Bike Tour, Astounding Google-Maps Feature

Gaetano alerted me to a recreational bicycle event in Newark today that, in itself, is great. But it was designed to promote a despicable event which Newark should no way participate in, much less promote. A frequent reader sent me a note and the pix I use today to illustrate that event.

On June 28th about a hundred riders converged on Newark to tour the city with pedal power. The tour was escorted by the NPD, with financial support from the Reagan family of Montclair. Volunteers from the Major Taylor Bike Club led the ride on Saturday and helped block off streets. The Major Taylor club isn't a Newark biking club per se, but they do a lot in Newark.

We met in front of City Hall, rode through the Ironbound including Ferry Street, then Bloomfield Ave, then Branch Brook Park, then South Orange Ave, then Bergen Street, then Chancellor Ave and Elizabeth Ave in Weequahic.

This first foto shows the starting point, in front of City Hall. One participant is all jazzed up.

I might have participated in that tour except that, since the two separate incidents that ravaged my knees, I don't think I can ride a bicycle, because I cannot straighten my right leg against resistance. I guess I should check that premise, and if it is correct, sell or give away my bike. It's in the basement, with flat tires, but I can reinflate them with the compressor that plugs into my car's cigaret lighter. If it turns out I actually can ride a bike, I should get a car mount and take my bike hither and yon on my foto expeditions. ("Ride" a bike should actually be "drive", because the "rider" supplies the motive power. Conversely, the "driver" of a car does not provide the motive power, so should be called something else. In Romance languages, one "leads" or "conducts" a car.)
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The good part of today's event was described in a Star-Ledger article before its start. This reminds me of the origins of the five-boro New York Marathon, which was suggested by a guy I worked with, George Spitz. George was a runner. He was also a proofreader in a law firm I worked in as a word processor. I'm pretty sure it was Cahill Gordon & Reindel in Downtown Manhattan, where Floyd Abrams, frequent media guest on First Amendment issues, was a partner. I'm not sure I ever saw Abrams, tho, because George and I worked evening or graveyard shifts. In any case, this may turn out to be the first of many recreational bicycle tours of Newark.

Here, bicyclists climb the slope up Ferry Street from Newark Penn Station to the Second Reformed Dutch Church at McWhorter Street.

Altho the Star-Ledger headline proclaims, "Newark kicks off Brick City bike tour", that may not be its formal name, if indeed this first event had a formal name. But perhaps that should be its formal name, and the event should repeat by that name every year from now until, as legal documents granting perpetual rights say, "the end of the world." Yes, some legal documents really do say that. Here, the S-L addresses the good part of today's doings,

a non-competitive bike tour of the city today at 9 a.m.

The ride, which is free and open to all, includes a 5-mile and a 15-mile "Family Fun Ride," as well as a 25-mile ride for skilled cyclists. Rides begin on Broad Street in front of City Hall and end with a health fair, live entertainment and food at the John F. Kennedy Recreation Center, 211 West Kinney St.

The first 100 children and 100 adults to register will receive a free bike helmet. The first 500 registrants also will get a free T-shirt. Rest stops, food, and beverages, and full police escort will be provided along the route ... .

Bicyclists pass the J. Massey Rhind statue of Washington at the southeast corner of Washington Park. That statue is shown at the head of the Wikipedia article about that sculptor.

The bad part is mentioned in the same article:

The City of Newark is launching "Team Newark," a city bicycle team that will compete in next year's national Race Across America.

The Team Newark website trivializes the appalling arduousness of the Race Across America:

Created in 1982, the Race Across America (RAAM) is now the longest running ultra-distance bicycle endurance competition in the world. This is not a stage race like the Tour de France, where each day a set distance is covered. In RAAM the gun fires somewhere on the West Coast (Oceanside, CA in 2006) and the finishing line is over 3000 miles away, on the other side of the continent.

Let's make clearer what that means. Wikipedia says (emphasis supplied):

the clock runs continuously from start to finish. The winner of the race usually finishes in eight to nine days, after riding approximately 22 hours per day through the varied terrain of the US [including mountains and deserts]. Each racer has a crew that follows in one or more vehicles to provide food, water, and other supplies. [What about showers???] A crew vehicle fitted with flashing lights is required to follow closely behind the rider at all times to ensure they are visible.

Having to ride continuously for days with little to no sleep places tremendous strain on RAAM's participants. As many as 50% of solo participants drop out of the race due to exhaustion or for medical reasons. The race takes place on open public roads, forcing its participants to deal with traffic. Since 1982, there [have been] two fatalities in the race.

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Here, Newark bikers take time out at a refreshment tent at the Boylan Recreation Center on South Orange Avenue, Vailsburg. The black gent in the middle is wearing a white Team Newark teeshirt.

My correspondent says of this part of the tour:

We went up SO Ave and then down SO Ave. I didn't like the backtracking.

That makes no sense to me. They could have gone up (that is, west on) SOA (the main east-west drag of Vailsburg), then south on Sandford Avenue (the main north-south drag of western Vailsburg) to 18th Avenue (the western corner of my super-long block) and back east on 18th Avenue, thru a corner of Irvington and then past West Side Park to Springfield Avenue. Springfield intersects Bergen Street at the Applebee's, so the cyclists need merely have made a right there to head down to Weequahic.

