Know Essex County

Earlier this month Joe sent me a link to this Wikipedia map of Essex County on which the municipalities are shown by numbers, not names. Joe lives in 15, Gaetano and I in 1. I knew the name of most of the towns in this county. Do you?

I did get confused in the Caldwells/Essex Fells area. Hm. Caldwells/Essex Fells. That sort of rhymes, but I will resist the temptation to write an "Ode to Essex County" and contrive other rhymes.
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To check any names you are unsure of, go to the version of the map with a key, which has both number-to-name and name-to-number indexes.
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Today's foto is a view of a steel skeleton alongside the Irvington Pathmark parking lot, at nite, which is generally when I'm there.

I thought when first I saw this, years ago, that it was a building under construction, but it never seemed to get any further along. Then I thought it must be a building being demolished. But it has never been torn down either (unless that happened recently and I just stopped looking for it). Does anybody know what it is and why it is in a skeletal state? Pls advise.

Free Christian-Music Concert Saturday

Gaetano discovered that there will be a free concert by the group Casting Crowns, at Bears & Eagles Stadium this Saturday, September 1st, sponsored by religious broadcaster Star FM and the Goodwill Rescue Mission, located in Downtown Newark.

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Today's fotos are before-and-after versions of an ornate drinking fountain in Military Park. First, a close view of the three shell-shaped drinking positions, taken at nite last October 28th.

"OVER" is the last word of an inscription that wraps around the cylinder, "MY CUP RUNNETH OVER".

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Star FM is an activity of the Pillar of Fire Church, located in Zarephath, a section of Franklin Township in Somerset County, about 40 miles southwest of Newark (tho it claims a New York ID, for serving the region). The station's website, at the "Listen" option on the left, offers two Internet radio streams, one that is mostly music and the other, "teaching programs".

Saturday's concert is described thus:

STAR 99.1/ WAWZ, is celebrating the release of Casting Crowns new CD The Altar and The Door by bringing the group to Newark, NJ for a CD Release party. On September 1st, 2007, STAR 99.1 and the Goodwill Rescue Mission in Newark are hosting a performance by Casting Crowns and an autograph session with the band at Bears & Eagles Riverfront Stadium in Newark. Home of the Newark Bears, the stadium will welcome STAR 99.1 listeners and the people of Newark for a day of hope and celebration.

STAR 99.1’s Johnny Stone explains, "The news about the recent tragedies in Newark has skewed the view of everything good that is going on there. We wanted to highlight those that are working for the good of Newark and bring a day of hope to this community." Gates open at 10:30 AM and at 11:30 AM those in attendance will learn about the great things that the Goodwill Rescue Mission is doing in Newark and how they can help. Seats are first come, first served so come early.

Casting Crowns will take the stage starting at Noon to spread the message of hope that their music brings and the light of a life in Christ. During their performance, STAR 99.1 personalities Johnny and Stacey Stone will join them on stage for a Q&A session with questions sent in by STAR 99.1 listeners. Once Casting Crowns has debuted their new music, they will move to the concourse to sign autographs for everyone who attends.

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When next I saw that fountain, in the daytime at the beginning of this month on the New Jersey Historical Society's walking tour of the architecture alongside Military and Washington Parks, it had been knocked off its platform.

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The website for the band that I found thru Google wasn't working at first, tho when I found the same site thru Ask.com some time later, it did work. (I went back to Google and this time the band's site worked! Same site, different time. The Internet has reliability problems.) Before I found the working website of the group itself, I found a site with a lot of info about that band, from an outside point of view. It links to a site with 10 audio samples of the songs on their new CD, The Altar and the Door, copies of which will be offered for sale after Saturday's concert in Riverfront Stadium.
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The band is apparently well regarded in Christian-music circles. Wikipedia says:

Casting Crowns is a Grammy award and Dove Award winning Christian band that employs a soft rock music style. The band was created by youth pastor Mark Hall who also serves as a lead vocalist. The band previously served and performed in a youth group in Atlanta, Georgia.

Discovered by, among others, contemporary Christian music legend Steven Curtis Chapman, Casting Crowns received a recording contract and vaulted to popularity in 2003 with songs such as "If We Are the Body" and "Who Am I".

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I asked the NJHS guide, Jessica, if she knew what happened. She wasn't sure but thought that a Parks Department vehicle or police car had inadvertently bumped into it rather than that it was vandalized.

As you can see from the inscription, this fountain has been around a long time. I hope it has already been or will soon be restored to its proper place and to operation as a multi-person drinking fountain. Drinking fountains are part of what we once regarded as the bare minimum for a civilized public park.

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For some reason, the Newark event is not listed on the official Casting Crowns website as an upcoming concert. Hm. It is, however, listed on the current version of Star FM's website. I wonder what that means.

Incomes Up, Poor Out

Gaetano found an article in today's Star-Ledger about Newark's economic upswing. It bears two headlines, major and minor, that summarize the whole article nicely, with a bit more detail in the first two paragraphs:

Newark income rises at double the national rate
Census finds poorest citizens moving out, middle class moving in

The city of Newark is still one of the nation's poorest, but Census numbers released yesterday show the state's largest city has made some of the biggest gains in income this decade.

Newark's median household income has jumped 28 percent since the 2000 Census — a rate of increase nearly double the nation's and far above the state's 17 percent increase.

Observers say the phenomenon has two prongs. First, more middle-class people are moving in; second, more poor people are moving out, as to East Orange and Irvington. Other observers argue that some of Newark's poor are not leaving but actually doing better. More companies within Newark have turned to hiring Newark residents, in part as the result of urging by the City, starting in the long James administration. Mayor Booker says, "a couple years ago about seven percent of Continental Airlines' new hires lived in Newark. Now that figure is about 33 percent".
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The article sounds a cautionary negative note:

sooner or later, the homegrown families mak ing it into the $100,000 bracket will be looking to leave, [Roland Anglin, executive di rector of Rutgers' Initiative For Regional and Community Transformation] said.

"They're going to pursue their piece of the American Dream," Anglin said.

There's no reason prosperous Newarkers should leave Newark. There are plenty of wonderful, big old houses that can be renovated into splendid places to live, and plenty of empty lots or spaces occupied by decrepit housing that should be torn down, as can provide building lots for upper-middle-class homes galore. Maybe we don't have room for McMansions with spacious lawns on all sides, but how about McTownhouses, McMansions on urban lots?
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And remember the kids. They are going to be bored out of their minds in the suburbs. When they're too young to drive, their parents are going to have to chauffeur them around everywhere, because there's no public transit to most places they'd need to go. And when the kids get old enuf for a driver's license, parents risk losing them to accidents brought on by youthful overconfidence, distractions from rowdy passengers and jangling cellphone calls and text messages, and recklessness behind the wheel.
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Part of the good life is having things to do at nite, places to stretch one's cultural legs and broaden one's outlook. You're not going to find that in the 'burbs. You will find it in Newark.

Today's fotos were taken from PSE&G Plaza. In this first, we see, on the left, a luxury apartment building now available Downtown, very close to statuary-graced parks, the Newark Museum, galleries, New Jersey Historical Society, NJPAC, baseball stadium, and Arena. There is not one location anywhere in the suburbs that offers so many splendid recreational and cultural opportunities within walking distance. This is 1180 Raymond Boulevard, as seen past the pool above the crescent-shaped waterfall at PSE&G Plaza. The next foto shows most of the curve of that waterfall, tho it is too wide for my present camera to capture the whole curve.

Today, the Plaza is largely empty much of the time, but as Newark's economics improve and more housing is built nearby, we can expect food carts, relaxed socializing, perhaps even impromptu musical performances to fill the space. It may not become a match for Greenwich Village's Washington Square Park. Then again, it may.

