father of Modern architecture).

More than styles have changed:

The entire cost of land, church edifice, rectory and repairs was twenty-three thousand dollars.

I'll take two, at that price.
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Today's last foto is of 3 distinguished Newark structures, from 1710, 1850, and 1960.

You won't see that in the suburbs.
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Note: The Newarkology walking tour of the North Ward is TODAY, starting at 12:30pm and ending well before the Superbowl begins. See you there?

Pathmark Gospel Choir Competition; Lincoln Motel (3 pix)

Today, the Carteret, New JERSEY-based supermarket chain lends its name and support to a Gospel Choir Competition in New YORK.

Description: A competition for $10K in prizes between gospel choirs in a youth division (18 and under) and an open division. Free and open to the public [in the Winter Garden of the World Financial Center] from 10am to 5pm.

Pathmark has apparently been holding this competition in various New York City locations for years. Why? I deeply resent it.
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Perhaps Carteret is too small and out of the way to serve as the site for a choir competition, but Newark isn't. Not only is Newark the nexus of a huge complex of transportation, public and private, but it also has at least two great concert venues, Symphony Hall and NJPAC. It is offensive that Pathmark holds its annual Gospel Choir Competition in New York. I guess I should spend more of my time in Shoprite.
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There's a Shoprite in East Orange that is if anything nearer than any of the three Pathmarks I go to, tho it tends to close early and sometimes does not allow one to take his shopping cart into the parking lot. The Kearny Shoprite seems never to allow you to take carts into the parking lot, perhaps because the lot slopes and carts can get loose and roll into cars. But the Kmart shopping center nearby also has a sloped parking lot, yet you can take carts out to your car there. If you can't take the cart to the car, single shoppers can't buy more than they can carry in a single trip, so I rarely shop at Shoprite. I am so incensed about this Gospel Choir Competition thing, tho, that I will make an effort to get to Shoprite more often, and to Pathmark less. Besides, Shoprite's prices on some items, especially meat, are better than Pathmark's.
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Abandoned Motel. A reader wrote some weeks ago:

Do you know the name and any facts regarding the old abandoned hotel/motel between River Front Stadium and Broad Street Station?

Pass the building everyday on the train and can't find anything about it.

I didn't know which building he was talking about and thought at first he meant the former Westinghouse factory. I told him I'd ask around. Jeffrey Bennett, webmaster of the Newarkology website,* knew which building was meant.

I don't know a lot about that hotel, but I've seen it too. It's a great place for redevelopment.

All I know about that building is that it was a Holiday Inn at some point. It's now owned by Miles Berger, a developer. Miles Berger is part owner of the old Hahnes Building, on which construction is supposed to begin next year. * * *

[I'd] rather see luxury apartments built at the Holiday Inn site than at the [old] Sci High building.

I did some additional research. The hotel was built in '66 as a Holiday Inn. It then became the Lincoln Motel, basically a homeless shelter. In the 1990s Miles Berger was talking about turning the building back into a hotel; now I have no idea what its fate is. See NYTimes "In the Shadow of a Stadium, An Eyesore."

He then forwarded me the Times article, from July 13, 2003. The description in the second paragraph made me wonder how I could have missed it when passing nearby.

The decrepit shell of a motel that once featured a kitschy picture of Lincoln has been closed for years, though to describe it as shuttered would be wrong, since many ... walls are missing from the litter-strewn building that once sheltered homeless people.

Jeff said it can't be much of an eyesore if I missed it, and he's right. Today it is behind a chainlink fence to keep vandals out, and I saw no litter of consequence, nor holes in its walls. So perhaps damaged areas were repaired or neatly excised, leaving a core that looks fine. This is the motel in its setting, looking toward the elevated railroad tracks from which my correspondent sees it.

The motel is on the extreme right. The other prominent structures, moving left, are Mies van der Rohe's Pavilion Apartments flanking the Episcopal House of Prayer, and the Broad Street Station. This picture was taken late in a dismal gray day. I'll have to take a similar foto on a brite sunny day. When it's warmer!
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Here's a closer view of the arched front of the building, looking the opposite direction.

And here is a tidier close view that cuts out the chainlink fence and focuses on the contrast between the arches close in and the pointed roof of the tower on the northwest corner of Bears & Eagles Riverfront Stadium. That tower is, I realized only when looking at these fotos today, an architectural nod to the Broad Street Station, tying the two together across Broad Street, which is genuinely wide there.

I'm not persuaded the Lincoln Motel is an eyesore, tho the chainlink fencing surely is. I would, however, be perfectly happy to see something grand built there. Maybe the arches could remain in a new, tall structure, perhaps a market-rate housing tower with balconies or at least picture windows to look out on the river on one side, stadium on another, and Broad Street Station, House of Prayer, and Pavilion Apartments on another. A round building with these rounded arches would make for great contrast with the current surrounding architecture.
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* The Newarkology walking tour of the North Ward is tomorrow, starting at 12:30pm and ending well before the Superbowl begins. Temperatures for the day are not expected to rise above the low 20s! but I plan to go anyway. I'm tuf (I hope). I'm going to put on the navy-blue, silk longjohns my sisters (mother?) gave me for Christmas some years back, for the first time this season. I may take fewer fotos than originally planned, however, unless my gloves prove flexible enuf that I can trip the shutter without taking them off. Of course, if there's no wind, taking my glove off for a moment shouldn't be a problem. And I doubt I can really walk past a worthy subject and not take a picture. See you there?