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How does any of that square with the stated goals of Team Newark (emphasis supplied):

Raising funds while having fun.
Raising health awareness through actions.
Building community through personal responsibility.
Building strong hearts, minds, and spirits, through inspiration.
In the hearts of healthy individuals lie the seeds for healthy communities.

What, tho, lies in the minds of people egged on to insanely self-destructive, extreme behavior?
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There are many stupid people who can be influenced to do things that are hugely destructive to them, thru the infamous phenomenon of "peer pressure". Team Newark is creating a peer group that will egg people on to potentially catastrophic dangerous behavior. I regard the Race Across America as a criminal enterprise that should be out-and-out forbidden by law. Its organizers, and the teams created to participate in it, are equivalent to the slime who notoriously have gathered in mobs on the sidewalks opposite people standing on ledges of high buildings and chanted, "Jump! Jump! Jump! Jump!"
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If the United States cannot have a civilized long-distance bicycle race like the Tour de France, it should have NONE. Newark should not in any way encourage the kind of extreme behavior that the Race Across America incites. What next? A Team Newark to emulate the stunts in Jackass movies? How about encouraging kids to lie down on the yellow stripe in the middle of highways, as has actually happened, and actually killed stupid teens. Young people are easily influenced to do incredibly stupid things, some of which might truly kill them. The City of Newark should in no case participate in the encouragement of madness.

This last foto today shows riders at the last stop of the day, the JFK Recreation Center on Kinney Street in the Central Ward. The guy with the blue Team Newark shirt was one of the organizers.

The Star-Ledger story says:

"The Bicycle Tour will restore the history of cycling back to its historic site, Newark, and will also propel our city to become environmentally-conscious and family-fit, leading the race in America for healthy communities," said Recreation Manager Zaid Braswell[.]

Some people may be surprised to learn that Newark was very big in American biking:

"In the 1920s," wrote Peter Nye, author of "hearts of Lions: The Story of American Bicycle Racing" and historian of the U. S. Bicycling Hall of Fame, "Newark was to bicycle racing what the Yankee Stadium is to baseball." Bicycle racers, wrote Charles Cummings, Newark Historian (in New Jersey Monthly, Oct. 2003) "from all over the nation and around the globe made the pilgrimage to the Newark Velodrome." The Newark Velodrome, of course, was the center of Newark bicycle racing. It was located at 701-711 South Orange Avenue, between Devine Street and Munn Avenue.

The creators of the Prudential Center didn't forget that history. I showed here January 11th a foto of a race underway in the Newark Velodrome, in my part of town, Vailsburg. (The second foto there, of a sign showing a caption, may not look like a foto, since the font of the sign is the same as that of this blog, except larger in that picture.)
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There apparently no longer is a Devine Street. Mapquest suggests that 701 SOA would be on the north side of SOA opposite Vailsburg Park. I then went to Google maps to make sure of that and was ASTONISHED to find what I thought must be a new feature: a panoramic view of that location in fotos! Check it out. A foto will appear in a box superimposed on the map, with a "Street view" hyperlink. Click on it, and you will see a foto of that location. Place your cursor somewhere in the picture and drag, and the vantage point of the foto moves, to show you the entire area around. This truly amazed me. It is the most astonishing thing I have seen in a long time, if not the single most astonishing thing I have ever seen on the Internet. I feel like one of the "natives" in the Bob Hope-Bing Crosby classic comedy, the Road to Zanzibar, or some such comic movie of the Forties, astonished by a flame magically popping out of a cigaret lighter.
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OK, the fotos are not completely up-to-date. The construction of a new school has started in what is, in the foto, an enormous vacant lot. The far end of that lot is where the burned-out office building that long blited the entrance to Vailsburg just west of the overpass carrying the Garden State Parkway used to stand. (To see what used to be there, click on the last foto in the Newarkology tour of South Orange Avenue.) Zounds! That a company based in Mountain View, California (where my brother Brian lived for a while, decades ago) would have a panorama of this part of Newark, NJ, on the opposite side of an entire continent, is astonishing to me. Why wasn't I informed?
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I had to experiment. I plugged in "edison place and mulberry street", the location of the Prudential Center, and found a 360° panorama of the area during the construction of the Arena! There also appeared an "Explore this area" option, where, oddly enuf, I found something I was looking for earlier, some info about the Newark Arts and Music Festival at Halsey Village. I didn't know if it has already been held (it occurred on the same weekend as the Portugal Day street festival last year) or was yet to be held, for a second year, in that the first event, last year, was only sparsely attended. The maps that popped up, created by "Sebastian", were uploaded "May 14" and updated "Jun 4" — no year, so presumably 2008. But a regular Google Web search turned up nothing for 2008. Anyone??
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I then plugged in my own address, on a quiet side street in an out-of-the-way semi-suburban area, and, lo and behold, a "Street view" foto did come up. The street address was off a bit, but I recognized houses up the street. So I plugged in a number 30 higher than my actual house number and, jeez, a street view of my house did come up! Un-f(asterisk)ing believable!
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I thought I was going to have to venture out with my videocamera to create panoramic videos of key parts of Newark for my TourismNewark.org website, like those that Newark, England has put onto its website. Now, however, all I have to do is plug in the specifications for Google Maps' "Street view" panoramas (e.g., Broad and Green Streets, the City Hall area), and Google will supply not just a panorama for that immediate area but also all kinds of additional information, including fotos and even videos, for many Newark sights in the vicinity. If you click on one of the fotos shown to the left of such a "Street view" panorama, another window may pop up with another panorama. Unbelievably fabulous. (Or, in that I am sometimes inclined to lapse into (my little bit of) French or Spanish: "Incroyablement fabuleux!" or "Increíblemente fabuloso!")
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I love it when other people do some of my work. It almost never happens. Were I to win the lottery, I would hire a LOT of help, in all kinds of areas of life. When I was a child, people hired "help" (with the housework, with a business, with whatever) at a reasonable price, and got a lot more done with a lot less stress. Today, in our supposedly enlitened but actually benited age, everybody has to do everything himself/herself. We are overworked and overstressed, and our houses and other areas of life are a mess. What ever happened to that fundamental principle of civilization, "division of labor"?) Today, however, somebody did my fotografy for me, and it turns out that Google Maps is going to do my TourismNewark panoramic-foto work — and more — for me too, well into the future. Terrific.