Newark Street in DC; "New Jerseyite"; Free Business Advice

Did you know that there is a Newark Street in Washington, D.C.? I didn't, until I chanced across a foto titled "Newark St., N.W." on the Internet. The foto itself is of a tree that could be anywhere, but I did a Mapquest search and found that Newark Street is off Connecticut Avenue very near the northwest corner of the National Zoo. Is it named for our Newark? I searched the Internet for an explanation of the name but didn't find any. Newark (pronounced as tho written New Ark), Delaware is closer to DC, but it seems to me unlikely that Washington would have a street named for either that Newark or for Newark-on-Trent, England. Thomas Paine started writing The American Crisis, a key spine-stiffening work in the dark days of the Revolution, in Newark, so "Newark Street" in Washington is probably named for our Newark. It better be!
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I've been to the National Zoo, which has a gigantic cage for bald eagles. Right outside that cage, I asked where the buffaloes (bison) were and was told, with some embarrassment on the part of the park ranger, that the National Zoo didn't have a buffalo, one of our national symbols. Hm.
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Newark doesn't have its own zoo, except the Newark Museum's Mini Zoo. Essex County runs the Turtle Back Zoo ("TBZ") in West Orange, but its website is a "work in progress" and does not seem to say what kinds of animals, nor how many, the zoo contains, in what groups or environments, so I have not yet made my way there. It seems that no buses nor other forms of public transit run to the zoo, a major failing.
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Newark has lots of open space in former industrial areas in far eastern Newark (no, not Chinese; there are very few Chinese in Newark nowadays, tho we used to have a Chinatown!), past the Ironbound. I have given thought from time to time about what things Newark could do that would make it stand out as a tourist destination, and I just got another such thought. How about a zoo devoted to animals in heraldry and that are symbols of the various states and nations? We can't get a unicorn or griffin for such a zoo, but we can collect real animals used in heraldry. And states and countries have official birds, animals, fish, etc. For instance, New Jersey's official bird is the Eastern Goldfinch; animal, the horse; fish, the brook trout; insect, the honeybee.
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Animals and plants also serve as religious symbols and symbols for human qualities: Lamb of God, Dove of Peace, the stylized fish icon for Christ; hungry as a bear, strong as a horse, stubborn as a donkey, ferocious as a tigress, noble as a lion, sly as a fox; mighty oak, the willow as symbol of a tree that bends in the wind rather than breaks for trying to resist, the evergreen and holly as symbols of Christmas, the different colors of rose in the Wars of the Roses, etc. It might be hard to cover all these things as well as state and national symbols, but it is decidedly possible, especially inasmuch as there will be repeats. New Jersey's state animal, the horse, would be collected for that purpose, but signage at its place in the zoo would indicate its other symbolic significations, and cross-references, onsite and online, would link different areas of the zoo/garden, without duplication of exhibits in separate areas.
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Alongside the Symbology Zoo we could have a Symbology Garden, with all the state flowers, trees, and such. Did you know that the state flower of New Jersey is the violet; state tree, the Northern Red Oak; state memorial tree (whatever that is), the dogwood; fruit, the blueberry? All such classes of offical plants could appear in a Symbology Garden. (I have some oaks on my property but am not sure they are Northern Red Oaks.)
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In checking another website about New Jersey symbols, which either Gaetano or Joe sent me (sorry, guys [inside pun: "Gaetano" is pronounced like "guy-TAH-no"], but I can't remember who sent it, months ago. They might both have sent it, months apart), I saw something that incensed me, so sent the following message via feedback form.

You have a section labeled "Famous New Jerseyites". That is ignorant and offensive. The proper term for a person from New Jersey is "New Jerseyan". I know that many dictionaries published outside New Jersey use the antique term "New Jerseyite" but it is NOT used by New Jerseyans. See the second paragraph of a statement by the Governor of New Jersey at http://www.state.nj.us/governor/msg/. Please correct this odious misuse at your earliest POSSIBLE convenience.

I played a part in Merriam-Webster's admitting "New Jerseyan" as the word for a person from New Jersey. (Merriam-Webster is the sole legitimate lexicographical heir of Noah Webster, the American dictionary editor and spelling reformer who is responsible for our spelling "color" without a U. M-W is also probably the most important dictionary publisher in the English-speaking world.) Many years ago, I was sufficiently ticked off by seeing "New Jerseyite" in my Collegiate Dictionary, that I wrote to M-W to complain. They wrote back saying that they base their vocabulary on actual citations in print, and they had citations for "New Jerseyite" going back a couple of centuries (and were thus not about to heed my barebones complaint). So, I collected samples of materials that show "New Jerseyan" as the word now used by people from this state, including some newspaper articles and a form acknowledgment letter I had received from then-U.S. Senator from New Jersey Bill Bradley that casually used the term "New Jerseyans", and sent them off to M-W. I also sent copies of that letter to various New Jersey newspapers asking their editors and readers to send off samples of their own usage of "New Jerseyan". The very next edition of the Collegiate Dictionary not only included the previously absent "New Jerseyan" but also put it first.
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Alas, dictionaries, including M-W's, continue to show the ignorant and offensive "New Jerseyite" as at least an accepted alternative. Then people who wonder what someone from New Jersey is called find "New Jerseyite" and don't know better than to use it. Thereupon, lexicographers collecting usage citations pick up such usages in things written by people they told to write "New Jerseyite", as proof that "New Jerseyite" is the proper term after all. Circular reasoning: dictionaries say it is the right term; people use that term because the dictionary says to; the dictionaries cite such usage as proof that their ignorant misuse is correct. And the beat goes on. We can stop that by writing to dictionary publishers, etc., that use "New Jerseyite" and say NO, YOU STUPID BASTARDS, IT'S "NEW JERSEYAN"! But nicely.
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Back to a Newark Symbology Zoo and Aquarium (for official fish), and adjoining Symbology Garden: Out-of-towners who make plans to attend an event at the Prudential Center or NJPAC might make a day of it, spending the daylite hours at the Zoo/Aquarium/Garden and the evening hours at the Arena/PAC. Travelers from a distance might spend one nite of their vacation in Newark in order to do the one on one day and the other on the next. Tourists or businesspeople who are in any case visiting within striking distance of Newark (as to Manhattan, which seems to get the occasional tourist) might be delited to see their state or country's official animals and plants recognized in a Newark Zoo, Aquarium, and Garden complex. Newark is a seaport on a freshwater river, so a short pipeline could bring in seawater for salt-water fish, and a different pipeline could bring in fresh water from the Passaic, both types of water being appropriately filtered, of course.
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Newark Online Store. I see at the Turtle Back Zoo website that they do not have an online gift shop. Many other small Newark-area businesses and cultural organizations don't have an Internet store, either. I think it might be good for all such groups to join together in a one-stop online shop for Newark-themed merchandise, from NJPAC teeshirts and Newark-landmarks foto calendars to Turtle Back Zoo caps, reproductions of artworks from the various galleries, and CD's of Newark musicians. Visitors might even create their own calendars or CD's from albums of many Newark fotos and songs.
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A couple of years ago I reserved the domain names AllThingsNewark.com and EverythingNewark.com to prepare to start such a business (by one name or the other; I am still undecided which is better), perhaps in concert with a Newark jobs program, as for instance under the aegis of the Newark Community Corporation or the City of Newark, that would place Newark youths in entry-level "fulfilment" (shipping and handling) operations for such an endeavor. But I'm no expert in launching such a business.
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I wondered tonite if we have something like New York's SCORE (Service Corps of Retired Executives) to provide guidance as to such matters, so searched the Internet. We do. I'll have to think about this, and perhaps attend one of their half-day seminars ($30, including takeaway book) about "Starting And Managing Your Own Business", held the third Tuesday of the month at 2 Gateway Center.

Gateway Two is the wide, medium-dark, mid-height building that blocks most of Gateway One (the white building with the microwave antennas atop) in this foto of Gateway Center as seen from the PSE&G Plaza.