Columbia(n) Building

Today I present the picture from Jeffrey Bennett, webmaster of the Newarkology website,* that I said on Wednesday I'd show this week. Jeff says the building is called the Columbia or Columbian Building ("Nineteenth century Romanesque architecture. It would fit in in Greenwich Village, no?"), but not much else about it. Plainly it's an old structure. It does indeed look a lot like the cast-iron buildings you see in parts of Greenwich Village and SoHo, but it's definitely brick. It's in the block that separates the Arena from Market Street, one of the two main drags of Downtown that meet at the Four Corners a (long) block to the west.

Bennett also says that "Columbia University used to own a large building on the EO/Newark border, on Central Ave." I don't know why a New York City university would own a building out here, but in any case it apparently no longer does. I don't think the Columbia Building (above) has any connection with Columbia University but is rather a reference to the alternate name for the Western Hemisphere, from "Columbus". The more common term "America" derives from "Americus Vespucius", the Latin form of the name of a Florentine navigator (Amerigo Vespucci) who sailed years after Columbus and did not establish any of the colonies that led to the creation of the "New World". What Vespucci did do first, however, is recognize that what Columbus discovered, was not Asia (which Columbus wanted to believe, to his dying day, it was) but an entirely new continent.
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Still, "Columbia" (or, in Spanish, "Colombia") vies with "America" for pride of place (the capital of the United States of America being located in the District of Columbia). Why exactly the Columbia(n) Building in Downtown Newark bears that name I do not know.
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I also don't know if the building is historic enuf and distinguished enuf to be landmarked and thus protected from demolition to create a plaza in front of the Arena. But even if it had to be preserved, that would not preclude the creation of a plaza if other buildings on that block can be demolished. In fact, buildings can be moved. A theater on 42nd Street was moved several hundred feet to make way for redevelopment there.
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As I said here last June 22nd, I would love to see a great big fountain there, on a plaza with the Arena looming behind as backdrop. Such a fountain plaza would give that area of Downtown a focal point it now lacks.
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* Newarkology's walking tour of the North Ward is two days from today! Dress warmly (with a hat!) and meet us on Sunday at 12:30pm, four blocks north of where Broadway and Bloomfield Avenue join. Click on the link at "230 Broadway" on the webpage that describes the tour, to be taken to a map.

'Terrorist' Silliness at Gateway Center

After I took the second picture shown here yesterday, of the Arena from the area of the driveway between Two and Four Gateway Center, I looked around to see if there was anything else of interest to portray from that spot. I started to take a picture of the skyway and elevator/stair tower of the Prudential parking garage, when the guard at the driveway shouted "No!" He said I couldn't take a picture of that structure. 'On the contrary,' I replied, 'I can', and then showed him a business card from the management office of the Gateway complex on the back of which an executive had written that I have permission to take pictures in the common areas of Gateway Center. He wasn't taking that as proof of anything, but phoned his superiors. As I waited for a cop to come out and talk to me, I was afraid I was losing the lite.
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I showed that handwritten permission and my Resurgence City/Newark USA card to the guy who came out. I also carry a printout of "The Photographer's Right", a flyer written by a lawyer in Oregon, but did not whip that out as well. The website that links to the printable document summarizes the issue thus:

As the flyer states, there are not very many legal restrictions on what can be photographed when in public view. Most attempts at restricting photography are done by lower-level security and law enforcement officials acting way beyond their authority. Note that neither the Patriot Act nor the Homeland Security Act have any provisions that restrict photography.

The (very nice) man who came out from Gateway Four was wearing a sweatshirt with the word "Police" on it, but no badge was apparent. He called the management company to ask if this was really alrite. The guy who had written the note had left for the day, so he put me on the line with a woman who was still there. I told her that I had been taking pix in the area for years, for my website and fotoblog, and gave her the URL to this blog so she could check on her own computer that it's legit. After a short delay during which she went to this site, she said she guessed it would be OK, and I asked her to repeat that to the officer standing nearby, which she did. I left my card with the officer and asked if there was some way note could be made in some central computer so I wouldn't have to go thru this again. He didn't know about that, but at least he might pass the card along to others and, if nothing else, I'll have alerted some more strangers to the existence of this fotoblog.
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Then I took this picture. Tho I feared it would be too fuzzy to use, since the sun had been sinking lower into the sky all the while, it looks alrite, I suppose.

Most parking garages have no architectural distinction whatsoever. This one has some grace, which is why I wanted to show it.
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This country has got to grow up about 'terrorism'. Yesterday Boston police closed down highways and deployed huge numbers of cops to investigate supposedly 'suspicious devices'. They even had the bomb squad blow one up. Those 'devices' turned out to be advertising signs for cable's Cartoon Network! What a bunch of morons. Similar signs were on display in similar locations in nine other major cities, but no one in those more courageous and sensible cities called 911 about them. Nor did the authorities in any other city close down anything out of fear of advertising signs!
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Here in Newark, which has never in the history of the world had so much as a single terrorist attack, police and private security guards are worried sick about people who want to take pictures from public sidewalks. Ridiculous. Whatever happened to "The land of the free / And the home of the brave"?
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I may have mentioned that I need to write to Mayor Booker to see if I (and other fotografers working to show outsiders how good Newark is and how much improvement is happening every week) can get some kind of ID, like press credentials, to show to police/security guards who are inclined to deprive us of our right as citizens to take pictures of public places from public places. Now that I have been laid off my part-time job because the firm hired full-timers, I should have time to do this within the next few days.
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We shouldn't have to get any kind of permit to take pictures in a free country. And how is Newark to promote tourism if tourists who dare to point their cameras at 'sensitive' buildings are hassled and treated as terrorists? I had less trouble with the authorities when taking pix in the old Soviet Union!
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More broadly, if this is no longer to be a free country, what is there to defend? If we give up our freedom 'in defense of freedom', then, in the oft-heard phrase, "the terrorists have won". I don't live in fear. Newarkers don't live in fear. Maybe those guards live in the suburbs.