June-July Art Shows, Part I

The most prominent piece in this wide view of the cWOW reception is the untitled sculpture by Kevin Sampson and Faquan Williams ($5,500).

On June 12th I attended two opening receptions for art shows, one in Newark and the other in South Orange, a near suburb adjoining my part of town, Vailsburg. Two days later, there was another opening, at Gallery Aferro. Today, I discuss the show that closes soonest, July 10th. I'll show the others over the course of the next few days, interspersed with other matters. I don't want to over-art visitors to this blog.

This other sculpture by Kevin Sampson and Faquan Williams is "Four Dead in Ohio", $4,500.

The first reception was at City Without Walls, "An Urban Gallery for Emerging Art", which abbreviates its name distinctively/oddly as "cWOW". The show was "ArtReach XVI", the culmination of a collaboration between local artists and high school kids. I gave the text of a press release about this program here June 12th, so won't repeat it here. I showed a few pix from the first two receptions the next day but was too pressed to show more at the time. Some of the artworks I show here today are by the mentors, others by the students, and some by the two working together.

Here, student Jesús Rosario and Montclair artist Marco Muñoz pose by their collaboration, It Don't Mean a Thing if it ain't got that String Theory (silver gelatin prints and wall drawing, POR: Price On Request). The wall drawing is of a "crazy ladder" that Marco likes to create for little kids, comprising a very tall ladder on the right wall and a loop-the-loop slide on the far wall. I told him I don't think the physics would work.

The object in the foreground above, by student Felipe Londono, plays music, as tho a loudspeaker. Titled Westinghouse Londonophone ($800), it is apparently assembled from found objects retrieved from the demolition of the Westinghouse Building. In the background appear two fotos by his mentor, Matt Gosser.

The foto above, Abstract with Vents ($300), by Matt Gosser, shows the rescued air vent in its setting.

I am not clear as to what exactly the grouping shown above is, because it looks like a single group in two parts, floor and wall, yet there are two descriptions in the flyer. I'll show both: "Kate Dowd, Treads, 12 x 18 each inches [sic], 2008, $3000" and "Lanay Thomas, Glass Etcetera, mixed media, dimensions variable, 2008, $1200".

These two works to the right of the piece(s) above are both by Ibou Ndoye and Alexander Grevich: From the Window and Bad Neighbor, both ink and oil paint on glass window, and $750 apiece.

This foto, of people enjoying the reception, shows Evonne Davis, cWOW's Gallery/Education Director (and co-owner of Gallery Aferro) to the left of a three-dimensional, freestanding object with two-dimensional drawings attached, which I think but am not certain is Hidden, by Kathleen Herron and Raquel Alves ($1,000). If so, it is 'hidden in plain sight'.

In this foto, a father points out to his dauter (out of frame to the left), features of Mackenzie Young's acrylic on canvas Restriction II, $150. To the left is Young's Restriction I, also $150. To the right is Jay Seldin's Behind the Windowpane, $950.

Here, visitors examine the detailed assemblage Leap of Faith 13 (POR) by Mansa K. Mussa and Elijah Smith. Marco introduced me to Mansa and he consented to this interview into my microcassette dictation unit. Naturally, when I went to play it back in my footpedal-controlled transcription machine, the transcriber played it at an unintelligibly high rate of speed, and the speed control suddenly doesn't work. Another day in my life of harassment by electronics. So I put the tape back into the dictator (so to speak) and played it back arduously that way.

Me (LCS): His student is not here [by the recorder], but he and his student worked on Leap of Faith 13, which is thirteen people —

MKM: Thirteen students. I've been doing the ArtReach mentoring program since 1995 and I've worked with 13 teenagers from the city of Newark, and Irvington.

Me: Did any of them stay in art?

MKM: [Thinking,] Juan Rosado, Jerry Lavelle, a couple of them have stayed in art.

LCS: Did any of them get in trouble?

MKM: No, not that I know of. Some of them I see; most of them I don't.

LCS: How long does this project continue?

MKM: Well, we work for three months. Originally, we worked for four months, which was better. But we work for three months, in the spring. With my process, usually we collaborate but each of us does something, and then we pull it together.