Anti-War March Pix (Not Mine)

Gaetano found a website that shows 20 pix of last Saturday's rally and march in Downtown Newark. He had told me about the event in advance, but it was too early in the day for me to be anywhere, so I didn't even try to get there. The fotografer who did get there did a magnificent job, except that there are no captions to the pix, not even as "alternate" text, the text that appears on a foto if you roll the mouse over a picture that does appear, or that appears in lieu of a picture if someone has graphics turned off in the browser.
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I recognized Congressman John Conyers (foto 1) and Amiri Baraka (foto 7), but the bulk of the fotos were of human-interest elements in the smallish crowd, only 500 to 1,000 marchers, according to the website. I saw no coverage of the event on TV, but I'm not sure I was watching News 12 that evening.
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The flag at Lincoln Park (in the 14th picture on the foto site) was at half-staff. Was the official period of mourning/recognition for the Riots still going? Was it still at half-staff for the victims of the Ivy Hill shootings? Or did the City lower the flag in sympathy for the march and rally? I don't know.
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That's the flagpole with the nearly life-size statues at its base.* (The pictures below are mine.)

Here is one of the bas reliefs beneath the statuary group at the base of the pole.

The choice of route for this anti-war march — which was also in favor of universal healthcare, which is why Representative Conyers (of Michigan) was there — is interesting. It went from Lincoln Park to MILITARY Park and back. The flagpole in Lincoln Park is a WAR MEMORIAL!

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I have shown pix of different aspects of that great flagpole on February 9th, February 11th, May 13th (third picture), and July 18th of last year.

Sidewalk Shrine

This "Church Day" at the Newark USA fotoblog, something a little different. One meaning of "church" is the collective body of believers. They don't really need a building. This informal shrine graces Market Street in the Ironbound, outside a residential building a bit west of the junction with Raymond Boulevard.

The foto above shows the wide view, with a ceramic tile embedded in the wall behind. It occurs to me now that I should have zoomed in to fotograf the tile for detail. But I didn't. The tile is close to Spain Restaurant, so if you're down that way you can check it out for yourself.
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The foto below shows a closer view of the statue and associated plantings. This is the kind of thing one sees in private yards in, for instance, suburban Italian neighborhoods. It's both startling and charming on a sidewalk, don't you think?

Last Three Essex County Park Concerts

I've been remiss in not advising readers of the free concerts sponsored by the Essex County Parks Department. I've seen many of them listed in the News 12 New Jersey calendar on cable (News 12 is a media sponsor of the concerts), but some were in parks I knew nothing about, not even what town or city they might be in. Grover Cleveland* Park? Kip's Castle Park? Eagle Rock Reservation? I didn't even know where Independence Park was until the Newarkology walking tour of the Ironbound. And tho the concert list speaks of "Monte Irvin Orange Park", the closest listing on the Parks page of the Essex County website is just plain "Orange Park".

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Today's fotos are of two Essex County Parks. Here is a wide view of the southwest corner of Independence Park in the Ironbound.

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Essex County this year sponsored, if I counted correctly from the list on the concerts webpage, 29 concerts in 16 county parks, including, early in the season, a Metropolitan Opera production of Faust in Brookdale Park (which apparently occupies parts of Montclair and Bloomfield). The "New Parks Page" contains a list of the parks with their locations in words, clickable to profiles and fotos of each park. There are also maps of the individual parks, but I see no overall county map showing all the parks in relation to municipal boundaries or major roadways. If you click on a given park's link, you can get driving directions, and instructions on what to enter into, say, Mapquest, Yahoo Maps, or Google Maps in order to get detailed directions from your own location. But some of us would find a locator map with municipal boundaries (which are absent from most Internet maps) a big plus.

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Closer view of Independence Park, showing an adult pushing a kid very high on a swing.

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In any case, the last three concerts this year are the 28th, 29th, and 31st of August. Again, as with NJPAC's website, the day of the week is not shown. Am I the only one to find that odd? This TUESDAY is the last free Essex County Parks concert this year within Newark, in the Ironbound. I was going to lift the text of the description from the website by hiliting and copying, but discover that the entire list is a picture, not text, so I can't do that. I'll type — something I've been doing for about 46 years; I'm pretty good at it now.

7pm at Riverbank Park: Serenade Under the Stars featuring La Fuerza Positiva

Unlike the NJPAC website as to its free concerts, there is no clickable link to more information, as for instance who comprises La Fuerza Positiva or what kind of music they make. If it's your typical salsa or merengue band, I couldn't be less interested. I regard that stuff as possibly the very worst music in the Western world, and find even oom-pa-pah music easier to tolerate. A search on Google for "La Fuerza Positiva band" produced a website that describes the band thus:

Latin sensation La Fuerza Positiva, a Bronx-based salsa band that demonstrates the power of recovery. Their new album is complete — take a listen to the medley for a taste! * * *

This Bronx-based Salsa band is on the move! Releasing their first album this year, La Fuerza Positiva has a classic sound with an R&B/Jazz flavor, burning up the dance floor every venue they play. Check out their medley, and get infused with "The Positive Force."

OK, I try to be fair-minded, so clicked on the purple (hi-fi) button in the middle column at the top of the page and listened to a 3-minute medley of their music. It's not exactly your typical salsa band. For one thing, some of the lyrics are sung in English, which all foreign musics will have to do to win a general American audience. I don't know that I want to travel five miles each way to hear that band, but, then, I'm not absolutely certain that is the band that is to play, since the Essex County concerts page did not give any more info than the group's name, nor a link to the page I found. Still, it seems likely it's the same group, so if you want a sample of what you'd likely hear Tuesday, listen to the online medley.

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Here's a wide view of an area of Independence Park a little farther east of the last foto. What struck me about this park in general is how well occupied it was. The Essex County Parks closest to me (Vailsburg and West Side) are usually almost empty.

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The concert on WEDNESDAY the 29th is in Orange. Would you believe that I again, from habit, tried to hilite and copy the text?! I shall type:

7pm Monte Irvin Orange Park: City of Orange presents a West Indian Caribbean concert featuring The Angels Caribbean Band

I found an extensive website for that group, which is based in New York. The site loaded very slowly in AOL but much faster in MSIE. The band is "Indo-Caribbean", which means it mixes Asian Indian music with West Indian music. There are large "East Indian" communities in Guyana and Trinidad where such mixes flourish.
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The website is very generous with the band's music. It offers 28 sound clips, as long as 5 or 6 minutes each, of various songs, which you can listen to online but also download for free. You can tend to other things on the computer while listening to these things in the background, and just go back to select another clip when the earlier one ends. I've been listening while drafting the text and fixing the fotos for today's blog entry.
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This music is much more to my taste. I am very impressed, and might actually stir myself to get to wherever the heck "Monte Irvin Orange Park" is. The Parks website gives a general location for Orange Park, but if there is a particular area called "Monte Irvin", I'll have to locate it. If I'm late, as per usual, I can follow my ears.

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Here's a close view from the foto above of another set of swings in Independence Park showing another kid flying very high. I remember from my childhood how exhilarating that was. I hope there is rubber matting around these swings.

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"West Indian Caribbean" is a bit misleading for this band's music. Of the 28 audio clips on the website, all of which I listened to (and not as a chore), only 2 are at all like what one might imagine West Indian music to be, tho unexpected instruments, like a trumpet or sax, do pop up in some of the Indian songs. The bulk of the clips are dominantly Indian in style, and sung in an Indian language. Tho I liked just about all of them, one of the West Indian songs, "Trini to de Bone", was my favorite. For one thing, it's in English.
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If I have one complaint about this terrific band, it is precisely that the Indian-style music is not in English, a bizarre failing. As India and the United States move closer, a meld of cultures is bound to develop, but in English. Americans are not about to learn Hindi, Gujarati, or Bengali.
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If you haven't seen the wonderful Bollywood musical Bride and Prejudice, and you like Indian music, by all means get thee to a rental outlet or add it to your Netflix/Blockbuster list. As I recall, not all the lyrics in the film's songs are in English, but many are, which is more than can be said for the Indian-style songs I listened to at The Angels Caribbean Band's website.

