No Mass

[That title conjures, for me, boxer Roberto Durán's plea during his last big fite, "¡No más!" Maybe that's just me.]

I neglected to mention, as followup to my entry last Sunday, that I ended up not going to midnite mass. Gaetano felt a little silly for forgetting that of course he couldn't go to midnite mass at the Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart (nite views of which I use here today) in Newark because he had a big family thing down at the Shore set for Christmas Eve. (My immediate family is scattered, to Texas, Nevada, and California, and I do not care to leave my little kitties for several days to venture afar.) I decided I didn't want to go to midnite mass alone. (All my best friends are Catholic, and most are Italian. I don't know how that happened, given the diversity of the New York Tristate Metropolitan Area, tho NJ and NYC are both very Italian. However it happened, it happened. And I'm content with that. They are more Catholic than I, but I may know more Italian than they do!) Next year I'll start planning earlier, so will be better prepared psychologically to get myself to the Cathedral (Basilica), whether anyone I know goes too or not.

On Christmas day itself, I decided to take a drive. (In ye olden days my family used to pile into the car and go for rides. Does anybody still do that? or has traffic become so oppressive that no one willingly goes out into it for recreation?) First, I headed to Washington Park to take pix of what I think is the newly-floodlited façade of 15 Washington Street, the distinctive skyscraper that used to serve as Rutgers' law school and is supposed to be reworked into apartments for married students. I'll show some of those pix some other time.

After I finished at Washington Park, I wanted to see if Sacred Heart had a lited crèche I could fotograf at nite. But in any case, I wanted to get a nite picture of the Cathedral Basilica to balance the day picture in the slideshow at my TourismNewark.org website-in-the-making, so set up my tripod and took some pix. Inasmuch as this is "Church Sunday" here at Newark USA, I am showing some of those now, even tho I showed pix of the same great church last Sunday. At this time of year, the greatest of Newark's churches must have pride of place, as we at once fill out the Christmas season (to Twelfth Nite and the celebration of the Three Kings that is important in Newark's Hispanic community) and look back on the year just past, mull earlier times, and look forward to better times ahead. The foto below is an overview of the Cathedral, pair to the daytime view shown in the slideshow. Alas, the dimmer parts of the building appear to be brownish. They are actually pure gray, but I could not figure a way to cause my graphics program to show them as gray. (I'm not saying there is no way, only that it may take a very long time to master all the features of any sophisticated graphics program.)

There were three teenage boys riding on tiny bicycles in front of the Basilica. (Is that a Newark thing, or do big kids ride on small-kid bikes elsewhere too?) Two of them appear, if less than clearly, in the foto above. One is a dark blur at the bottom of the foto, left of center; the other, who was wearing a lite-colored hoody, is the white object almost exactly center. This next picture is a nite view of one of the pictures shown last Sunday.

I thought that if they asked about the pix I was taking, I'd tell them about my fotoblog, hand them my card, and ask if they'd like to be shown riding their bikes with the lited cathedral as backdrop. I could stop-action with flash. But they didn't ask, and I don't push. I did ask one if there were a crèche ("nativity scene", I think I actually said) on the grounds and was told no. I didn't see any in front or on either side of the Cathedral, and did not wander all the way to the back in the cold, but merely accepted that there was none. You'd think the Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart would have a grand, artistic crèche on the east side of the building (along Clifton Avenue) for all to see, as brilliantly lited at nite as the Cathedral building itself. But they didn't. Here's a side view of the west tower. The towers are tilted 45 degrees off flush with the façade.

Here's a close view of the main portal to the Basilica. Alas, the camera seems to have automatically shut out a lot of lite, because the Cathedral's stone in all these pix should be dazzlingly white. It's really gray, in sunlite, but in the blaze of the floodlites, it is stunningly, brilliantly white. "You had to be there", truly.

I couldn't even briten these fotos in my graphics program without distorting the color and losing detail. Cameras just see things differently from people. To be on that plaza close to the façade when the floodlites are on is to be surrounded by lite and overwhelmed by the beauty of the stone tracery and the magnificence of the building. If you've never seen it in person, you owe it to yourself next time you are in Newark at nite to get there to experience it for yourself. But the lites may go off around 2am. (The blur in the bottom middle of the picture below is one of the kids on bikes.)

As we enter a year in which Newark seems poised to attract big-money developers, let me offer this advice to people planning to build large, permanent structures:

Think. Will anyone 53 years after your building is completed want to take fotos of your building, nite and day, to share with the world? Will anyone list your building among the great architectural achievements of Newark? New Jersey? the United States? the human race? Think big. Don't just spend big and build big. If you are, 100 years from now, remembered for anything, will it be for the building you planned 100 years earlier? If it's still standing, will people pass it by without notice, or point it out? And if they do point it out, will it be as a cautionary tale about the mistakes people can make in littering the visual landscape with architectural crap, or to honor someone who understood that what has to be seen should be worth seeing?

To celebrate the American Institute of Architects' 150th anniversary, the NJ Chapter released this past September a list of New Jersey's best 150 buildings/places. 14 of them are in Newark, and only one cathedral, our Cathedral Basilica, is among the 150.

If you like these pictures, consider this my belated Christmas card to you and yours.

Sabres Edge

Mike Harrington of the Buffalo News blog "Sabres Edge" yesterday remarked on the Prudential Center, where the Sabres were to go on to lose to the Devils last nite in overtime:

The arena itself is beautiful outside and in, a huge upgrade from the Meadowlands. One key highlight is a giant video screen on the Mulberry Street facade. Inside, there's still a surprising amount of construction dust around and the musty smell of drying concrete. Work continues in some areas, including the Devils' practice rink.

Hope some work is done on the neighborhood too. Sheeesh. Right across the street from the Devils team shop is some abandoned buildings with windows blown out. Across the street from the service entrance is some abondoned tenaments. Not postcard material.

Gaetano found that comment, at the end of which were links to a 4-foto slide show of the Prudential Center on the Rock's website and a nonworking link to the time-lapse video of the Arena's construction on the Star-Ledger site. I left this comment. (The foto in the middle, showing a construction fence around the building with no windows, is not in the comment, just here.)

First, the vacant buildings opposite the main entrance to the Prudential Center are under renovation, not abandoned (see pix in my "Newark USA" fotoblog entry of today, at http://newarkusa.blogspot.com). Second, the link to the time-lapse video of the Arena's construction on the Newark Star-Ledger site doesn't work. I see what happened, because I have had the same thing happen in my own blogs. Harrington left out the "http://", which rendered what followed, "www.nj.com/newarkguide", into a relative hyperlink, that is, to a page on the default website, the Buffalo News's own server, which of course is not where the Star-Ledger page resides. The correct link is http://www.nj.com/newarkguide. Then scroll down to the time-lapse video. It is really worth seeing.

We here in Newark are very proud of the Prudential Center. Even the new mayor, who tried to block its construction, saw the lite and thanked the former mayor for pushing it thru against heavy odds. Buffalo and Newark have a lot in common, both being cities that have gone thru bad times as a lot of the monied people poured out into beautiful suburbs. Both cities are coming back. Buffalo and Newark are fiting the good fite for central cities.

Harrington mentioned postcards. I'd like to create a line of Newark postcards, using my best pix. I guess I could fold that into my TourismNewark.org enterprise. Now, I just have to learn how to be a businessman. Should be easy, right?
+
(P.S. I put this up on the Internet before I finalized the entry for yesterday, below, in order that I might timely post to the Buffalo News a link that would take people to the fotos above. If you haven't seen the discussion and fotos of the Westinghouse Building demolition below, please read on.)