LCS: So why did they reduce the time?

MKM: I don't know, I don't know.

LCS: Was it a Schools decision, or a project decision, or what?

MKM: I'm sure it had to be a project decision by the people at City Without Walls. We used to meet in January, and then we worked February, March, April, and May, and had the show in June. Now we meet in February and work March, April, and May.

LCS: Do you still get enuf done, or are you left hanging?

MKM: No, we got plenty of work done. There are 15 actual fotografs and collages. This one was different, because all of the work that we produced was done digitally. That's what makes this different from any of the other 12 guys.

LCS: With the monochrome, did you make it in monochrome or did you process it into monochrome?

MKM: We shot it in black and white.

LCS: That's digital, tho.

MKM: Right. All the images, they're all digital.

LCS: So you went and you selected black-and-white mode on your camera.

MKM: Right.

LCS: Why?

MKM: We wanted something different. This leopard skin, I have leopard-skin gloves, leopard-skin scarf, so we wanted to see how they'd look.

LCS: Not real, tho.

MKM: Well, yeah they're real [laffing], of course those are real.

LCS: Real leopard.

MKM: Yes!

LCS: Alrite. Where's the cops?

MKM: [Protesting,] I got them when they weren't an endangered species [but laffing].

LCS: That does not look like real leopard to me.

MKM: OK, it's not real leopard.

LCS: OK, what is this thing, down on the lower right?

MKM: We made collages. When I work with the kids, they always have pictures of themselves in the show, because for me, when they get this work and think about it, I want them to think, "I was 15, and I was in this show and in this program."

13 years of mentoring. I'm impressed.

City Without Walls is one large, squarish room, perhaps 50 x 40 feet, plus a small New Media Project Room, which will accommodate a dozen or more people to watch videos projected onto a screen. "Select Shorts III", student videos, were showing during the reception, but I focused on stationary art in good lite that I could fotograf.

This papier-mâché girl — You see why I'm a spelling reformer? That ridiculous spelling is pronounced "paper mashay" — is in the middle of things. In this foto, artists Pasquale Cuppari and Marco Muñoz mingle.

Here, I think 'she' (Yasmin DeJesús's Emerging Self ($500) faces Emma Wilcox, the other co-owner of Gallery Aferro.

This small three-dimensional piece is Janet Taylor Pickett and Yasmin DeJesús's Open Mind/Open Jacket (POR). It echoes this next piece, which is flatter than you might think.

Janet Taylor Pickett's Artist Jacket ($1,500).

I rather liked this next piece, which visually seems very precariously balanced but is, I think, secured to the wall behind. The name appears to be Rainbow Bridge, melting, tho "melting" is not in italics in the listing flyer. It's by Bob Bonnano and is made from "melted crayons"! (NFS: Not For Sale. I look forward to a time when Newark arts will attract the kind of arrogant billionaire who says "Nonsense. Everything's for sale", and see what happens.)

To the right of Rainbow Bridge are these three pieces by the team of Rosalind Nzinga Nichol (left, Ceremony (price scrambled in flyer), and middle) and Yasmin Stephenson (middle, untitled ($300), right, untitled study #1 ($150)).

Finally, I close with one of Gianluca Bianchino's wall rubbings on canvas, Wall Drift III. What better way to close a discussion of an art show in Brick City?

City Without Walls is at 6 Crawford Street, Newark, NJ 07102; (973) 622-1188. Hours: Wednesday-Friday, 12-6pm; Saturday, 1-6pm.

Sunburned and Weary

I got very little sleep two nites in a row, then had a very busy day (summarized below), so will not even attempt to discuss anything at length today but just show a few pix of the Westinghouse demolition in its final stages. This first foto shows the Broad Street Station freed from the shadow of the enormous former Westinghouse Building.

Remember how people warned that you can get sunburned even on a cloudy day? Believe it. (Do not, however, believe the assertion that even one incident of sunburning, even in childhood, can set a person up for skin cancer decades later. How many bald guys have you heard of with skin cancer all over their scalp?

This second picture shows the piles of rubble that used to be the Westinghouse Building, seen from the area in front of the Station.

I spent the early part of today at Bears & Eagles Stadium, first at a business expo, then watching the Newark Bears defeat the Southern Maryland Blue Crabs. At the end of the seventh inning, when I was reasonably sure the Bears would win (they did, 2-0), I headed out to see the current state of the demolition of the Westinghouse Building and some other things in the neighborhood. I was already parked, for five bucks, in the Bears Stadium parking structure, so didn't look for a parking spot on the street closer to what I wanted to see, but just walked there. I need the exercise, anyway, given how much time I spend sitting in front of a computer. Then I drove to Motor Vehicles to get my car inspected. As you might suspect, I also took some pictures — 54 pictures, to be more precise.

This foto (taken from the southeast corner of the vanished building to allow viewers who have seen prior progress pix to compare earlier stages with today's), shows construction / destruction equipment separating materials into discrete piles. Note that one pile is wood; the others, masonry.

Given how long it takes to fix pix with my slow old Dell, I won't even try to work past the weariness to discuss the expo or the game and the things they made me think of. Later.