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Here's a view of spring bulbs flowering outside the main gate to Branch Brook Park, the oldest Essex County Park, because it is also the oldest county park in the United States.

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The very last Essex County Parks Summer Concert this year, this coming FRIDAY, August 31st is described thus:

7:30pm at Eagle Rock Reservation: Nicholas Martini Foundation presents "That's Entertainment" featuring The Garden State Concert Band

I find an apparent personal website for the GSBC, but it is almost two years out-of-date. The Nicholas Martini Foundation seems not to have a website, tho it is mentioned in a number of other organizations' websites. I find that Nicholas Martini was an attorney and politician in Passaic County.
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I don't know what kind of music the GSCBand will be playing, but I get the impression it will be swing classics of the Big Band era. If you want to know for sure, you can call (973) 268-3500.

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This last foto for today is of reeds in Branch Brook Park turned the color of wheat by winter's cold, as seen past the Ballantine Gateway this past spring.

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* Grover Cleveland was born in Caldwell. Thus the name of that park, which spans the boundary between Caldwell and Essex Fells. Cleveland (you'd think he'd have been born in Ohio, huh?) was the only President of the United States born in New Jersey (to date). Woodrow Wilson was governor of New Jersey before being elected President, but he was born in Virginia. Cleveland is also the only President to serve two nonconsecutive terms. He's one of my least-favorite Presidents because he was opposed to geographic enlargement of the United States, even if areas annexed were ultimately to become states.

New First Avenue School

Gaetano, my friend from the Ironbound, grew up in the North Ward and attended the First Avenue [elementary] School. That school is being replaced by a new one that should be just about ready to occupy, tho that is not plain from the school's website. Here's a foto taken September 3rd of last year.

And here's a foto taken last month.

The building occupies an entire city block, perhaps because it rises only two stories. The old building had three stories, much more sensible for an urban school. The school's website says the student body is only 885 students. That seems a profligate misuse of space. Newark may want some of that space for future enlargement of that school, or for other purposes, as the city's population continues to grow.
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I saw a little mistake on the website that I wanted to draw to the webmaster's attention, but there appears not to be a single email address on the site, a serious mistake no website should make. So I'll just show it here in the hope of embarrassing the webmaster into fixing that typo and putting contact email(s) on the site.

First Avenue School services approximately 885 students from kindergarten through eight grades.

How would an English teacher mark that?
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I note that on this blog, my own email address was not obvious (except for those occasions when I have mentioned it in the text of an individual day's entry: ResurgenceCity@aol.com), tho I do get emails, so some people managed to figure out how to reach me. I had put my email address on one of my other blogs on this service, and thought that carried over to this one, but found to my dismay, today, that it did not. So I have revised the text to show my email address on the upper right of this blog, as well as in the "Email" area of my full profile, which you can get to from the upper right corner of this blog as well. See, First Avenue School webmaster? It's not hard to empower people to contact you.

O'Reilly Blasts Booker

Cory Booker has been trying to defend a policy of passively co-conspiring in illegal immigration, even tho person-on-the-street interviews that I have seen reveal that Newarkers of all races want dangerous illegals deported. Bill O'Reilly, conservative star of The O'Reilly Factor news-commentary program on cable's Fox News Channel, tore into Booker yesterday, calling him "flat-out dishonest, and downright stupid." An 8½-minute tape of yesterday's "Talking Points Memo", which includes that attack, a discussion among O'Reilly and two women whose qualifications to comment I do not know, and a note that Booker refused to come on O'Reilly's show, which is taped in Manhattan, appears on YouTube.
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We are getting a lot of national media attention of late, and it isn't as negative as we might first have feared. Somehow the Ivy Hill shootings struck home to a lot of people who saw in that incident not something that they can put out of their thoughts as just something that happens in Newark, but something that happens in all too many places, all over the country, and has to be stopped. The illegal-alien angle has given the issue political traction in many circles, and the discussion has been far more sympathetic to Newark than anything else I have seen in the seven years I have lived here. It hasn't been exactly positive attention, but it hasn't been negative as to the city. As to Mayor Booker, yes.
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Altho I have heard various conservatives claim that Newark is an official "sanctuary city" for illegal aliens, O'Reilly's website contains a list of "sanctuary" jurisdictions, and neither Newark nor New Jersey is on it.
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Gaetano alerted me to an NJ.com blog entry yesterday by Star-Ledger columnist Tom Moran that contains this passage:

Booker led with his chin on this issue. He's been adamant about his feelings that police should look the other way on illegal immigration. That makes sense on the streets, since cops need everyone to report crime, act as informants, and testify at trial.

But once someone is arrested on a serious crime, why not check on their status? Councilman Ron Rice Jr. had proposed a resolution to require that of Newark police, and today, responding to the Newark murders, Attorney General Anne Milgram ordered all local police in the state to do so.

Booker called Milgram's order reasonable. But he's just playing nice. He told Star-Ledger reporter Jeff Mays last week that he didn't like the idea, saying "We don't want to have any undue burden. Our job is to arrest them and put them in the criminal justice system." And his spokeswoman confirmed today that he still feels that way.

Making an inquiry as to immigration status is an "undue burden"? Don't blame me for Booker's foolishness. I didn't vote for him. I tried to run for Mayor as a write-in candidate. You see how well that went.
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Ron Rice, Jr., is my councilman — and councilman for the survivors of the kids slain in Ivy Hill, which is in (topographically) Upper Vailsburg. I'm in Lower Vailsburg, a few feet down the hill (but still about 190 feet above sea level). Rice ran as a member of the Booker Team, but apparently got no cooperation from the leader of that Team on his resolution. That resolution may no longer be needed if the Attorney General's order moots it, but the Booker administration, and perhaps even the Booker Team, may have been seriously damaged by Booker's adamance on not doing the people's will on illegal immigration.
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We have the chance to get legal immigrants from a heretofore undiscussed source, if we act humanely and quickly. 50,000 Iraqis a month are trying to escape the nitemare the war has brought, and many educated, anti-extremist Iraqis would, I am sure, love to live in Newark. We've got a number of mosques to accommodate them, but a lot of the people who have fled are Christians, who are being specially targeted for violence by Al-Qaeda. If Mayor Booker thinks Newark would be enriched by an influx of immigrants — legal immigrants — he should let Federal authorities know that Newark would be happy to provide safe haven to Iraqi refugees fleeing violent intolerance.
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For today's foto, let's stay in Vailsburg. The Statue of Liberty lifts its torch "beside the golden door". Vailsburg has golden arches, which have served as the door to the world of work for many people, including me (tho my first job was in a McDonald's in Middletown, Monmouth County). The Vailsburg McDonald's drive-thru went to 24-hour service several months ago, and is one of the very few places I know of in this entire city that is always open. We need many more such places. Great cities need nitelife, places where good people can safely hang out with friends, not just drive thru.

Tires Collected; Free Concert Tomorrow

The tires somebody dumped on my frontage were collected with bulk pickup today, I'm pleased to say. I had actually taken them off my frontage as I went out yesterday to walk to the post office, but as I proceeded down the street, I saw that my neighbors had put out bunches of items for bulk pickup. Someone had put out a tire. So I thought that maybe Sanitation collects tires in bulk pickup even tho it does not in regular pickups. That would save me a lot of trouble. So when I got back from the post office (and a local convenience store to get two lottery tickets, one for MegaMillions, one for Pick 6 — I regard the lottery as cheap entertainment: for $2, I can fantasize about what I'd do with all that MONEY! Well, at least until the drawing.), I put the tires out again. Et voilà! They are gone.
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I do have at least one other tire to put out, that had been dumped in my narrow side yard and has almost vanished in the weeds, some of which flower, so I leave them. I myself don't see that side much, but do want to put some better plantings there, for other people to see. I didn't want to haul that tire some 70 feet unless I was sure it would be picked up. Now I know. The next bulk pickup is in two weeks. I'll have AOL Calendar remind me the day before.
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Tomorrow at 5pm there will be another free concert in front of NJPAC in Downtown Newark.