Westinghouse Demolition Underway

Stuart Chirls, who works in Downtown Newark, sent for your information two slitely differing fotos of the demolition of the old Westinghouse factory building as at December 20th. He says:

I spoke with a worker at the Westinghouse site last week who said demolition is expected to take 6-8 mos., due to special care needed on light rail side. Bricks and large wooden beams have already been purchased by re-sellers. Other demolished materials to be ground up and used for fill on-site. He also said a strip mall and lux apartments were planned but we both expressed doubt given deteriorating economy. Interesting, though, how many buildings have been bought and shuttered in immediate area (mostly by Rutgers, I understand). Rutgers recently paved (but does not use) a parking lot nearby, so I guess the landbanking goes on.

I thought the city was indignant about "landbanking" — just putting land aside and not developing it — and was inclined to use governmental power, to the extent available, to force development. Perhaps they have no jurisdiction over a property held as long as the Westinghouse Building has been owned by its present owners. I hope the Planning Commission has zoned that area for something tall, and that it can do something to spur construction, not just demolition. A parking structure as part of a large-scale development would be of much greater value to Newark, and to the property's owners, than a bare parking lot.
+
In this wider view, you can see some of the dignified Romanesque façade in dark red brickwork, on the right.

I regard the destruction of the Westinghouse Building as not just sad but actually shameful. Its loss may not be the equivalent of the destruction of New York's old Penn Station, which produced in reaction New York's landmarking law, but it is nonetheless a monumental loss. I got an inquiry two months ago about it.

Hi, my name is Manuel. I am a commercial real estate appraiser [from the Bronx]. I happened to be in the area and I couldn't but notice the Westinghouse building and how great looking it was but I was surprised to learn it was going to be torn down. I tried contacting the City but I couldn't get any info until I came across your article.

Can you tell me a little about the building and what they propose to do there. I understand a new townhouse development has been proposed. Do you know [what] the property sold for?

I would appreciate any info you would be willing to forward.

I replied:

Sorry, but I don't know what exactly is to be done with the property. As I expressed in my fotoblog, I hope they build tall, on at least part of the property, but I have no information about the buyer nor the plans for the property. I assume there are records in the city or county as to the present owner's name and location, and possibly also a phone number, but don't know for certain. Altho I got a real-estate salesperson's license this year, I have not yet gotten the practical training in the profession as would permit me to give you further guidance. It is, as I said in my blog, a pity that the owner did not see renovating the magnificent original structure into a multipurpose edifice (apartments, offices, retail space) as economically viable in today's market. It really is sad that we consent to lose, forever, structures of value due to temporary market conditions.

And he responded:

Thanks for your reply. It is sad to see a beautiful building like the Westinghouse Building go. It certainly looks like a classic and would certainly have value as residential loft space.

Gaetano subsequently found some info at The Daily Newarker. Following links within that item, I found an artist's rendering (click on it to enlarge) of what is, or at least at one time was, planned for the site, low-rise condos and high-rise apartments. I take vehement exception to words in that article like "the Westinghouse building ... blights the Broad Street Station area" and "this dilapidated warehouse". I suppose the writer of those remarks would as well advocate demolition of the ruins of the Colosseum in Rome. Repair it or remove it, eh?
+
I should have around here somewhere (unless I lent it out and never got it back; that happens with books) a book called Lost New York that shows a host of fotos of fine buildings destroyed in the march of progress in New York City. I see that there is now available an updated version of the original 1968 work. Amazon.com quotes a comment from a review by The New York Times:

"Two kinds of people should have Lost New York -- those old enough to remember how New York once looked and those too young to know the New York they have missed."

I know of no such book about Newark, but the Old Newark website has many fotos of Lost Newark. If Newark were a richer city, there would be strong enuf demand for high-class condos in a historic building to justify the expense of renovating rather than destroying this grand old building. But we are (temporarily) poor, so must eat our past to survive the present. But what kind of future will we have if we destroy the best of our heritage?
+
It's a pity that future generations will have no idea that a building the size and distinction of the Westinghouse factory ever existed in Downtown Newark. More's the pity.

Montana in New Jersey

The much-ballyhooed Hannah Montana concert series comes to Newark this Saturday and Sunday at 4pm. When I first heard of the tour by Billy Ray Cyrus's dauter Miley (from the nickname her parents gave her, "Smiley"), I thought that it would be a great thing to bring to Newark, because it would attract lots of little white girls and their protective parents. If little girls and young families can come in from the suburbs and nearby cities, have a great time in Newark, and head home with nothing but great memories, that would make a lifelong impression on thousands of kids, and favorably dispose them and their parents toward Newark.
+
Little girls have no preconceptions about Newark. They haven't lived long enuf to have seen the Riots on TV, nor, perhaps, even to have heard the slanders still making the rounds. If their personal experience is joyous, Newark becomes permanently associated in their minds with good times, a fun place to be.
+
Lo and behold, AEG, the management company for the Prudential Center, booked two Hannah Montana concerts for Newark! Terrific.

---

The discussion of the Hannah Montana concert continues below, but since I have no pix for that, I offer pix on two unrelated sights that I associate by process you will see. The first foto is of one location of Soul Delicious, "Newark’s Premier Soul Food Restaurant" and caterer, whose main location is in the Weequahic section. This little triangular building is on Springfield Avenue in western Newark, at the juncture of South 12th Street and Pierce Street. I pass by it regularly and love tiny, odd-shaped buildings.

---

Even better is that a Newark charity is using the concert to raise money for crime prevention:

In an attempt to cash in on the hype surrounding teen phenomenon Hannah Montana's "Best of Both Worlds" tour, the Community Foundation of New Jersey is offering donors a coveted seat at the concerts.

But such charity comes at a hefty price: $1,000.

The foundation entered the frenetic realm of Hannah mania two weeks ago with 100 tickets — a world where ticket prices have soared to $2,000 a pop. The donation, tax-deductible, seemed like a good way to raise funds for Newark's Community Eye program, a public safety initiative putting security cameras in city neighborhoods ***
Donations will help fund the program that will put gunshot detection technology and 50 surveillance cameras in areas where gun violence has occurred. So far, $1.1 million has been raised ... If by Saturday afternoon tickets remain they will be distributed to previous donors or to a community group, he said.

Anyone interested in tickets and a donation can call (973) 267-5533 or visit http://www.cfnj.org/affiliates/newark/communityeye/hannahmontana.php.

I won't be going, of course, not at that price, nor any price. I'm not a little girl. The Newark Museum offered its visitors a chance to win a pair of tickets, and that award was made yesterday.
+
This was part of the Museum's "Holiday Fun Week" between Christmas and New Year's. The events still remaining are:

Friday, December 28
2 pm - Performance: Dickens Victorian Carollers

Saturday, December 29
2 pm - Performance: A Season of Miracles

Sunday, December 30
2 pm - Performance: Wall-to-Wall Klezmer by the Greg Wall Klezmerfest

---

Years ago I took a picture of a very narrow building near the Academy of St. Benedict on Niagara Street in the Ironbound. This is not to be confused with St. Benedict's Prep (pictured), on Springfield Avenue at MLK. I have no idea why we have two schools with such similar names that are apparently unrelated.

A week ago, St. Benedict's Prep took the No. 1 ranking in USA Today's high school basketball ratings. I hadn't heard about that.

In any case, tho the two St. Benedict's (-es?) may not be related, the two Newark restaurants and caterers called "Soul Delicious" are indeed related.

---

Caught on Camera

On Saturday I mentioned that I have a squirrel problem. It occurred to me that if banging on and opening the panel to the storage area (effectively my attic) and waving my hand or a broom handle didn't scare the squirrel away long-term, maybe the flash of a camera would. So when I was already on my third floor and heard scurrying, I took my camera in hand, pointed it into the darkened storage area and snapped two pix of my little furry squatter.