In this slitely briter view from the same corner, something in the distance that you couldn't see before is more evident: the Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart. I don't know how long it will take to remove all the demolition debris still onsite. Nor do I know what else will be visible when the piles are gone. Will the site be redeveloped immediately? I've heard of no approved project for that superblock, so suspect there will be a huge parking lot there until something has been decided upon, financing arranged, etc. I just hope this enormously important parcel will not be "land-banked", set aside for years and years until the owner can maximize profits from redevelopment. There have to be limits on how long prime real estate can remain fallow. The City can hurry things along a bit by offering beneficial tax incentives that expire if a project has not been started by a reasonable deadline. That way, a landlord can act soon and enjoy tax advantages that can make a project more economically feasible, or wait for more favorable conditions in the general economy, but lose tax advantages. The calculus will then likely be that acting on a project now is wiser than waiting for economic conditions that might not arrive for years, even decades — during all of which time the landlord will still have to pay property taxes. I have seen an artist's rendering of one possible project. I'm not at all sure it is distinguished enuf, nor remotely tall enuf, for so extraordinary a spot.

"BG" alerted me to a June 17th announcement that Cushman & Wakefield has been named the exclusive agent for the office portion of the redevelopment of the Lincoln Motel parcel, which I discussed here Saturday, June 21st. "Liberty Plaza" (the pretentious and stupid name presently assigned to the project) is to have a 26-story multi-use office, hotel, and retail complex over onsite parking.
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The Westinghouse site is much larger, and could wisely be used for office, retail, residential, and parking structures, with residences built high to take advantage of the great views of Manhattan, Jersey City, Newark, and the mountains, to be had from that location. It would be great if the developer made architectural reference to the magnificent Westinghouse edifice that occupied the site for so long. Six years from now, the Broad Street Station "transit village" could bring jobs, residents, stores, parking — and panache — to a long-neglected neighborhood.

The Tucker development may or may not block the second Pavilion Apartments tower on the right. Perhaps it will appear further to the right. We'll see.

Midweek Food and Music

"BC" sent me the electronic poster above. Gaetano found a farmers' market Thursdays in Military Park. I see no mention of music, but some impromptu performances might pop up. I hope that these events, in time, will attract things like sidewalk artists and street performers. It may not happen for a while, but you never know. Indeed, the NDD and other organizers of such events could offer new performers exposure to a diverse crowd, at low or no fee to the organizers.

I lifted this image from the NDD website. I don't imagine they'll mind someone helping with publicity, but if they object, I will of course remove it.

On Thursdays also, from 12:15-1:45pm, the Newark Museum has its Jazz in the Garden concert series ($3 for nonmembers; free to us). Tomorrow's program:

June 26—Joe Locke "Force of Four
Vibraphonist

Regarded by many as the most gifted vibraphonist of his generation, Joe Locke is also a noted band leader, composer and conceptualist. His recent recordings and live performances include his group the "4 Walls of Freedom" as well as the Joe Locke/Geoffrey Keezer Group, the Joe Locke Quartet, and Rev.elation—the Music of Milt Jackson. Locke has performed and recorded with a diverse group of noted artists including Eddie Henderson, Cecil Taylor, Kenny Barron, Ron Carter, Jimmy Scott, Rod Stewart, Hiram Bullock, Bob Berg and Jeff "Tain" Watts.

View from the garden of the Newark Museum, in March. It is presumably greener now.

Mélange

It's been an odd two days, with lots of little things and a few big things, but no dominant theme I could address in a unified way, so I present today a mix of themes. By the way, if you don't know how to get an accent, as in "mélange", within email or other programs, you need to enable a logical "keyboard" in MS Windows that will then work in all Windows-based programs. In any sophisticated word-processing program, you can use that program's own features to supply accents. But for email, HTML programs, etc., you will need to take another approach. I often need to write in more than one language that employs accents (and my pronunciation key, Augméntad Fanétik, also requires accents), so I made a point to learn how to get to the "United States-International" keyboard from within the Windows operating system. Unfortunately, because Microsoft programmers make lots of very odd mistakes, that keyboard keeps flipping with my default "English (United States)" keyboard on its own, for no apparent reason. I select the one and a few minutes or hours later, I'm in the other. It's very annoying.
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I would leave the International keyboard always in place except that it employs the apostrophe and quotation-mark key as a "dead key" to form various augmented characters. If you want to use it just for an apostrophe or quotation mark, you have to hit that key and then the spacebar. Otherwise, you can get an unexpected and undesired result. For instance, if you press apostrophe and then a vowel, the vowel will have an acute accent over it. If you hit apostrophe and then the letter C (lowercase or upper), you will get a C-cedilla (ç, Ç). If you press the quotation mark (shift-apostrophe) and then a vowel, you will get an umlaut/dieresis (two dots, side by side) over that vowel (ä, ü). If, however, you hit either the apostrophe or quote and then a character that Microsoft does not interpret as requiring a diacritic, the apostrophe or quote, without more, will appear. The standard workaround is to be sure to press the spacebar immediately after every single press of the apostrophe or quotation-mark key, which can become very tedious in very short order, especially if you're typing a lot of quotations.
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This keyboard issue is a perfect example of the many little things that cause me problems. I had, today, a lot of little things to deal with, and some big things, but I couldn't deal with the big things, because one of the little things that got in the way is trying to adjust my schedule to get up much, much earlier than usual to attend Thursday's business-development, all-day event at the Newark Regional Business Partnership. I will probably spend very little time on the computer Wednesday, and instead do housework and other things that don't keep my mind running past the time when I should be getting to sleep. To add to the problem of Thursday, I found out today that one of my oldest friends will be in NYC, from Boston, that same evening. He'll be participating in a panel of original members of the Gay Liberation Front, from 1969 and the early 1970s, at the NY Gay Community Center on West 13th Street. I have to consider whether I can realistically get up at 7am, when I haven't even been to sleep yet by 7 on several days this past week, and not only stay up and alert all day — NRBP will have coffee, I trust; in the last event I attended, they ran out of regular and had only decaf remaining, which had better not happen this time! I was too sleepy and thus subdued to do any networking last time — but also drive into Manhattan afterward, meet John (Lauritsen), and drive us to East 6th Street to an inexpensive Indian restaurant (I love Indian food, but there are no Indian restaurants in Newark), then stay awake not just thru dinner but also all the way home afterward. Parking in both the area of the Community Center and on East 6th Street could be a real problem, even midweek. The last time I ate on 6th Street, with my niece and grandnephew (who flew in from Oakland, CA in February 2005 for the Christo "Gates" event), I carelessly forgot to put money in the parking meter, for being thoroughly involved with relatives I never see, and got a $60 parking ticket. Don't you just love NY?

