The Sporting Life in Greater Newark

My friends Gaetano (Ironbound) and Joe (Belleville) attended a Devils game in Prudential Center on St. Patrick's Day (March 17th), and the opening game at the Red Bulls Arena in Harrison on March 20th. Gaetano took a bunch of fotos with his Blackberry, but was not happy with the quality. Still, the pix do give a sense of the two events at the two venues. Cellfone cameras do not generally produce high-quality images, but with some fixing-upping in my graffics program, they came out well enuf for a slideshow (which appears at the end of today's post).

All of today's fotos are from Gaetano Lardieri, of the Ironbound.

In waiting for Leno to start on the 17th, I heard Bruce Beck of WNBC-TV say that the Devils' defeat of the Penguins in that game put the Devils in first place, so emailed Joe and Guy ("Gaetano" is Italian, as are most of my friends; and in Italian, "Gaetano" is pronounced gie.tón.oe or, in folk phonetics, guy-TAHN-o) to say, "It would appear that you pushed the Devils into first place by your attendance at Wednesday's game against the Penguins. They surely could not have done it without you." Joe sent this one-word reply: "Obviously".
+
After the opening of the "New York" (harrumph!) Red Bulls Arena, I asked Joe how he liked the building, and he said:

the soccer stadium was awesome. red bulls won it 3 to 1. only problem is what looks like a lack of handicapped access. i currently have two problems with my feet [which get] very painful the longer i'm on my feet. i had to park several blocks away in a garage for $10 and had a long walk. then on top of that, i had to walk up 3 sets of stairs to get to the main level. there are many things that the stadium and the harrison police have to work on. especially the traffic control. it took me 1 hour to go from my parking space to my driveway. normally it should be no more than 15 minutes. gaetano got a good laugh when they served me uncooked brazilian cheese puffs. i sent them back and they recooked them for me. the [food service people] were all like headless chickens. i felt bad for them because it was sold out and packed and the lines were long. a [female] season ticketholder in front of us [displayed] a red bulls flag on a telescoping pole. she was told several times by fans behind us to put it away. it was very annoying. too bad for gaetano.

I asked some followup questions, and Joe had these additional comments (gently edited). Text marked by {...} is Joe's quotes from my email inquiry.

{I'm unclear as to what you mean by "too bad for gaetano."}

I meant that Gaetano has season tix right behind the woman with the 12 foot flag pole. he will have to sit behind her all season with her [expletive deleted] flag.

I suspect this is the offending flagpole. Tho Gaetano's seats may have the narrow impediment of the pole alone, fans higher up in the stands will have the flag in their way as well. Let's hope the Arena's management will authorize ushers to compel people to remove such obstacles from other fans' views.

{There must be elevators in the stadium, because it was built long after the ADA went into effect. They are probably just not marked well. The story I saw about the changes around the arena says that the PATH station renovations will install an elevator. About friggin' time.}

I imagine they do have ADA compliance and have elevators, however, they are NOT clearly marked. I didn't see any and I really needed them that day.

{The parking situation is really out of line. Are people charged to park at Giants Stadium?}

Yes, they are. All arenas and stadiums charge for parking. If the soccer sta. holds 25,000 people, then they should build a multi floor garage with at least 10,000 spaces. I figure at least 2 people per car would cover 20,000 and also consider how many take public trans.

{In one story I saw about the arena, the writer confirms what I felt, that it looks much larger than a 25,000-capacity stadium, at least from the outside. How does it feel inside?}

It does feel big inside partly because a soccer field is much larger than a football field. Add the space for the sidelines and then seating for 25,000. They def need to change some things. I think the 2 big screen TV's are not big enough at either end of the field. They should move those screens to the area of mid field and then put in much larger screens at each end zone. Maybe they will do these things once they start to make money.