Note that in order to take this picture, I had to noisily open a panel that should have alerted the squirrel to potential danger. But s/he didn't run, did s/he? Brave — or is it foolhardy — no?
+
OK, so squirrels can get into my undereave storage area. So what? How much harm can a little gray squirrel do? This much:

I don't know how a little thing like a squirrel could overturn a box and scatter so many papers once neatly stored in boxes. I have heard it (more than one? different squirrels at different times?) scratching around. I thought maybe it/they wanted to make a nest against the cold, maybe even a place to raise babies. But what exactly possessed it or them to spread papers across the floor? Perhaps one needs to be a squirrel to understand.
+
The American gray squirrel was brought to Britain in the late 19th Century and is making such serious inroads against the native red squirrel that some Brits are acting to eradicate them. The New York Times Magazine published a very long article (nearly 5,000 words) on this topic on October 27th, a few points from which I discuss below.

---

The remaining fotos today show some Christmas decorations in Vailsburg and the Ironbound. This first shows the view from my third floor of the house diagonally across the street, in Vailsburg.

---

In 1922, a government permanent secretary was quoted in The Times of London calling grays “sneaking, thieving, fascinating little alien villains.”

I get the distinct feeling that that reference was to Americans generally, not just to (North) American squirrels.
+
The article says that red squirrels can compete in coniferous forests, where food sources are lean, but not in hardwood (broadleaf) forests. I have both oaks, with large supplies of acorns, and a very large spruce(?), with cones. I find both on the ground, separated from the trees. Did they fall? Plainly some of the twigs were severed by sharp teeth.
+
But gray squirrels are also said, in that article, to carry a virus, squirrelpox, that is deadly to red squirrels but harmless to grays. That pox has now made its way into Scotland, that last refuge of the susceptible red squirrel population.
+
The Times article also says that red and gray squirrels do not interbreed. That seems odd, but an Internet search shows the same. Is that because they simply do not, or because they cannot? If they can, I see a solution of sorts: breed a mixed-ancestry squirrel that might have the gray squirrel's immunity to squirrelpox but the red squirrel's coloration, less food-demanding size, and more docile behavior.

Private home on Vermont Avenue, Vailsburg.

In the interim, or in the alternative if a captive breeding program could not establish an intermediary squirrel with the best characteristics of the two (and hopefully not, even in some individuals, the worst), a question remains of what to do with the animals killed in a squirrel pogrom. You may have heard late-nite talk-show hosts saying that some Brits are making squirrel pancakes! I'm not sure the word "pancake" is quite right, but it is used in a news item from Britain's Daily Mail October 16th:

"The Americans have numerous recipes for grey squirrel, with the most popular being Brunswick Stew, which is casseroled squirrel."

Last year Lord Inglewood, who lives near Penrith in Cumbria, warned the red squirrel will soon become extinct if the non-native grey population is allowed to go on increasing.

He suggested then that one way of dealing with the problem would be to foster a market for grey squirrel meat.

He said: "What about celebrity chefs like Jamie Oliver promoting it for school dinners? I have never actually eaten a grey squirrel but I am prepared to give it a go."

Street decorations on Ferry Street in the Ironbound.

Anyone who has seen The Beverly Hillbillies or other hillbilly comedies will know that squirrels have indeed been eaten historically in parts of the United States, usually by people who live(d) at the edge of subsistence.

Granny's Beverly Hillbillies Cookbook

Granny was always cooking hogback, gizzards, or crawdad, and anyone who looked at Jethro or Elly Mae knew Granny's cooking was nutritious. To capture the humor and spirit of the show, this book has possum, squirrel and groundhog, but also the hearty traditional recipes of the stars, photos, profiles, trivia, and more.

For more information and to purchase:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1558532714/ref=nosim/happydaysonline

The red squirrel has seemed to retreat to Scotland and northern England, but I rather doubt there has been an actual migration. Instead, those in the far north of Great Britain (the main island of the insular nation sometimes known by the same name but formally as the United Kingdom) survive in substantial number, whereas those farther south have declined or disappeared from squirrelpox or other cause. If the Scots are at all like the Irish, there may be a lot more red hair on people as well as squirrels around there, which may give rise to a certain prejudice. The claim is also made by defenders of the red squirrel that the gray squirrel (but presumably not also the red) somehow reduces songbird populations.

Grey squirrels eat seeds, buds, flowers, shoots, nuts, berries and fruit from many trees and shrubs. [So they, not the raccoons, may have eaten my strawberries off the plant (before the plant perished in its third year)!] They also eat fungi and insects, and occasionally birds’ eggs and fledglings.

Closer view of St. Stephan's Church past several strings of Christmas lites, Ironbound section of Newark, NJ, December 2007.

I have seen a red squirrel exactly once, in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio (like Newark, a city overcoming a difficult past). How is it that the American red squirrel can live in acorn-rich Ohio but the Eurasian red squirrel cannot live in acorn-rich southern England? Is the American version a different species, immune to squirrelpox? If so, perhaps that would be the squirrel to interbreed with England's red squirrels.
+
In any case, Newark squirrels are gray. No Commie squirrels here.

Closer view of Christmas lites on Ferry Street in the Ironbound section of Newark, NJ, December 2007, taken with flash. The resulting foto is much darker than the actual scene but makes clear the shapes that the lites form.

Midnite Mass?

I'm undecided as to whether to try to get into the Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart for Midnite Mass tomorrow nite. Jule Spohn of the Old Newark Group says that he has gone on various occasions and it can get very crowded so one should try to get there by 11pm. Music starts around 11:30. I don't believe in God but do believe in the Church and its good works, tho of course as a gay man I have serious problems with the Church's attitudes toward sexuality, and not just homosexuality. But like most people in this and many other countries, I am culturally Christian. I am also nominally Catholic. I was elated to hear that former British Prime Minister Tony Blair just converted formally to Catholicism, leaving the Anglican Church to join his wife and children in the Catholic faith. The report I saw says that there are now more Catholics in Britain than Anglicans! The Anglican Communion's problems, touched on here Wednesday, may be deeper than the split between liberals in the First World and conservatives/reactionaries in the Third World. Good. The Anglican Church, and its colonial "Communion", exists basically only because the monster Henry VIII wanted to divorce Catherine of Aragon but the Roman Catholic Church, the "Faith" of which the King of England was supposed to be "Defender", wouldn't let him.

---

This "Church Day" at the Newark USA fotoblog, I return to showing pix of Newark's (New Jersey's?) most magnificent building, the Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart. This first depicts the main portal, with its great, bronze doors made in Rome.

---

In any case, midnite mass is to me a cultural more than religious rite, rich in communal experience, music, and, in a beautiful place like Sacred Heart — bigger than Saint Patrick's, taller than Notre Dame — art. I imagine the magnificent organ, something like the 27th largest pipe organ in the world, will fill Sacred Heart's cavernous interior with luxuriant sound. I once attended midnite mass at Saint Patrick's Cathedral in NYC with my older sister. I was able to get two tickets, which are required for St. Pat's because so many people want to attend. Jule says he never heard of tickets being required for a midnite mass at Sacred Heart, which is good for me in that I still do not know if I want to try to get in. I certainly don't want to have to stand in the side aisles, as latecomers have to do (tho that might solve the kneeling problem I discuss below, since there are no kneeling platforms in the aisles). Gaetano hasn't gotten back to me as to whether he wants to go.
+
I think that when my sister and I were at St. Patrick's, Renata Scotto, a world-renowned soprano, sang Ave Maria and at least one other solo for the telecast on WPIX. I doubt Sacred Heart in Newark can as yet attract so distinguished an artist, and its midnite mass is not, to my knowledge, (as of yet) televised. Couldn't NJN or News 12 New Jersey or Cablevision Public Access (or WNET, if it were genuinely the Newark station the FCC intended) do so? Perhaps someday.