Karen (right) and Josh (left; but perhaps you guessed that) pose in the middle of this picture of the southernmost portion of Central Park during the "Gates" art event. (Josh's father is Jamaican, so his complexion is a compromise between the very pale-pink Schoonmakers and the very brown Bristols.) We had been up and active for hours. I picked them up from JFK in the morning and returned them to JFK that evening. In between we walked miles all over southern Central Park, and drove up to the northern end to walk around a bit there too. We ate mid-day in what one might call 'little Little India' (Jackson Heights, Queens, being a larger Little India) — that is to say, East 6th Street between First and Second Avenues. Some people call it "Indian Restaurant Row", as distinct from plain "Restaurant Row" (West 46th Street between Eighth and Ninth), one block east of where I lived for 25 years.

That's sardonic, not sincere. I was aware, around the 11th of this month, that on Saturday, June 14th, I would have been in Newark for eight years. Naturally, when the day itself rolled around, I had completely forgotten about it, being distracted by two art openings (at City Without Walls and the Seton Hall Walsh Gallery) on the 12th and another at Gallery Aferro the very evening of my eighth anniversary. In any case, I have never regretted my move out of Manhattan into Newark. This fotoblog attempts to explain to people, in Manhattan and elsewhere, exactly why that is. As regards the three gallery receptions/exhibits that week, I gave up on retrieving from my HP notebook computer, which crashed, the pix I had fixed on it, and finally fixed all art-reception pix on my much slower Dell. But putting them together with the descriptive info from printed handouts is one of those Big Things I can't deal with on too little sleep. So I skipped adding to this blog on Monday altogether, and will even off put discussion and illustrations of the art exhibit until after Thursday's busy day. Stay tuned. I'll have pix up in plenty of time for readers to judge whether they want to venture in to see those exhibits in person, before they close.

I took some pictures out my hoffice window because for some reason my English ivy in its climbing form does not have its ground-form, three-pointed shape. I don't know why. In this first picture, you see the trunk and some large branches of an oak tree at over 30 feet off the ground, covered in ivy. I'm in Vailsburg but not the Ivy Hill section. Still, this tree is on the side of a hill, and is covered in ivy. My part of town is called Lower Vailsburg. One might also call it Lower Ivy Hill.

In this closer view, you can see only the single-pointed leaf form.

Big news on Smith Street. The burned-out house that has been dragging down property values a couple of hundred feet south of me is being rebuilt. Here's what it looked like May 23rd.

Here's what it looked like earlier today. I noticed a dumpster in that vicinity only last nite on my way to the Bergen Street Pathmark, so knew to look for construction today. A neighbor was sitting with her baby on a porch diagonally opposite the house under reconstruction, so I asked her how long the rebuilding had been going on. She hesitated a moment and said, about two weeks. I said it was about time, because I know that it had been standing, burned-out, since at least December. She said the fire had actually occurred in early September! "Better late than never", said I about the rebuilding. And indeed it is. Given that I am one of the property owners whose home values were adversely affected for the past several months, I am very happy to see this house rebuilt. It has even been given a new, more cheerful color. I don't know if the same owner/tenant will return to the restored house.