This week’s artists include New Jersey-based jazz trumpeter Carlos Francis and his Open Space Band, an expert ensemble that navigates a multitude of musical styles including jazz, calypso, reggae, and rhythm-and-blues; Newark's own Antoinette Montague (pictured [on that site]), a vocalist who combines the heartfelt passion of the blues with the sophistication of jazz, here performing with The Bill Easley Quartet; and acclaimed trombonist-composer Wycliffe Gordon, a veteran member of the Wynton Marsalis Septet and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, who has nine solo CDs to his credit, including the recent Cone's Coup.

I think there's only one regular Thursday concert left in this summer series. I thought there was also to be a Friday goodbye concert the following day, but don't see that at the NJPAC website at the moment. I do, however, see that Newark's own Queen Latifah will be performing with the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra on October 15th, part of the Center's 10th Anniversary bash.
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An earlier, free event kicking off NJPAC's Tenth Anniversary Season is an outdoor fair with the Big Apple Circus's "Circus To Go" on September 15th. That's a Saturday, tho the website doesn't note day of the week in its event listings, a serious (and curious) oversight. The absence of that information is not a problem if the event falls in the same month as the calendar on the right, but is more of an annoyance when the event falls in a future month. Then you have to go to the calendar and click, perhaps repeatedly, on the right arrow in order to go to the appropriate month. The webmaster should just put the day of the week in the description of every event.
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I saw a couple of other online oddities within the past two days. One was an article at the website of the Bridgewater Courier News that Gaetano directed me to, about a concert to be held at Newark's Riverfront Stadium, which inadvertently left out the specific date. It said "On Sept. [no date] , ..." and then described the event. I had to go to the website of the event organizer to find that the concert is September 1st. More about that as we get closer to the event.
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The other oddity was an article on AOL that early on said "in this quaint older suburb". But there was no dateline, with the name of that suburb, at the beginning of the story. You had to read down a couple of paragraphs to know it was Worthington, a suburb of Columbus, that was being talked about. Articles on C-N.com (the Courier News website) don't have any kind of dateline, not a place, not a date.
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People, people, people. Hire some proofreaders! They are not like buggy whips, but still have their uses.
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Today's foto is a graphic reminder that it doesn't take much to improve the "curb appeal" of a house. Here's a dignified but monochrome entryway to a house in Vailsburg (Carolina Avenue, I think) that a creative homeowner britened with a small planter of multicolored flowers.

PSE&G Eagle

I suppose there is some sort of story connected with this sculptured eagle on a smooth granite backdrop in PSE&G Plaza, but I don't know it. Perhaps the eagle was part of the façade of a building torn down to make way for the PSE&G Building or the associated plaza. But there appears to be no plaque nearby to explain what it is. It's just there.

One reason for showing this picture today is that there is actually sunshine in it. Remember sunshine?

Greening-of-Newark Program on TV Tonite

The New Jersey Network is rerunning tonite at 10:30pm its half-hour documentary A Greener Greater Newark. If you haven't already seen it, you might want to do so. I would have given you more advance notice except that I didn't see anything about this showing until today, in channel-surfing past NJN.
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Speaking of TV, Cablevision has bumped one of its public-access channels, on which local Newark programming from, for instance, Arts High, appeared, from channel 22 to channel 77 and put in its place WNYE, which is Channel 25 on over-air UHF. This is terrific. WNYE should have been on Cablevision all along. Now I can resume watching the news in French (with English subtitles) at 7pm each day, which I used to do when I lived in Manhattan, and practice my (crappy) French. I think the channel listings on Channel 14 (and sometimes 29) are not yet showing WNYE's programming, much of it multilingual, some dubbed into English or with English subtitles. Alas, not all of it is titled. Polsat News, which followed Le Journal at 7:30 tonite, is in Polish only, and I can recognize only isolated Polish words, from my brief study of Russian, and the occasional Western loanword. You can check out WNYE's offerings online.
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A reader sent me, today, a direct link to a webpage on the City of Newark website about the Sanitation Department that answers some but not all of the questions I raised here Saturday. Thank you, reader. The City of Newark website's City Directory, however, is still not working.
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Today's foto is another in my "Doors of Newark" series, this one in the Ironbound. I think it's on Lafayette Street.

Altho this is a brickfronted building, our tourguide for the Newarkology Ironbound walking tour, Jeffrey Bennett, speculated aloud that the reason Jersey City and Hoboken have so many more brick and brownstone buildings than Newark (even tho Newark actually had a brownstone quarry!) may be that more stonemasons and brickmasons lived there, drawn to construction jobs in Manhattan, which is so much closer to those towns than we are. By contrast, he says, more carpenters lived here, so there are more frame houses with wood siding than either brick or, especially, stone residences. Jeff didn't say it, so I will: tho "Brick City" is one of the nicknames for Newark, "Frame City" might be more apt, at least for residences.
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I would like to see a lot more stone and steel townhouses and such here, because, historically, great cities have been built in stone and, more recently, steel. Such structures are presumably more expensive to build, but might not their longer lives and lower upkeep (you don't generally have to paint stone, or brick, every few years, tho you can, if you like) pay off in the end?

The Lion's Face in Newark

This "Church Day" at Newark USA, I present two fotos of an unprepossessing brick church in the North Ward, Projeto Vida Nova — NJ (Project New Life), "The Church With The Lion's Face".

There are two signs on the otherwise unadorned brick, this one on the left.

"Light in the City" is explained on a website thus (in Portuguese; English below). Altho people who speak Portuguese may be concentrated in the Ironbound, they are also found in other neighborhoods.

A Igreja Projeto Vida Nova apresentou no sábado, 29 de Novembro o evento que esclarece os perigos da tradicional festa cultural dos EUA, o HALLOWEEN! Com o tema LIGHT IN THE CITY, a festa já está sendo apresentada há 04 anos, trazendo pessoas de vários lugares para assistir a apresentação, voltada exclusivamente para o público infantil. O halloween é uma festa tradicional nos Estados Unidos e a Igreja tenta mostrar o lado oculto desta festa que pode parecer inofensiva, porém pode ter um significado maligno, sendo um culto a Satanas. O evento teve uma organização espetacular e o público recebeu vários prêmios e brindes doados pela Igreja, como 04 bicicletas e todas as crianças vestiram as camisetas padronizadas para o evento.

I have mentioned that my area of Newark doesn't celebrate Halloween. A neighbor down the street said that this nonobservance is because of concerns about dangers to the children from malefactors, the old "razor blade in the apple" and "chocolate-flavored laxative" urban-legend thing (or did such things really happen, as produced the discontinuance of trick-or-treating around here?), not, as I had wondered, due to a Baptist aversion to the holiday as satanic. "Light in the City", however, is a Halloween alternative that teaches about Halloween's satanic roots. In case you don't read Portuguese (I, of course, do; but I had Babelfish, Alta Vista's machine translator, give me a rough translation, anyway, that I then fixed up), here's the English equivalent:

The Project New Life church presented on Saturday, the 29th of November, the event that clarifies the dangers of the traditional cultural festival of the U.S.A., HALLOWEEN! With the theme LIGHT IN THE CITY, the party has been presented for 4 years, bringing people from various places to attend the presentation, directed exclusively toward the child public. Halloween is a traditional festival in the United States and the Church tries to show the occult side of this festival, which can seem harmless, but can have a malignant meaning, being a Satanic rite. The event had a spectacular organization and the public received various prizes and toasts donated for the Church, such as 4 bicycles, and all the children dressed in standardized t-shirts for the event.