Stained-glass window portraying St. Walter of Pontoise, a medieval Catholic critic in France of the abuses that led, 400 years later, to the Protestant Reformation.

When I went to St. Patty's, it had been many years since I'd been to any mass, much less midnite mass, and I think my sister was also hoping we could take our cues from others as to when to stand/sit/kneel/stand/kneel/sit, which can be very complicated, but we were seated in the first row so there was nobody ahead of us to watch! We had to rely upon peripheral vision and turning to the side to stick to the script.

In this picture, note the gargoyles on the near tower, the Mater Dolorosa Tower on the west side of the Cathedral, and the ornate stonework of other parts of the Cathedral's exterior.

At least then I was able to kneel easily. Now I'm not sure it's advisable for me even to try to kneel, since I've had surgery on both knees. I can stand from a seated position, tho not always easily or quickly. I can sit. But I don't know that I should kneel, and there is apparently no special seating area for disabled people. I don't want other participants to be indignant at me for not kneeling, and since I'm not in a wheelchair, my gray beard may not be enuf to cue people that I have very good reasons for not kneeling. Parking might also be a problem. I wonder if I still fit into my "banker's suit" (three-piece navy pinstripe). And where is my overcoat? Hm.

Maybe Saint Lucy's has a midnite mass. I've been inside that church only once. The foto above shows the Saint Lucy Chapel in Sacred Heart, with the window for the first American saint, Mother Cabrini, on the left. The foto below shows the statue of Saint Lucy and window of Saint (better known as San) Gennaro beyond.

Maybe I'll do Sacred Heart this year and Saint Lucy's next year. Or Sacred Heart of Vailsburg, just a few blocks from me, this year, and the others in future years, especially if Gaetano isn't going to the Basilica. I can walk to SHV, but don't know if it has a big midnite mass — or any at all, for that matter. No, I think I should stick to the original plan: SH, not SHV this year. Oh, jeez.

If you haven't yet made it into the Cathedral Basilica,* midnite mass would be a great time to get there, to see the place packed and hear the thunderous organ in all its glory. If you see me there, say hello. I'll be the old dude with a gray beard, exaggerating his limp.

I think this small room is just outside the Baptistry. It contains a triptych centered on the Black Madonna of Czestochowa, Poland, which also includes a picture of Pope John Paul II, who elevated the Cathedral to the status of Basilica on his Newark visit on October 4, 1995.

____________________

* In the initially-puzzling phrase "Cathedral Basilica", "Cathedral" is an adjective, meaning "containing the seat of the bishop"), and "Basilica" is the noun, meaning a "special church entitled to host major ecclesiastical events that lesser churches may not").

Squirrely New Year

My birthday was Thursday, and I used to take my birthday off from work. But I'm retired now, so was irritated that I couldn't take the day off. Then I realized that of course I can take the day off, by not working on my blogs. Instead, I headed to Wal-Mart in Harrison to use the gift cards my brother Alan sent, for birthday and Christmas (five days apart) this year and some value left over from last year. I overdid it a bit. First, I had to shovel some ice and wet leaves out of the way in two tire paths down about 75 feet of my driveway before I could even head out. Once I got to Wal-Mart, I loaded big bags of dry cat food and other heavy items into the shopping cart, then pushed the cart around that enormous store; then pushed it to the car and moved all those items into the car; then headed to the Bergen Street Pathmark to do supermarket shopping and push another shopping cart around another big store, with more heavy items, and out to my parked car; then transferred everything to the car; then, once home, unloaded the car and distributed things to various floors — in addition to all the things I ordinarily do around the house each day. That's a bit much for a 63-year-old whose routine is mostly sedentary. However, physical exertion tends to rev my engine more than knock me out, so even once I finished all this I was tired but unable to sleep soundly. So I ended up taking two days off.

In any case, I'm back now.

---

All but one of today's fotos are of the leaves of Vailsburg as they changed during autumn (which ended only today), as seen from the windows on my third floor. In some of these pix, the camera autofocused on the frame of the window and rendered the view beyond, fuzzy. I didn't know it at the time and didn't know what to do about it in any case. I'll have to check my camera's documentation to see if there is any way to tell the camera what to focus on. Someday.

This first foto shows the very start of the change of leaves from summer's green.

---

My New Year begins 12 days before most people's, and I use those days to reflect on my life thus far and contemplate my future. Yes, I do write resolutions. And no, I don't keep all of them to the letter, but I do make incremental change in the general direction I set forth.

I face a little predicament right now. For some reason unknown to me, my house was built with openings under the eaves of the top roof that open completely to the outdoors. (The floor doesn't meet the roof as it passes the floor's edge.) I didn't know that when I bought the house, because the outer edges of my third floor are walled off into storage areas, and I would still have bought the house even if I had known. Since the openings are at the level of the floor, cold air doesn't get very far. It's like those open-air freezer or refrigerator compartments in the supermarket where cold air just stays low (tho I think some of them may have a fan in the base to draw air down). Still, I have to keep the panels that block the openings to the undereave storage areas closed to minimize heat loss. It turns out there's another reason to keep those panels closed.

My predicament is that squirrels can jump to and fit thru those openings, and get into the storage areas. There, they rummage about, and I can hear them running around and scratching. I'm afraid that they might be damaging the floor, as they have already gnawed a hole thru one of the sloping panels to the ceiling, leaving sawdust on the wall beneath:

There is also apparently a narrow passage from the storage area down thru the wall of my bedroom closet (on the second floor), since I saw a gray furry critter in my bedroom once and found some snack bags chewed into. I don't want squirrels gnawing a hole thru the floor and dropping into my bedroom. The question is what to do about it.
+
Once before, a couple of years ago, I had a squirrel in the storage area that wouldn't go away, no matter how I shouted at it and pounded on the closure panels to scare it away. I ended up letting my cats into my home office on that floor and leaving the access panels open. Unfortunately, rather than scaring the squirrel off, they killed the poor little thing. I don't want to kill it. I love squirrels — outdoors. And a couple of my cats are so small that I'm afraid they might, in over-eagerness during a chase, fall out one of the holes onto the porch roof and maybe even farther. Decisions, decisions.

New topic: Like most Newarkers, I imagine (since the address was "Schoonmaker Family or Current Resident"), I got a year-end card from the "Booker Team for Newark" at 60 Park Place.

Season's Greetings

A generous heart, kind speech, and a life of service and compassion are the things which renew humanity

Happy Holidays!

[Foto of Mayor Booker]

Wishing you all the joys of the season and prosperity throughout the New Year

[facsimile signature] Cory A. Booker
Mayor, City of Newark

And I didn't send him a card!
+
I'm glad to see that this came from the Booker Team, not from the City at taxpayer expense. The Booker Team must have had a lot of money left over from the virtually uncontested mayoral election, since it was floating on a sea of (outside) money. Christmas — oh, sorry, holiday — cards are one way to use up some of that money.

I didn't get my plastic/fiberglass snowman and penguin out onto the porch yet. Is there any point in doing so now? I almost bought a wreath at the Bergen Street Pathmark, but I wanted to check if there is already a nail or hook on my front door for such a decoration. I'm disinclined to mar the surface if there isn't.
+
The snowman, which has a lite socket inside and was left here by the prior owners of my house, has an empty space in the face where there should be a plastic carrot for a nose. I have real carrots in the frij. I suppose I could size the tip of one to form a snowman nose but wonder if squirrels eat carrots. Doesn't matter. I've got about 12 carrots. If they eat one, I'll put out another.
+
I got a birdfeeder a couple of months ago, the instructions to which advise you to put it on a 3/4" dowel seven feet tall, and bury one foot of the dowel in the ground, perhaps secured by stones more than plain dirt, to keep it safe from squirrels. But the Newark Home Depot doesn't have seven foot dowels but only precut lengths of about 4 feet longest. I have to find a lumber yard or some other source for such a dowel. In the interim, I guess I could just put out a bowl of birdseed on the chaise longue on my patio. I also have some walnuts and almonds in the shell to put out for the squirrels and raccoons. Got to love the wildlife in semi-suburban Vailsburg.