I took that foto after I had walked a block and a half in the opposite direction to get two lottery tix, one for Mega and one for Pick 6. As I think the NY Lottery at least used to say, "You've got to be in it to win it." My (late) best friend Jay (oddly enuf, last name Friend) used to say that if he was intended to win, he'd find a ticket. I'm not taking that chance. (Jay never did win.) So every now and then I buy one ticket each for the two big games here in NJ, and if I happen to be in NY, I may buy a New York ticket too.
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I wanted to get some plantain chips while at the convenience store where I buy my lottery tix (at Sandford Avenue and Silver Street; it's owned by Hispanics), but they had only one bag of plantain strips left, which I found odd. In the same area were little bags of something I have often wondered why we did not have: "Howard's Crispy Fried Chicken Skins / Chicharrones de Pollo", comparable to fried pork rinds. I bought the strips and the skins. When I got home, I found that the strips had gone bad, the oil they were fried in having gone rancid. But the skins were OK. I had pictured, when I thought about this years ago, the skins being flat, but in fact they were rolled up titely into crinkled, crunchy chunks. Not bad, but they needed extra salt, which I sprinkled. Made by International Provisions of Hamden, Connecticut (2 ounces for a dollar), these seem a very worthy addition to our stock of snacks, tho in need of some improvement. Maybe Frito Lay could buy the company or come up with its own version. I'm 63 years old and had never either heard of nor seen fried chicken skins in a snack bag before in my life.
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On my way home, I saw something in the yard nextdoor that I did not recall having seen before either.

Yes, those are flower spikes on yucca plants, four to five feet tall. Moving around the plant, I couldn't find a dark background against which to hilite their entire height. Part was always in front of patches of sky or something else too lite to show the outline clearly. I took the foto above, then moved to the front of the plant to take this closer foto to show the bell-shaped flowers.

I then moved on 20 feet to view my own yard's current state (of nearly perpetual, warm-weather bloom). The yellow phase of my front garden has faded, and now we begin the pale-pink phase, in which what I think are phlox (stupid spelling!) bloom profusely all over the right side of my front yard. They vary in color, some (in the shade?) being white or almost so, others being pink, as here. These are a legacy of the former owners of my house, so I'm not certain they are phloxes. Whatever they are, they have steadily expanded their range and now, at well over 100 flower stalks, dominate the front yard and fall over into the stairwell that leads up to my front door.

The most spectacular of my many perennial flowers, pink lilies some six or more inches across, are now forming as buds on tall, semi-woody stalks amid the phlox. When they come out, pale pink will be replaced by deep, mottled pink as the dominant color of my front yard, probably in about ten days.
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In this next foto today, I show a slitely different area of the English ivy climbing an oak. Note that altho most of the leaves have only one point, a few on the upper left show the three-pointed shape typical of the ground-covering form.

Moreover, altho the oak is covered in ivy well above the level of the roof of my three-story house, there is a second tree, an enormous evergreen (spruce?) that ivy is only now climbing. (I also have a black walnut tree that is now being climbed by a Virginia creeper.) The ivy on the evergreen has to date reached only the level of the floor of my second story. This closeup of the top growth shows mixed leaf forms. Odd.

Yesterday I wasn't in the mood to do this fotoblog, so instead updated my political blog (which is, in general, very far Liberal-Left, I hasten to warn). I noted that what I call my "Nwk blog" (877 posts) has now passed my "polblog" (876 posts; for a total of 1,753 posts to the two blogs). I had updated my polblog every day for a couple of years; then I updated this every day for a couple of years. Now I update this 4 or 5 times a week, and my polblog irregularly but sometimes as often as / only 2 or 3 times a week. If I do one blog, I don't always have time and energy enuf to do the other too, depending on how much effort I have to exert to put a blog post together. You'd think a text-only blog should take less time than a blog for which I must also select, resize, and upload fotos, and write captions for them. But since I want readers to be able to check for themselves every source I cite, the research for my polblog can take quite a lot of time.
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This week I have also had to plan ahead for the Thursday business-startup conference at NRBP. I want to be able to hand out two-sided bizcards, on one side of which I show this fotoblog and my Resurgence City site, and on the other side of which I show at least my TourismNewark.org site and/or "EverythingNewark.com" or "AllThingsNewark.com", domains I have reserved but not yet developed into websites/businesses. I want to offer various Newark-imprinted materials over the Internet, but need help to get much of anything accomplished. I am already operating very near the limits of what I can do alone. I'm happy with the business cards I have created for Newark USA/Resurgence City and for TourismNewark, but I wanted to have some sample/mockup cards for AllThingsNewark / EverythingNewark as well. So, over the course of a couple of hours, I played with some typography.
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Some of the typefaces are very similar, belonging to the Arial and Tahoma families. A couple are quite different, and would be accompanied by simple, sans-serif text for my name, address, telephone number, website URL, and email address. Only the top line would be large and typographically showy. It is that line that appears in different forms in the last graphic today. Each version is numbered. I'd welcome feedback from readers. If you particularly like or dislike any of the formats shown below, tell me the number, by email to ResurgenceCity@aol.com. I'd like to print some samples of whatever I decide upon, in time for Thursday morning's NRBP session. I do not need to commit to a design today for all future time, but I'd like to have something to show Thursday.

For some reason, the italics didn't come out in some of those entries in this graphic. They looked fine onscreen and on paper within WordPerfect, but when I "published to PDF", the italics vanished in some of the fonts. The lines that did work give you an idea of what the ones that didn't might look like. The point of PDF files is to show things exactly as they appeared in the original application, but WordPerfect didn't create an accurate PDF. Silly program. I recently installed but haven't much used the Sun Microsystems OpenOffice word processor, which is supposed to be able to create PDF's too. I'll have to experiment to see if it does a better job.