I then remarked to Joe by email that (approximate quote) "I saw a story (with video) on NJ.com about the opening before it occurred that raised some interesting issues. It sounds as tho what I expected [that so small a town could get itself into deep financial problems with so large a development]  is currently the case [due to the Recession, even if the plan had been fiscally sound before the Recession — which I have to wonder about]. All this argues for annexation of little Harrison [14,000 population] to Newark [300,000 — and don't forget to return your Census form so Newark is credited with all the people who live here!]. Christie might agree, esp. with his Newark connections."
+
A Governor who is (supposedly) very concerned about cutting public expenses may be the best ally we can have in promoting a Greater Newark by annexing smaller (and more distressed) municipalities, like Harrison due to this overextension, and East Orange and Irvington, which are generally in much worse shape than Newark. Newark's population could skyrocket, as would cause us to jump much higher in national lists of major cities, by annexing areas that, for the most part, were once part of Newark anyway, before the State Government smiled upon destroying large municipalities by carving them up into ever smaller municipalities. (One reason Houston is now the largest city of Texas is that Texas, unlike New Jersey, thinks big, and hastened to annex to Houston every nearby area that became urbanized.)
+
What the State has sundered, the State can forcibly rejoin, because every municipality is a "creature of the state". And what the State of New Jersey can create, the State of New Jersey can uncreate. A Greater Newark would save a FORTUNE in local government costs, and hugely increase Newark's (and thus, inevitably, also New Jersey's) favorable visibility in the Nation and, indeed, the world. The property-tax-payers of little Harrison are on the hook for over $40 million of development expense around Red Bulls Arena, and they can't even raise property taxes on the Arena's site, because the Town owns the land!

The big news for Prudential Center a couple of weeks ago, of course, was that the New Jersey Nets are going to play their next two (last two?) seasons in Newark! It's about friggin' time. Part of the deal appears to be that the Brooklyn Nets won't try to block Newark from getting an NBA team of our own once the Nets move to Brooklyn. Perhaps the prosperous New Jerseyans who wanted to buy the Nets to bring them to Newark will be able to put a new (and improved?) team into PruCenter if the NBA approves. Hopefully that would be an expansion team, tho I haven't heard anything about the NBA wanting to expand. New Jerseyans have to feel for any area that loses a team. As for the 'quality' of play by the Nets this season, could it have been a (sub)conscious ploy by the players to try to get the current, NY-based owners to sell the team so it could stay in NJ and move to Newark? I suspect that the Nets will do MUCH better, as to both finances and quality of play, in Newark. Good attendance could prove persuasive to the NBA in considering whether to put a team in PruCenter for good.
+
I'm not big on sports, myself. I don't see much point to watching other people exercise. But if pool (billiards: 8-ball) can be considered a sport, both Joe and I are avid sportsmen. I even have a pool table in my basement, and Joe and I were part of a group of very proficient players that dominated the pool tables in the Good Old Days when NYC had gay men's bars (instead of the pretentious "post-gay" mixed / compulsorily-heterosexual bars of today. A multi-mutual friend whom Joe dubbed "Don Pon" (in place of a long Italian surname), and whom Gaetano calls "Uncle Don" because he's even older than I am (and who is another pool tiger — "shark" is such an unpleasant word in this context, since it suggests hustling more than playing well), told me he has recently been talking to the owner of what had been a great men's bar in Chelsea who was forced out by gentrification of that entire area and who is thinking of opening a new gay men's bar someplace or other. I suggested to Don that he should tell C.T. that if Manhattan is financially out of the question now, Downtown Newark within walking distance of Newark Penn Station and the Prudential Center would be a great place for a sports-themed men's superbar [with dancing, pool, pingpong, video games — who knows? even half-court basketball]. (Think the big vacant space with "Mannings" awnings on Market Street between Broad and Mulberry.)

But New Yorkers still think of the Hudson River as a Great Wall beyond which no one in his right mind would ever want to peer. Never mind that a large proportion of Manhattan's gay bars have always been heavily dependent upon the "bridge & tunnel crowd" from NJ. Surely a large part of that crowd would be very happy to stay on this side of the Hudson.
+
Gaetano has even suggested to me that if it weren't possible to fill a big bar in Newark with gay men only, every nite of the week, a Newark gay bar could have a "straight nite", as some ordinarily straight places in other places have one "gay nite" a week — a turnabout on the usual theme. Guy tells me there's a Brazilian place on Ferry Street that has a 'gay nite' each Tuesday. Of course, that Brazilian place's version of a gay nite doesn't meet my standards for a gay place, so perhaps a gay superbar's "straight nite" wouldn't be as straight as straight people would like, either.
+
In any case, Gaetano is happy to have me show his pix here, as part of the effort to change perceptions of Newark. He describes himself as a "self-acclaimed ambassador for Newark". I'm not sure "acclaimed", where the more common rendering would be "proclaimed", is an error. Gaetano, Joe, and I are all very big on Newark. And Greater Newark is getting to be quite a sports town.
+
Now, please check out the slideshow. To pause the display, you can click on the solid square at the top, or just move your cursor onto a foto, either in the main screen or in the thumbnail lineup below the main screen. To resume autoplay, remove the cursor from the foto.)