Tourism Sights

I wanted to see if my TourismNewark.org website* has been found by search engines yet, so did a Google search for "Tourism Newark". One of the pages found contained references to things I had written, but there was no way to get from that page to the items listed! I sent the following email to Best of City Guide for United States @ Top10z.com:

I was taken to one of your pages by a Google search for "Tourism Newark", and find on that page 4 references to things I have written, but THEY AREN'T CLICKABLE! I don't know of what value such a listing is supposed to be to the visitor. I can see clickable links to ads, but not to the articles listed. This should definitely be fixed.

In other search results, I find that I am one of very few people even talking about tourism to Newark. AOL Travel shows 2 stars (poor) out of 5 for Newark, and very few listings of things worth seeing: 11 restaurants, NOT including Forno's, Spain, Iberia, Iberia Peninsula, or Casa Vasca; 5 bars and clubs, not including Sugar Ray's Comedy Club; 29 "sights", including several repeats and a ballet troupe ("Garden State Ballet Company") I never heard of, on Academy Street. Where have they been performing? Do we also have an opera company I don't know about? A ballet company would be a good thing to show on a tourism website. Very visual, and very appealing to the cultural tourist.
+
I found a website that bears that troupe's name, but it seems to relate only to the School affiliated with it and seems to contain no clickable link to a Ballet Company website as such. That seems odd, in that the School has a very sophisticated website, including sound. (That site announces a performance tomorrow, Thursday, of the Nutcracker in Rutherford.)
+
I'll have to check the MS Office Live Small Business website-creation program to see if sound files are supported. The New Jersey Symphony Orchestra website has short sample files ("Listen Now") you might like to check out.
+
In lite of the almost total absence of links to tourism resources for Newark, a Tourism Newark website is plainly very much needed.
+
Today's foto is of a Newark historic landmark and potential tourist site that has fallen into disrepair, Trinity & St. Philip's Episcopal Cathedral. (I have some other pix of that Cathedral and its historical plaques at the third foto gallery on my Resurgence City website; search for "Trinity".)

Tho it may not show clearly at this resolution, some paint is flaking off the steeple, and the four-faced clock on the lower level of the steeple doesn't work. Of the two sides showing here, the one on the left indicates 10 after 9 and the one on the right is missing the "big hand". The little hand is on 10. But I took this foto in early afternoon, on a New Jersey Historical Society walking tour of the architecture around Military Park. I see that on January 10th there will be a walking tour I will very much want to take:

The Peddie Memorial Church demonstrates the eclectic taste of Victorian architects. Built in the heart of downtown Newark in 1890, it contains some extraordinary examples of 19th-century American and European stained glass. Join us for a behind-the-scenes tour of the church interior, which will reveal the stunning woodwork and stone carvings. Learn the story of a spectacular Victorian treasure, listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

No reservations required for tours. Tours are free, but donations are accepted. Tours will run rain or shine and begin in the lobby of NJHS. All programs are subject to change. Please call ahead to bring a group. 973-596-8500.

The Episcopal Church, which Catholics tend to disparage as "mock Catholic", is the American member of the Anglican Communion, headed by the Church of England and its Archbishop of Canterbury. It was the church of the British ruling class during the colonial era, and then of the "WASP" elite. The first President Bush, for instance, is Episcopalian (tho the younger Bush is shown as Methodist. Hm.). Thus it should not surprise that the Episcopal Church in Newark would suffer financially from the exodus from Newark of rich WASPs. The national Episcopal Church is also hurting, from dissension produced by its very liberal stance on homosexuality and lesbianism. The Episcopal Diocese of Newark has long been among the Nation's most liberal. The Episcopalians are, for instance, the only church with an active outreach program to gay and lesbian Newarkers. Do the troubles of the Episcopal Church signal the inevitable crumbling of this physical landmark, a historic church that stood in its current place, by Military Park, when George Washington led a retreat of the Continental Army down Broad Street. Indeed, one of the historical plaques on the Church says "Washington and his army in November 1776, passed beneath the shadow of this tower". Wow.
+
Given the separation of church and state, and the dire condition of the City's finances, we can't very well expect the government to make needed repairs to this little Cathedral. But perhaps a "Newark Alliance for Tourism" (NAT, said like the short form of "Nathan") could be formed with nominal dues and occasional fundraisers to preserve our heritage and make our tourist sites maximally attractive to the international tourist trade. We've got to make distant tourists think it would be as preposterous to visit New York City without also seeing Newark as to visit Scarsdale and not also see Manhattan.
____________________

* The foto slide show is very slow to load. I may have to separate it out onto its own page and put a clickable foto that will take visitors to that slide show, and urge patience in the text if it's slow to load. Stunningly, when I went again, after uploading this post, to Google to search for "tourism newark", it came up with THIS blog entry! Jeezaloo!

A Trove for Tourists

Gaetano alerted me to a major article that The New York Times published today about the Newark Public Library's extraordinary special collections:

It is difficult to say which is more surprising: that the Newark Public Library owns prints by Picasso and Rauschenberg, a page of the Gutenberg Bible and a 1493 handwritten tome known as the Nuremberg Chronicles, or that William J. Dane, a dapper, refreshingly irreverent art scholar from New Hampshire, has been tending to this astounding collection for six decades. ***

Mr. Dane has leveraged a wispy budget to beef up the library’s collection, which includes 23,000 prints, 5,000 posters and 1,000 autographs — think Mozart, Thomas Paine, Winston Churchill and Eleanor Roosevelt.

On November 14th and 15th, I showed many fotos of a display, in two venues, of some of the Library's prints collection. That exhibition is still running, until January 12th.
+
The Times article speaks of plans to expand the Library:

Mr. Dane cannot say when he might retire, but he hopes to stay long enough to see the completion of a proposed $100 million expansion, which would double the library’s shelf space and provide more opportunities for exhibitions. After all, what good is owning a Dürer etching or an Escher woodcut if it is seen only by a few librarians and academics?

Precisely. Moreover, if the Library can display a lot more of its collection, it can attract more tourists to Newark, who will at once both bring money into the city and take away a drastically better view of Newark than most people now have. I mentioned that I had taken the domain name TourismNewark.org thru Microsoft Office Live Small Business, and reserved but not yet created a website at that address. Tonite I tried to work within the website design tools offered by Microsoft, but didn't get very far, and was not able to do what I intended to do with such a site. But there are good features.
+
I had initially intended to create a foto-montage, say five little fotos across by five deep, of Newark sights, day and nite, in thumbnails that could be expanded on clicking. I have tons of fotos to use for such a montage, but hadn't decided which were most important to show. Then I discovered that the MS webpage-creation software allows a slide-show, so I created a slide show. It was supposed to be the maximum, 50 pix, but somehow the upload went awry and a few fotos were left out. I went back to try to edit the slide show but don't see how to do that!
+
If you have suggestions as to what you think would most interest potential tourists, let me have your feedback. You can check the start I have made on a Tourism Newark website, tell me of any category of attraction I need to add, and suggest what sights belong under what category. I also discovered that the slide show wasn't displaying properly, but the captions and fotos were out-of-sync. I hope that was a temporary glitch but won't know until I check at various times, or hear from others. If you have comments or suggestions to make, please send them to ResurgenceCity@aol.com, which I check every day. I don't yet check the Tourism Newark mailbox regularly.
+
Today's foto is of one of the sights that history-minded tourists might want to check out, the Civil War Monument in Fairmount Cemetery. There's supposed to be a better view of it in the slide show, but I don't know if it's there or, if not, how long it will take me to figure out how to add it.