There are a bunch of fotos of the event available at a linked page. One on the bottom row shows little kids in an auditorium in their uniform red tees with "JESUS" in white over the logo in the sign I show above.
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The second sign on the exterior is the name of the church and info about services that appears to be out-of-date, so I won't show a closeup of that sign. (Besides, I hadn't zoomed in with my camera, and when I zoomed in with my graphics program, the result looked crappy.) Rather, you can check the website, which is still "Em Construção" (under construction), for more information.
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It's a very handsome start, shows a fine rendering of the Lion's Face, and has streaming video. No video played in the afternoon, when I first went there, but the "PVN [Projeto Vida Nova] TV" screen is showing, apparently live, the Sunday evening service as I write. So it may be active only during the evening services, Sunday (starting at 7pm) and Thursday (8pm). The leader of the service, who wears not vestments but street clothes, seems to have a southern Brazilian accent, not the speech of either Portugal or of Rio and farther north in Brazil. But I could be mistaken. I was, once. Yeeeeeeears ago.

Dumped Tires

Somebody has dumped two castoff automobile tires on my frontage, in Vailsburg, far western Newark. And a few days ago I saw a third tire dumped in my side yard, between the driveway of the 4-family house nextdoor and my house. Altho the two tires up front were right near where I leave garbage for pickup, Sanitation apparently doesn't pick up tires, because we've had two pickups since these tires were abandoned and they're still there. Why doesn't Sanitation pick up tires? What are we supposed to do with the things Sanitation in its infinite wisdom decides it should not pick up?

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As you can see, we still have some slate sidewalks in my neighborhood. They warm up much sooner than the surrounding ground once the sun strikes them during the winter, so much so that unless snow on them is deep, a few hours of sunshine melts all the snow away, a great convenience. On the other hand, slate can be slippery with the wrong kind of shoe sole, and stray leaf litter or even a lite coating of mud on a wet day could land you on your a... heinie.

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Am I supposed to call Sanitation to find out where I have to take things that I didn't discard?, then pile them into my car (after laying out plastic to keep them from getting the car dirty) and drive miles in each direction to some approved tire-disposal site? What site, where?
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I went to the Newark City website to look for information from the Sanitation Department about what kinds of things are not picked up and what we're supposed to do with them, or even a phone number, but that website is in very bad shape. I couldn't get to the S's in the City Directory and there is no mention of "Sanitation" or anything like it in the department dropdown list. When I clicked on the "S" entry in the City Directory, I got an error message, "The website cannot display the page", with two possible reasons suggested:

Most likely causes:

• The website is under maintenance.
  
• The website has a programming error.

I then tried several other heading letters (F, K, whatever), with the same result. The same thing happened when I last tried to use the City Directory, over two weeks ago. Why haven't they fixed this? I went to the "Suggestion Box" from the Home page and left this message:

The website is in TERRIBLE shape, with a great many nonworking pages. I tried to get to the S's in the City Directory. Doesn't work. Looked for "Sanitation" in department list. Not there. Tried something else of interest. At the Animal Services page, I went to the dropdown menu on the upper right to see what was there, and selected the option to find out how to make suggestions to the City. It turned blue. Nothing happened. Page after page after page doesn't work. This has GOT to be fixed. Cheers.

I still don't know what I'm supposed to do with these castoff tires. If there is someplace I'm supposed to take them, I don't know where it is and can't get that information from the official City of Newark website. I guess I can find a telephone number for Sanitation in my phone book or online and call that. But I'll have to make a list first of the questions I need answered.
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What about people who don't have a car? What about other things people may need to dispose of, either because they generate them themselves or because somebody dumps them on their property or they turn up in 'spring cleaning' or clearing out apartments after prior tenants depart?
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When I bought replacement tires of my own, the store or tire shop I dealt with took away the old tires as part of the price. I don't know why whoever dumped these tires didn't do the same. But we must remember that some people are very pressed for cash, especially in a place like Newark, a substantial proportion of whose population lives below the poverty line. In a densely populated city with good public transportation and many poor people, a lot of residents don't have a car with which to cart trash to special county recycling centers, tire-disposal centers, or whatever.
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Sanitation needs to make special runs, once a month or once every couple of months, for things like tires, batteries, computer components, used motor oil, and other things it won't take in regular pickups. (I couldn't even find out what types of things Sanitation won't pick up, because there is no Sanitation Department webpage working at the moment.) And the Sanitation Department needs to publicize what things aren't permitted in regular pickups and when special runs to take those banned items are scheduled, so people will know what not to put out with regular trash and when they should put them out.
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I suspect a lot of recyclable materials that don't fall into the present categories of recyclable paper and metal, glass and plastic containers that do get curbside-recycling treatment, are put out during bulk pickup and not recycled as they should be (like the metal in stoves, metal shelving, etc.). That is wasteful and unwise, especially at a time when industry is promoting more and more disposable wipes and toilet sponges and dustcloths and you-name-it. Don't we have a landfill problem anymore? It seems that 20 years ago we heard all kinds of alarms about running out of landfill space, but now you see ads on television for all kinds of new, disposable items (which I regard as socially irresponsible).
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Perhaps special Sanitation collections could be Quarterly Cleanup events, in which Sanitation works with the schools, the Beautiful Newark initiative, and community organizations like Unified Vailsburg Services Organization and New Community Corporation, the Boys and Girls Club, churches, etc., to clean out yards, basements, and vacant lots. To refuse to pick up these things, ever, pretty much guarantees that many of them will be dumped illegally (such as motor oil down storm drains), concealed in trash bags with legal trash, or just left on the streets and in parks and vacant lots, to make the city progressively dirtier, doesn't it?
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Rather than end this post on a negative note, I present below a picture of something right about Vailsburg, tasteful plantings in a private front yard. Note that the colors of the hydrangeas wander from dark pink to blue to lite pink to lavender. Usually the color of hydrangeas varies according to the acidity of the soil. It would seem the soil in that small area is all mixed up!

(This is an entry for Saturday uploaded Sunday due to time/energy constraints.)

Corzine Beats Booker to the Punch

On July 26th I urged Mayor Booker to make Craig Ferguson an honorary citizen of Newark. He apparently did not do so. (Ferguson is the host of The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, which follows Letterman on CBS and is produced by Letterman's company.) Last nite, Ferguson read much of a letter from Governor Corzine making him an honorary citizen of the State of New Jersey, mooting any move by Booker to make him an honorary citizen of Newark. The letter was cute. BlueJersey.com has the entire text, not all of which was read on the show. Interesting to me is the fact that that text was posted yesterday afternoon, but the show did not air until over 11 hours later. I see from the .PDF of the Governor's letter that Blue Jersey has posted, that the undated letter was faxed to California on August 9th.
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(By the way, and this is very important, beware of downloading .PDF's from unknown persons. Unless you have the most recent version and security patches for Adobe Reader, .PDF's can carry executable Java script that could connect to the Internet and do malicious things without your knowing.)
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The cause of getting favorable publicity for Newark by granting honorary citizenship was, happily, not completely lost. Later in the show, Ferguson was interviewing (Mr.) Masi Oka of the (ridiculous) NBC drama Heroes and joked that his Scottish accent was phony and that he's really from New Jersey. A tad later, he said, more particularly, that he's from Newark! So we got some benefit from this honorary-citizenship bit after all, no thanks to Mayor Booker. Thank you, Governor Corzine.
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In appreciation, I'd like to show some pix of one of the great things about New Jersey, the Shore. Altho summer doesn't officially end until September 23rd, you have only 2½ weeks to get to the beach before the "unofficial" end of summer, Labor Day, arrives, and many (most? all?) beaches stop posting lifeguards. I wonder if beach access is then free. It should be if there are no lifeguards.