First Presbyterian's Neighborhood; Possum in the House

This "Church Sunday" at Newark USA I show a couple of pictures of the present home of the first church congregation in Newark, and its neighborhood. The First Presbyterian Church (which seems still not to have a website) was founded in Brantford, Connecticut in 1644, and relocated with Robert Treat and his Pilgrim settlers to Newark in 1666. The first meeting house was built in 1668. This building was dedicated in 1791 — across from, appropriately, Brantford Place.

Old First Church is a Newark landmark on Broad Street one building in from Edison Place, just west of The Rock. Brantford Place, seen here, is a perfect microcosm of Newark today. At far left, you can see the orangy-red brick and gray upper courses of the newest big thing, the Prudential Center, above the sloped side of the church. In front of it, the church that Newark's original Pilgrim settlers embraced. On the right are some Moslem businesses. Farther right, out of frame of this picture but visible in the second foto below, is the Islamic Cultural Center, a mosque. A block further right, out of frame, is Hobby's Delicatessen, a long-established Jewish institution and home of "Operation Salami Drop". (By the way, in checking the cross-street for Hobby's (Halsey), I found that the "Directions" page on their site is broken. I'll try to tell them about that by email.)
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In the picture above. You can also see the kinds of things some hostile critics have said about the neighborhood around The Rock, downscale businesses occupying a jumble of old buildings, some distinguished, some nondescript. In some of these buildings, second-story businesses have their own signs in the windows, a practice that upscale buildings tend to frown upon. The ornate sign painted on the interior of the window below is for Master G's School of Martial Arts.

The Islamic Cultural Center and some Moslem businesses occupy a very distinguished older building, former home to the Chamber of Commerce. Newark's present member of the Chambers of Commerce is not called a C of C but the Newark Regional Business Partnership, whose website is always very slow to load. I don't know why. They are holding a free Essex County Business Development Conference in their present offices in the National Newark Building this Thursday from 8:30am-4:30pm that includes a Newark Bears baseball game! I've attended one NRBP event, which gave rise to my TourismNewark.org website, on which I have lots of work still to do. I've sent email to ask if there's still room at Thursday's event, because I need a lot of information about starting a business myself (as to create and sell Newark postcards, calendars, teeshirts and the like to make good use of my best fotos).

Last July 2nd I showed three closeups of the old Chamber of Commerce Building. This mid-distance foto allows you to see some of the detail up as far as a flagpole that needs a flag. This foto was taken June 9, 2007. Maybe the owner has put up a flag by now.
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The last church foto today is of the top of First Presbyterian as seen past what I first thought was a liting fixture on the wall of the Prudential Center. The lite is fading, but seemed not so faint that the lite would come on. Then I looked more carefully, and I now think it's a surveillance camera within a weather-protective transparent housing, part of the increased video surveillance Newark police are now employing to keep us safer. In any event, whatever the thing over the steeple may be, I found the fine, rounded lines in the two visually near objects appealing.

Confused Visitor. In January I showed a foto of a possum in my yard near the back door. Last nite when I went into my back vestibule not far from that earlier spot, I found the possum inside that part of my house, eating birdseed from a big bag I keep there. That vestibule is between two back doors, outer and inner, that enclose stairways to the basement and second floor. I imagine the possum came in thru the basement door to the yard, which in nice weather I keep partway open on a chain. The opening is wide enuf for cats and apparently a possum, but not for a person.
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I didn't have my camera on the first floor (it was in my nylon pouch on three), so I didn't get pix, but now I am pretty certain that it's not alley cats that have moved things around messily in the vestibule. I'm also relieved to find that it was a possum, not wild rats coming in from outside, that spilled birdseed. We used to have a problem with outdoor rats invading the house, but my cats made short work of them and now I think just the scent of cats keeps rats from even thinking of coming into my house.
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The possum was up a couple of stairs to my second floor, so was cut off from retreat down to the basement. I opened the door to the yard in hopes that the possum would flee that direction, but it was scared and moved further up the stairs toward a locked door on 2 instead of down to the exit. There's a window alongside those stairs, and I went inside and over to it, then knocked on the glass in hopes of scaring it downstairs and out the door. It just stayed there and hissed. Then I opened the window a bit and shook my hand over the possum, which did send it away a bit. I then closed the window to leave the possum unmolested, to go out from 1, or down to the basement, or whatever the possum was comfortable with. A half hour later it was gone. I hope that whatever route it chose made a pathway in its little possum mind so if in the future it should ever again be caught on the steps in the vestibule, it will know how to escape and not put me thru this hassle again.
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Meanwhile, I wonder what happened to the pair of raccoons that used to come out into this neighborhood after dark. In the repaving/street improvements last year, the grates at catch basins in the storm-drain system were replaced, and the openings in the new ones are so narrow that full-grown raccoons could not get thru. So unless they were able to get out at some older grate with a wider opening, they might have been trapped in the storm-drain system and died of starvation. I'd like to think they just walked thru the system until they found a way out, then decided to make a home in some safer place, outside the storm-drain system altogether, thereafter.

This is one of the new storm-drain grates installed on my block at some unknown point late last year, as seen November 26th during the first stage of repaving my street, the removal of the old asphalt. The white outline is, I think, paint sprayed by a worker to alert the crew to the presence of a grate they might need to swing around. See how narrow the horizontal opening now is, perhaps 1/3 the height of the curb? There's no way full-grown raccoons could get out thru that. What happened to our semi-wild Vailsburg raccoons?