From Public Housing to Market Rate Condos

Brick Towers, the housing project where Cory Booker lived before becoming mayor, is being demolished. A Star-Ledger article from December 12th that Gaetano found describes what will take its place:

Uni-Penn has partnered with the housing authority to build 150 units of mixed income [housing] with retail on the ground floor in one structure and 50 condominiums. Another 80 rental units will be built on Montgomery Street. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development provided a $12 million grant for demolition.

Today's demolition is part of a major effort of the authority to remake its portfolio. Last month, the authority announced that it was tearing down the 502-unit Baxter Terrace because it was obsolete, located in a high-crime and high-poverty area and would cost too much to repair.

The authority also told residents of Felix Fuld last night that the 285 unit complex on Muhammad Ali Avenue would also be demolished. Better known as "Little Bricks" the complex suffers from the same high crime and high poverty as Baxter Terrace. Authority officials said it would cost $41 million to make the complex viable.

I have no idea where the Baxter Terrace nor Felix Fuld project is. I did see Brick Towers, however, and showed a foto here May 15, 2006. By the way, "condominium" is not, as some people think, a type of structure (townhouse or multi-story apartment) but a form of ownership. So I don't know whether the 50 condos will take the form of townhouses.
+
Today's foto show one of the few areas of Newark in which solid masonry townhouses were built in the olden days, James Street, Downtown. This is the type of housing (much of it clad in stone and called "brownstones", tho even brickfront buildings are often called that) that jams entire districts of Manhattan, and makes possible the dense population that supports urban amenities like restaurants, boutiques, and clubs. I will be interested to see what form the replacement for Brick Towers takes.

St. Stephan's at Nite

On September 9th, I showed several daytime pictures of the church that is iconic of the Ironbound, St. Stephan's United Church of Christ at the Five Corners. This "Church Day" at Newark USA, I present two nitetime views. This first was taken October 2nd.

This next is from November 14th, when Christmas lites were up.

I didn't find a website for St. Stephan's last September, and don't find one now. What I do find, however, is two referrals to that discussion in this fotoblog. The more people read this blog, the easier it is for other people to find it because the higher ranked will be the particular entries in this blog that relate to things they are interested in.

Repaving Smith Street, Part II

[Like Monday's, this is a post filled with pix of heavy machinery remaking a bit of Newark. If you are not a little kid at heart (think Bob the Builder but American, not British), or a construction worker in office-worker clothing, you may want to skip today's entry and come back tomorrow. It is also extremely long. I won't state a figure in words lest it scare every single visitor away, but I will give the number of fotos: 30. It's OK with me if you just look at the pictures, because I am as much a fotografer now as writer.]

---

When I was reconnoitering places from which to take pix for today's fotoblog entry, I saw something I didn't know had occurred: a house on the southern end of my (very long) block had been seriously damaged by fire.

I hadn't been aware of a fire in my area, so wonder when it happened, and whether I was home when the firemen battled the blaze.

---

This entry caused me enormous organizational problems, because I needed to consider how to integrate so many fotos with text. Ordinarily, I start with a theme, and choose fotos to illustrate that theme. But here, there is both a theme (the repaving project) and a sequence in which I took the many pictures I made that day (fewer than half of which I show here). Each of the fotos I use has its own purpose, and helps to make specific points that I felt I needed to discuss. To go thematic, I would have to use pix from scattered points in the sequence, which became confusing very fast. I only recently figured out how to keep track, during the drafting process, of which pix I have already used in a given blog entry. I created a "Used" subdirectory below my "Future" (blogpix) directory, and move each foto to the Used directory as I assign it a place in the draft. But then I saw I was going to have 30 pix for this entry, and they would not, thematically, retain the sequence in which I took them. How was I going to name the fotos as to be able to find the right one for the point in the text at which I needed it? And if I were to use a foto to illustrate one point, but there are other points it raises, I risk losing those further points in sticking to the theme of the particular place in the text into which I place it, or disrupting the thematic flow of the text to discuss those other points.

---

Often, the City tears down at least abandoned houses that are destroyed by fire, in order that they not be an eyesore — or gathering place for squatters, or drug addicts — that drags the neighborhood down. In that this house is only partially destroyed, perhaps the City, at the owner's insistence, has held off from ordering demolition. It may be possible for the owner to sell the current structure to a developer who might build two new houses on one wide plot, as was done in two other places in the immediate vicinity. Who knows? The developer might even turn over one of the new structures to the owner of the present, partly burned house as part of the transaction.

---

I had to create two different text drafts, one thematic, one sequential, and integrate them. Not easy. I also had to rename, sequentially, all fotos that I had earlier named thematically. If this blog entry doesn't seem to hang together thematically, you now know why. If you can, please just enjoy the pix and the descriptions by each. If the theme doesn't hold together, that's the approach that had to be sacrificed, if for no other reason than that the sequence of fotos shows the order in which I took them in walking about, as allowed me to remember events and the thoughts they prompted, more clearly. This organizational/reorganizational problem delayed this blog entry by three days. I had other topics I might have used in the interim, but not energy enuf to create brief entries as fill-in, and decided that rather than put something up just to have an-entry-a-day, I would simply not put up anything until I was ready. This is not, after all,"Newark USA Daily", and updating it every day is not my "job". If I were paid (well) to do it, I would put up an-entry-a-day, with one or more pictures, without fail. But it's not my job and I'm not paid, so I get to things when I get to them. When you reach my age, 63 a week from now, there's only one "dead"line that matters. And we'll all meet it. (Teehee.)
+
When I finished with Monday's entry to this fotoblog, the next day's lite was advancing, and I chanced to see, again, posters on the trees along my street, as suggested that the second stage of the repaving of my block was going to take place later that day. I got to sleep at my customary preposterous hour (around 7am; and to think that I had, for a while, been doing so well at resetting my sleep cycle earlier!), and was afraid the (re)pavers would be at work early in the day, so I wouldn't get much sleep, since I wanted to see and fotograf the process. Fortunately, they apparently did at least two blocks today, my very long block (over 1,000 feet), and the next one north. They may have done as far as to South Orange Avenue, two further blocks and over a quarter mile away. In any case, they didn't get to my area early.
+
I was wakened shortly before 1pm by what I thought was one of those dratted, oversensitive car alarms that are constantly going off for no reason (and which the City must ban). But this was a weird one, with a siren of sorts and other strange noises. It would go off for half a minute or more, then turn off. (Hm. "Go off" has two opposed meanings, one to start, the other to stop. It's sort of a reverse linguistic pair to "flammable" and "inflammable", which look opposed but mean the same thing.) Then there would be a short delay before it started again. I looked out my bedroom window and saw that the owner of one car had not heeded the warning that an emergency condition rendered the entire block a Towaway Zone, and the repavers were courteously trying to alert the owner to come out and move his/her car. This went on repeatedly over a period of a quarter hour or more, which ensured that I would not go back to sleep but was awake after less than 6 hours' sleep.
+
I peered out the window to see if there were any sign of paving equipment, but saw none. Still, there was that pesky car in the way. The owner did not come out to move it. So-o-o-o ...

I think I saw that car, which I believe is ordinarily driven by a heavyset woman who has trouble walking, back in the driveway of the pink house well after dark tonite. I hope the fees weren't severe, because a handicapped woman might have had very good reasons for not moving her car.

It's not as tho no warning was given. If you should see a line of posters telling you that the next day no one may park on your block, pay attention.