Here are some pix of Point Pleasant Beach from August 2004. I don't imagine much has changed.

I grew up further north, in Monmouth County, first in the Leonardo section of Middletown on Sandy Hook Bay, then Little Silver for one year, then on a lake in the River Plaza section of Middletown. Leonardo, I found out today, was named not for the famed Italian, Mr. DaVinci, but for "Henry and James Leonard, first ironmasters in N.J."

Boating and fishing, and not just beachgoing, are parts of what makes the Shore so appealing. How else can you get bluefish, my favorite foodfish? I don't see it in the supermarket.
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There's more to do at the beach than lie in the sun or swim. Point Pleasant Beach has beach volleyball courts.
Beachfront property is very expensive, and most young people rent in groups. But some houses are apparently family ocupied. I liked this sign.

I don't have any pix of Point Pleasant Beach after dark, but you can see below that lanterns are strung over parts of the boardwalk, and there are bars and live music for evening entertainment.

The Shore isn't hard to get to from Newark. By road, take the Parkway, or the Turnpike to the Parkway if you're closer to the Turnpike. By train from Newark Penn Station, take the North Jersey Coast Line, which goes all the way to Bay Head, one stop past Point Pleasant at the head of enormous, well-sheltered Barnegat Bay.

Mutual Benefit Life

On the New Jersey Historical Society walking tour of architecture around Military and Washington Parks early this month, I learned that the present IDT Building was originally built by the Mutual Benefit Life Insurance Company in the 1950s. Emporis.com (a wonderful website about buildings) confirms that, in a webpage at which appear two daytime fotos of the building's Broad Street façade.

- Built as part of the "New Newark" movement of the late 1950's, the Mutual Benefit Life Building replaced the company's former headquarters at 300 Broadway.
- The building's exterior features white limestone and blue-green glass.

(The fotos below are mine, not Emporis's, tho I think I might like to offer some pix for display on that site.) This first is a nite view from Washington Park past the lite rail station. You can see no detail of that building (I've shown other pix of that structure on several occasions) but the glowing letters "IDT" and the company's logo.

This was at least the third MBLICo Building. The first, 7 stories and 141 feet tall, stood at Broad Street and Commerce Street and is shown at Wikipedia as it looked in 1915. It was demolished, but I don't know when.
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There is another MBLICo building, built in Philly in 1972, that still stands. It was taller than the company's HQ building in Newark, just as Prudential has built far taller Prudential buildings in cities far from its Newark HQ. I don't know why.
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Mutual Benefit Life was the 18th largest life-insurance company in the Nation when it went bankrupt and was taken over by the State of New Jersey, which liquidated first it and then the transitional company the State established to find other insurers to service the policies Mutual Benefit had placed. There is today a different Mutual Benefit Insurance Company, but the life insurance company went bust in 1991, due to real-estate investments that didn't pan out. That's something to bear in mind in today's troubled real-estate market. There could be more at risk than private homes.
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Between the Commerce Street building and the Washington Park building was a headquarters building at 300 Broadway.

- 300 Broadway was the headquarters of the Mutual Benefit Life Insurance corporation from 1927 to 1957, when it moved to its new headquarters at 520 Broad Street.
- From 1957 to 1979 it was the home of Essex Catholic High School.
- It is now a facility for nursing and rehabilitative care.
- It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983.

I saw this building on Newarkology's walking tour of the North Ward last February.

It is of a very different architectural style from the modernist 1957 building. Central in the sculptural frieze is a pelican, an ancient symbol of charity to the point of self-sacrifice.

Emporis has lots of pix and info about Newark buildings. If when you first enter the website you type only "Newark" in the city search box, it presents 12 different Newarks, 11 in the U.S. and one in Britain, but ours is No. 1, and in bold. My brother in Texas mentioned today that in doing some searches in a geographic-name database, he found 19 Newarks in the United States. I think the others should change their names. One Newark is good enuf.

Free Concert at NJPAC Thursday

The "JPMorgan Chase Sounds of the City" series of free outdoor concerts in front of NJPAC continues tomorrow at 5pm.

This week’s artists include DJ Joey Mazza; Jen Kearney and The Lost Onion, a seven-piece band that plays an adventurous blend of soul, funk, jazz and Latin music; Brooklyn-born Tamar-kali, a songwriter and vocalist who cut her teeth on New York City’s hardcore rock scene; and composer-writer-performer Imani Uzuri (pictured), the artist behind the acclaimed Her Holy Water: A Black Girl’s Rock Opera, whose music was classified as “soulful, provocative and emotionally charged” by The New York Post.

I'm not big on music myself but thought I'd pass this info along. The Newark Museum seems to have finished its "Jazz in the Garden" series of Thursday lunchtime concerts, since I see no mention of it on the Museum's website. Perhaps next year the Museum and NJPAC should choose different days for their outdoor concerts. This year they were both on Thursdays.
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The NJPAC area is readily accessible via many buses and Newark Lite Rail, as well as on foot for office workers nearby. Newark's office district is reasonably compact. If you drive in, you may have a very hard time finding free parking anywhere near NJPAC, tho there are lots of garages and parking lots available for a fee. The Military Park underground garage charges $5.00 for up to an hour, $7.00 for up to two hours, and $9.50 maximum for the day. It closes at midnite. I thought I'd tell you that, since I have found no website about its hours or rates.
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I finally parked in that clean, pleasant, well-lited garage for the first time earlier this month. The guy initially overcharged me as I left, because the system that automatically computes the fee wasn't working and the attendant miscalculated. But when I pointed out the error he quickly made good. To play safe, you should know before you get to the booth on the way out how much the fee should be, and make sure it's calculated right.

You can walk in and out of the garage on the rampways alongside the cars, in paved areas marked off with diagonal lines to bar vehicles, or use stairs or, at least during certain hours, an escalator up to this dignified pavilion at Park Place and Center Street. The escalator wasn't running on a Tuesday afternoon in August.

There appear to be three levels to this spacious facility, and entrances/exits on both Broad Street and Park Place. I found parking on the first level off the street, but went partway down the stairs under the pavilion to see how many levels there are.
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This next foto shows how close the entry pavilion is to NJPAC.

When I was there, in the middle of the afternoon, the little cafe/foodservice area at street level was not in use. I don't know if it ever is, but it's an airy, pleasant little space. If we had more of a tourist trade, it would be an agreeable place for visitors to the park or New Jersey Historical Society to have a snack, or for tourists tired from walking to take a little refreshment before returning to their car, or just to sit a bit even if they hadn't parked below.

National Mentions, Newark Foto on AOL

The shootings in Ivy Hill have made national news for several days now, but have, fortunately, been put in context within the larger story of rising violent crime nationally. Indeed, the outrage over these shootings in particular may have sparked newly intense scrutiny of a horrendous trend that media, all too focused on the Iraq war, had given insufficient attention. It's sad that Newark should find itself in this position, but heartening that much of the Nation has rushed to express solidarity with us in the struggle against a nationwide tide of barbarism. Newark may lead the way in accepting that this is a crisis, and what we do about it will be watched by other cities whose people fear the same thing either is already happening or might soon be happening to them. In short, revulsion at this particular crime might actually produce some positive change, and not be dismissed by self-righteous outsiders as just the way things are in Newark. No, it's not just Newark, and the Nation is with us on this one.
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I chanced across a good foto of Newark in a Top 10 list on AOL tonite about auto insurance rates. I feared that New Jersey would be No. 1 on the list of highest rates, but it's not. It's No. 3, and the foto chosen to represent New Jersey was of our Passaic River skyline. Unfortunately, I see no way to get directly to that foto, but you can click your way thru the first seven states quickly enuf.
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My own foto of Downtown today is of a bit of renewal underway. Something is being done to the stairways from the elevated railroad tracks at Newark Penn Station directly to Market Street, and it's taking some time, because I took the following picture June 9th but passed by the same area only a few days ago and the fence hiding construction was still there.