Since stripping the pavement away had taken three passes of the milling machine, I figured that even if I missed the first run of the paver, I could catch the second or third. The paver actually took only two passes to lay down the new surface. As I stepped out onto my porch, which is 16 steps up from the curb (my house is on a slope, above traffic), I looked to the left and saw this. All the vehicles you can see are part of the repaving project, since other vehicles were banned.

The project involved four types of machine: a paver; dump trucks to feed the paver; an oil(?) tanker truck, the purpose of which was not clear to me, since I didn't see it used to oil the surface or do anything else; and what we used to call "steam"rollers, a big one (daddy?) and little one (baby). I suppose that in Atlantic City they could be called High Roller and Low Roller, but this is Newark. Aside from the vehicles plainly required for the paving project, the mechanical streetsweeper was also involved. Ordinarily it cleans only the east side of the street on Tuesdays, but today it did more.

The lite was so bad today, especially as late as it was when the paving machine got to my house, that I felt I had to take more than one picture of a lot of things, one with flash, one without, just to be sure of getting one usable picture. The fotos of the first phase of this repaving project were also taken on a cloudy day.
+
It's not that I expected flash to illuminate machinery 50 feet from the camera but rather that I needed visually to stop moving objects by quickening the shutter speed. Sometimes that worked. Sometimes it made the foto unusably dark. In a few instances, it hilited the reflective stripes on a worker's clothing, while leaving everything else dark! But you cannot know these things until you experiment.
+
I have always been a little annoyed by those scenes in movies in which a fotografer with an auto-advance winder in his camera takes foto after foto after foto in quick succession, of something that hasn't moved, either at all, or very far. I thought then and think now that such profligately needless duplication is obscenely wasteful in a world of want. In the digital age, however, there is no film nor energy for film-processing to waste if you take two pix of the same subject with two settings, one with and the other without flash. In time, I hope to learn, with confidence, what does and does not work, as not, thereafter, to need to take protection shots. But this was a one-time event that might not be repeated for many years, so I played safe.
+
I sorted out all the extraneous pix before I even started to post fotos to today's blog entry. Fortunately, my HP notebook computer with an AMD Athlon chip is fast. My Dell desktop, with a Pentium 4, is intolerably SLO-O-O-O-O-W. It can take 3 minutes to process one foto on the Dell, against 20 seconds on my HP. I recommend you never buy Dell unless you don't need a fast machine. (I worked, as word processor, for the attorneys for AMD when they were sued by Intel for having stolen proprietary information in developing their own core processors, but AMD was legally unassailable in that they produced a better chip than the Intel chip they had been hired to produce for Intel when Intel's own plants couldn't handle Intel's order load.)
+
Straight ahead (oh, sorry; that should be "directly" ahead; I'm gay, and we prefer not to write "straight" too often) was this view, of a dumptruck with a cover over its contents on a mechanical retractor that, like the device on a convertible car, moves the top out of the way when the driver so decides.

That's "my yew" to the left and an English-ivy-covered evergreen to the right of my stairs. I always have something green outside my windows. I walked down the steps and across the street to get a different perspective on the other dumptrucks lining up all the way south to 18th Avenue.

I then walked to 18th Avenue to see if I could get a long view of all the many pieces of equipment arrayed on my block. As I got to the corner, yet another dumptruck was backing up into waiting position. Smith Street is a one-way street, south. The repaving project need not, I suppose, have kept that same direction, but did. Oddly, rather than driving down Silver Street, at the north end of my block, and driving forward, to the south, the trucks went to 18th Avenue and backed up. I don't know why.

This is the view from 18th Avenue. All of the trucks are part of the repaving project. I suspect this is the most traffic this block has ever had. Ordinarily, if we get 50 cars an hour, especially at nite, that's a traffic jam.

Once they parked, the drivers got out to stretch their legs and socialize. I asked one driver who had just come out of his cab, what was in the dump truck. "Asphalt." "New or recycled?" "New." That sounded wasteful, since only fifteen days before, the city's contractor, Rockborn (which seems not to have a website; I wanted to tell them about these two blog entries and ask for corrections of anything I got wrong), had ripped up the entire block's asphalt and carted it away. Used asphalt can be recycled, so why wouldn't that very pavement have been recycled back onto the street from which it was taken?
+
There were a lot of dumptrucks on hand, their loads covered against the weather. When the trucks were parked, most (all?) continued to run their engines, as tho they contained an electric heater to keep the asphalt from hardening, tho I don't see how that could have been, unless these dumptrucks were very specially configured.
+
I encountered another driver who had just descended from the cab, and asked him if his truck contained new or recycled asphalt. His answer was different: both. I asked the percentage of recycled material. He didn't know, so asked the next trucker who pulled alongside, someone he knew well. That driver said that they are permitted to use up to 15% of recycled asphalt. I asked, why not more? He speculated that perhaps it didn't compáct as well as new, but didn't know for sure. When he said "compáct", I thought, "So there's a steamroller too." But I had, months ago, checked whether there was still such a thing as a "steam shovel" or "steamroller", so asked if these things are still called "steamrollers". The first driver said they're just called "rollers" now. (I had found that "power shovel" was the term for "steam shovel" now, and I thought "power roller" was the equivalent of "steamroller", tho I see "road roller" in Wikipedia now.) I said they were called "steamrollers" when I was a child. He smiled broadly and said I was dating myself.
+
I said that just over two weeks had passed since the old pavement was stripped away, and asked if he knew why there was such a delay between stripping of old pavement and laying of new. He did not.
+
He did, however, say that I could rollerskate on my block tonite (because the ruf surface of the past two weeks would be smoothly paved away by day's end). Alas, I cannot rollerskate anymore, due to knee surgeries. But I do, somewhere, still have a pair of black, boot rollerskates. I also have a bicycle my brother Alan gave me when he moved West that I also cannot use. Hm. Maybe I should give them away to a community organization for kids or teens. Suggestions? This would be a good time to give, no?
+
I then walked back north on Smith Street, past my house, to where a dump truck was feeding the hopper of the paving machine. In this next foto, you can see the truck-paver combo and the roller beyond.

The paver itself moves at a pretty good clip, it seemed to me, about as fast as an energetic person walks. Asphalt is pulled by a mechanism I saw only briefly from above but which disappeared beneath closing sides of the hopper before I could take a picture. The mechanism is like a conveyor belt with long, sideways ridges at intervals. Picture a waterwheel at an old mill along a stream, only sideways. This picture shows the asphalt falling into place and being leveled and smoothed by the paver. Some steam or smoke rises from the hot mix. I guess it is indeed hot in the truck, because I don't think there is enuf time that the mix is in the paving machine for it to be heated there.

Moreover, someone had to figure out what depth of asphalt to put around manholes and storm-drain grates, which seemed lower than the 4- or 5-inch height elsewhere. The problems I saw outside Saint Antoninus from the repaving of South Orange Avenue, with a big dip in the pavement at a manhole, did not occur on my block.
+
How many trucks were needed? You can see a lot from the pictures in this blog entry, but getting an exact number was between hard and impossible. In any event, someone had to do calculations of how much material would be required to lay down a 4- or 5-inch layer of asphalt the entire width of the street for the entire length to be paved today. Teachers! How about creating a math problem for your kids, to do the same calculation to show the real-world applications and importance of even simple arithmetic? How much asphalt, in cubic feet, do you need to pave 1,500 feet of a road 20 feet wide to a depth of 4 inches, minus X number of manholes (of N diameter) and X1 number of storm drain grates N1 by n in size)? How many dumptrucks do you need to employ to provide that much asphalt? If there is a time sensitivity beyond which asphalt in a truck will solidify, how many trucks do you have to have on hand during each hour of the paving process? (Give speed of paver in miles per hour, but length to be paved in feet.) Show your work. Extra credit: if there is no heating element in the dumptrucks to keep the asphalt soft, how much money could the contractor and thus the City of Newark save by having the truck drivers turn off their engine for the entire time they are waiting to dump their load into the paver? Give fuel-consumption figures in minutes of idle, diesel price per gallon. Extra-extra credit: how much pollution does an idling dumptruck pour into the atmosphere? Teachers could go further, if they wanted to do the research necessary to provide data from which kids could make computations. For instance, "Diesel exhaust consists of __% carbon dioxide, __% carbon monoxide, __% SumpinElse, __% SumpinElseStill, and __% water vapor. How much greenhouse gas does an idling dump truck produce in 15 minutes? (That would require kids to know what is and is not a greenhouse gas.) "If the maximum permitted recycled asphalt component of the new paving material is 15%, how many pounds of recycled material per truck is permissible?" Such exercises in real-world computations would show kids how complex the interactions among everyday objects and behaviors on the one side, and larger issues of the environment and resource depletion on the other, are, and how experts try to calculate them. So important are such real-world examples, indeed, that I think educators should schedule field trips to repaving sites and construction sites to make kids think about all the complex calculations that are involved in figuring out how much asphalt is needed for a paving project, or structural steel and rebar (or wood) and concrete are needed for a construction project. Let the kids talk to the architect or engineer, who can give them some raw data they can handle (bearing strength of a given unit of steel or reinforced concrete, times height of a structure, per floor; etc.), as could bring home to them how everything around us depends on math, from recipes, to bridges, to the load-bearing capacity of the ceiling between them and the classroom above their heads.
+
There are doubtless many kids who think they don't need to know math or science or much of anything else "academic" or "college prep" in order to function in the kinds of jobs they expect to get, and indeed may really want, once they get out of school, things like truck driver and truck dispatcher. If you show them that working for a trucking or construction company isn't necessarily mindless but may require them to use their brain and know math, they may pay more attention in class.
+
In any case, someone, be s/he in the employ of the prime contractor for this project (Rockborn?) or a subcontractor, did have to do such calculations, and somebody else had to find the equipment and do the scheduling for all those vehicles and drivers. I saw IDs on various trucks/pieces of equipment for various companies (I took fotos, not notes): Group Contracting (Cedar Grove), Dosch King Company, Inc. (Whippany), DVIS (Hoboken), and BTO Enterprises (Belleville). Someone had to contact all these companies, and perhaps others; draw up the contracts; do the scheduling; and get every truck and every load to the right place at the right time.
+
This next picture shows the asphalt mix pouring from the dumptruck into the hopper of the Caterpillar AP-1055B paver. Within minutes what the dumptruck dumps is dropped onto the street and smoothed by the paver. The 1055B is an older model. The newer model is called 1055D. Used 1055B's can sell for over $300,000. I was unable to find out what a new one costs, because the Caterpillar website doesn't seem to include either pavers or rollers in the categories of equipment you can price online.

Two gents attended the paver in close proximity, one riding on an extension off the back and one alongside, who has a bucket with what appears to be a stream of water pouring into it. I don't know what he is supposed to do with that, but there is apparently a hook built onto the paver for a bucket to hang from, as well as a hook for a shovel to hang from.

This next picture shows the paver approaching a manhole cover. I was very concerned about this because I have had a lot of trouble with tires. My car is low to the ground and has only 15" tires, which do not afford very good protection against sharp depressions in pavement. So I was very concerned that the manholes might be much below the level of new pavement, as one outside Saint Antoninus on South Orange Avenue was left after that street's repaving some months ago. You can see here that the depth of asphalt as it comes out from the paver is greater than the height of the manhole cover. Note that on Smith Street, the paver gets the height just about right, but it puts asphalt on top of the manhole cover that a human laborer then has to scoop off with a shovel while it is still hot.

But (a) a steamroller (yes, I am willfully defying the current terminology! I'm a rebel!) partially compresses the laid-down asphalt that may initially have been too high, (b) a guy with a shovel moves the asphalt that falls on the manhole cover, and (c) another guy, with a rake, smooths things down for either the daddy roller or baby roller to crush into place later.

You can see on the right of that picture some downward-pointing spouts that are at the rear of what looks to be an oil truck. I didn't see that truck actually spread oil across the new pavement, but I did see thin lines of what appeared to be oil on the rough subsurface before the paver reached that area, so maybe the oil is applied beneath the new asphalt. I don't, however, really know.

In the picture below, you can see the paver awaiting the next dump truck. It has to stop its forward progress until refilled, and the sides, which are usually perpendicular to the road surface, close up into a higher angle to dump what remains in the hopper down from the sides to the conveyor mechanism to be laid onto the roadway. Whereas the stripping of old pavement started on my side of the street (near), the actual repaving started on the far side. And the paver was adjusted to pave exactly the right width for two passes, one on each side of the street, meeting perfectly, with no gap and no overlapping. I was impressed, by both the precision of the paver and by the precision of the original workcrews who laid out my street to have a uniform width curb-to-curb. We have been blessed, thru most of our history, to have very good workers at all levels of skill to create the country we live in. The rich who have never done physical labor in their lives do not appreciate that without these "unskilled laborers", they couldn't get from Point A to Point B. Nor could they make a phone call without the guys who set the telephone poles and strung the wires, aboveground or below. Nor could they go to the bathroom or wash their hands without the sewer and water lines these 'nobodies' laid beneath our streets. The rich think they are the be-all and end-all, and everybody else is useless, but the rich couldn't do a damned thing if it weren't for the rest of us who created and maintain the infrastructure without which they would have to have personal generators and latrines. The First World was built by LABOR, not by capital. Capital merely paid Labor. Capital would never dirty its hands to lay pipe or string wire. But without those pipes and wires, all the world is the Third World.

The roller shown here, the Caterpillar CB-534D, is called a "compactor" on the Caterpillar website. Oh, good. We didn't have enuf terms, so needed another.
This next foto shows a manual laborer with a rake (yes, rake, not shovel; and he's wearing a nite vest with reflective areas that my flash hilites in this foto taken very late in the day) working with the 'compactor' to make a smooth seam between another of the things in the roadway that repavers must work around, a stormdrain grate.

Herebelow the man with the rake is followed closely by the 'compactor'.

This next foto shows how strong the stormdrain grate is, in that it survived being rolled over by a 'compactor'.

In addition to the big-daddy (steam)roller/compactor, there was this adorable little baby compactor.

You can see again some steam or smoke rising from the resurfacing. There is a LOT of steam/smoke, some of it so filled with smells that you just know it's got to have components people should not breathe at high concentration. Yet these workers aren't wearing gas masks, or even facemasks of any type to keep out even particulate pollution. Is that safe?
+
In the next foto, the driver is squirting something from a bottle into the bottom of his truck after he dumped the contents into the paver's hopper. I don't know what it is nor exactly what it's supposed to accomplish. There are two trucks there, near my house, cleaning up after dumping their load.

The fuzzy picture below, taken near the end of the day, shows a guy opening a hydrant to fill his bucket with water. I don't know what the water is used for.

In this next picture, you can see that some drivers raised the dump-part of the truck to the highest extension to leave on the target street as much of the asphalt they brought, as possible. And yes, the house in the back, left, really is pink.

The driver then walked to the back of the truck and used a little scraper to knock some of the asphalt clinging to the truck instead onto the roadway.

For some reason, the paver moved forward beyond the edge of new material at one point, and this guy with a rake smoothed things out in advance of the roller. I don't know why.

The project ran until at least 5:10pm, well after the fall of darkness, but the compactors rolled on, guided by headlites.

In fact, Big Daddy roller made a brief daylite appearance the following day.

As you can see, repaving a street is a very complicated operation managed brilliantly by people who, for the most part, probably do not have a college education. But they did an absolutely brilliant job on Smith Street. Well done, gentlemen. Bravo.