Is it too much to hope that escalators/elevators are being put where before there were only metal stairs? Even if all the workmen do is spiff up the stairs, that's better than closing them altogether, because there are times when you arrive late and don't have time to go the long way, thru the station, to get to your platform. These stairs are a great convenience, when they're open. Maybe they will be left open inward and not just outward at all hours. That would be progress, not just repair.
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Since that foto is informative but not purty, I offer below a picture of a treepit in Vailsburg britened by impatiens and hostas in bloom

My own frontage has only a single sickly (but flowering) tree. I don't know what restrictions are placed upon what homeowners can put in the treepit area between the sidewalk and curb. I would like to place flowering rose of sharon shrubs there but I'm afraid they might block car doors from opening. In looking at this foto, I see that these flowers are in two separated locations, at the edge of a driveway, where a car door would not be, and right by a thick tree, where people getting out of a car would already have to be wary. I'll have to look at my own frontage with such considerations in mind.

Hopper Exhibit Closing

An exhibition at the Newark Museum centered on a painting by great American artist Edward Hopper closes Sunday. I guess I should get my you-know-what in gear and get to the Museum to see it. There's also an exhibit of the works of 4 current artists from Communist China, inside the Museum and in the sculpture garden, that I should check out. The Chinese exhibit is supported in part by Johnson & Johnson, a New Jersey company now involved in a lawsuit against the Red Cross for licensing the red-cross symbol, which J&J started to use first, in 1876, to competitors of J&J. I'm a little miffed with J&J for using a British accent in a commercial for one of its products, but fair is fair. J&J invented the logo, the Red Cross was given use of it by Congress 24 years later, but the non-profit organization must not use it to confuse consumers and injure the company that created that very logo.
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Maybe I'll go the Museum Saturday. It closes at 5pm, so I could carry with me a list of things nearby that I want to fotograf and take some pix until the 8pm event Saturday nite at Gallery Aferro.
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Today's foto is a wide view of the Newark Museum as seen from Central Avenue during the New Jersey Historical Society walking tour I took August 2nd.

The façade of the former YMCA, on the right, is to be preserved thru the Museum's impending expansion, but the rest of the building will be gutted or demolished. I'm not sure which. It's a little surprising that an institution filled with so much that is beautiful houses it in such an unlovely building. I haven't seen any architect's renderings of the planned expansion, but I hope that it will look terrific from all sides.
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Jessica, my guide on the NJHS walking tour, said something that may explain why there are no floor plans online at the Newark Museum's website, but not really. In explaining why the NJHS does not allow fotos to be taken of its collections, she said that it is commonplace among museums not to show specific locations where particular (valuable) works might be, lest thieves be able to plan robberies with that information. But museums do publish hardcopy floor plans. I have one for the Newark Museum somewhere around here. And obviously thieves would have to be in the vicinity of the institution they are to rob, so could pick up a hardcopy floor plan easily enuf, couldn't they? So why not have floor plans online?
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As for fotos, the Newark Museum has fotos of some areas on its website, so the same argument against fotos is not persuasive either. Besides, I've taken fotos (nonflash) in the Hermitage, Louvre, and other famed museums, so think we should be able to take pix in the Newark Museum and New Jersey Historical Society as well.

Onion Domes in Newark

One of the historic churches we saw in the Newarkology walking tour of the Ironbound yesterday was St. Michael's Russian Orthodox Church, on the southern edge of Independence Park. I didn't know Newark even had a Russian Orthodox Church. I was so pleased to see the gilded onion domes that mark this striking church, that I've made that church the focus of this first "Church Day" at Newark USA following the tour.

The view above shows the only onion dome you can see from the side, approaching from the west. But there are 3 onion domes on the front. I don't know that I've seen any gilded onion domes at all since my trip to Russia in the 80s. I like the ivy on the brick wall beyond the church in this view.

Note the distinctive Russian version of the cross, as well. Unfortunately, the sun was high in the sky behind and visually close to the right side of the church so the glare damaged this picture. There is a better-illuminated picture of the façade on the opening page of the church's website.
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I couldn't hear everything our guide said (I hope he uses an amplifier/bullhorn for the next tour), but I think he said that hoped-for immigration from Russia after the fall of Communism didn't pan out, and the church's membership continues to dwindle. The U.S. really missed out on a great opportunity to bring in large numbers of educated East Europeans used to cold winters, after the Berlin Wall was destroyed. We might have not just have revivified immigrant communities but also reinvigorated Northern cities that have suffered a massive loss of population to the Sunbelt.
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Apparently the U.S. Government took absolutely no interest in promoting immigration from that part of the world, perhaps out of fear of being thought racist for preferring white people from Europe over mestizos and Indians from Latin America, and dark-complected people from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. Or perhaps there was lingering anti-Russian, anti-Polish, etc., sentiment among U.S. officials from the long decades of the Cold War. Whatever the reasons, Newark and other cities that used to have thriving East European immigrant communities have seen those communities shrink, in some cases shriveling away to almost nothing.

St. Michael's apparently does still exist as a community, despite an assertion I found online that it closed its doors in 2004. Our group did not go inside, and if St. Michael's is like most other Newark churches nowadays, it probably wasn't even open to the public in the middle of the afternoon, even a Sunday afternoon. But you can see fotos of the splendid interior at both the Home page and the Photos page of the church's website.

Tour Today Yes, but Gallery Next Week

Today, Newarkology had its most successful walking tour to date. Some 18 people, not including our guide, Jeffrey Bennett, walked to various historic sites in the Ironbound. One little baby girl in a sun hat, however, lucked out. She got carried the entire way.
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I met another reader of this blog, plus one of the writers of The Daily Newarker blog, Ken, and took some 80 pix during the tour and on my way back to the car. I had had less than four hours' sleep (my sleep cycle is entirely disrupted of late), so joined the tour very late. Fortunately, Jeff had indicated the first part of the route in the webpage describing it, so I was able to catch up. (He might want to indicate the route in the announcement of any future tour, so that people who get a late start don't decide to not even try to make it, for not knowing which way to go to catch up.)
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Naturally, I don't know what I missed in the first hour, but I don't have to learn everything about the Ironbound in a single day. Future entries to this blog will discuss (and illustrate) some of what I did learn on the tour.
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Today's pix are of palm trees being put into outdoor spots near what appears to be a new building at Lafayette Street and Wilson Avenue. I didn't see a name on the building so don't know what business or organization is to occupy it, but in this first picture you can see three flags, those of Portugal, the U.S., and Brazil, so perhaps it is some kind of Portuguese and Brazilian cultural center, or a Portuguese-speaking business.

This seems pretty late in the growing season to be putting tropical plants into the ground outdoors, so, unless there is to be some kind of enclosure built around them, perhaps they only look tropical but are actually cold-hardy palms. When I was in high school in Middletown (Monmouth County), a local business planted some palms it hoped would survive the winter. They all died within a couple of years. Perhaps plant breeders have developed truly winter-hardy varieties of naturally cold-resistant palms since then.
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There were some palms wrapped in burlap still to be planted.

We don't usually have our first hard frost until about the first week of December, so maybe the owners of this building will dig these plants up before then, but have a good 3½ months of tropical lushness before the palms need to be moved to a greenhouse somewhere. Of course, if there are now tropical-looking palms that can survive Newark winters, the homeowner whose pink flamingos I showed yesterday might want to plant some too.
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Because I got so little sleep last nite, I passed on the Gallery Aferro event (see yesterday's entry) at 8pm. There's another of the same sort, at the same time next Saturday. I'll try for that one.