Hibernating; Gateway 'Fortress'

(Long post, over 3,400 words and 18 fotos. You won't hurt my feelings if you just look at the fotos. After all, I took them.)

Today's fotos are mostly of the Gateway Center area, copied from my Resurgence City website or which were on this blog years ago, until erased when AOL closed subscribers' online storage spaces. This first shows a view you can't get anymore, because a Commerce Bank branch was built in the space enclosed by the wrought-iron fence in this view. (It is now a branch of TD Bank.)

I recently exchanged emails with an NJIT student from Taiwan who hoped I had some information about the supposed "fortress" design of Gateway Center. I said I'd be amenable to meeting him sometime to discuss Newark more generally. He suggested we meet today, but I begged off on account of the weather and suggested we try again when the temperature is 40 or higher. I'm pretty sure this is the last gasp of winter, if the pattern of recent years holds, and the weather appropriate to each season arrives a little earlier than it should.

Here's part of our email exchange, slitely edited for his privacy and (both our) English. His English is a lot better than my Chinese, I can tell you. First, the initial contact, under the subject "Some questions from your blog reader".

* * * I am from Taiwan, and studying in the US currently. I have been noticing your blog several months ago and read it sometimes. I also know that you have a lot of passion about Newark, NJ. Due to my school report, I would like to study "Gateway Complex" in Newark Downtown area. I do not know whether you can help me some directions if you have some resources or information. At the same time, I am also looking for some people who may know its history. So far, I have contact one person from the City Hall. He has told me to contact with someone, but he do not have his contacting information. I am still working on it.

One Gateway Center, first of the complex constructed.

As what I know that, Gateway Complex was launched after the 1967 riot (or rebellion), which was used to redevelop Newark. However, some design strategies were not qui[te] friendly and unwilling to build a connection with the downtown, such as sky walks or building facade as forming a fortress. Here I want to investigate why initial plan was created like that way and also how the area looked like before building this project. Certainly, I have not figured it out the main question I am going to study. At least, I hope that I can be able to gather more information as I can in the beginning. Another things I may want to include is why a enclosed shopping mall was built in the downtown area instead of a vibrant streetscape with many shops along the street. ( I mean that when you walk out the Newark Penn Station, what do Newark want to present to his visitors?)

I hope that my e-mail will not bring some confusing to you. Hopefully, I can gain some help from you.

Also, I am studying in NJIT now. It will be fantastic that you want to meet and talk to me in person. Certainly, language barrier is my biggest challenge and worry.

People who regard the Gateway Center – Legal Center – Newark Penn Station system of walkways as a fortress against the city may see this view from the skyway to the Legal Center past the structural X-beams as a visual metaphor. But it's just a structural member.

I responded:

The criticism of the Gateway Center project that it was "walled off" from the city is at least partly invalid, since every building in the complex has a street entrance, tho none has street-level retail space accessible from outside the building. Yes, concern about crime was indeed, and is properly, a consideration behind the design, but indoor retail spaces are hardly unusual. They're called "malls", and are everywhere.
+
The point of putting everything in a privately owned and patrolled space was to provide a FEELING of security to the many people from outside Newark who commute into Newark from the suburbs, not just by train from the adjoining Newark Penn Station but also by bus and by trains that arrive at the Broad Street Station. It also permitted the complex's owners to provide security instead of having to rely upon the city police force alone. That also reduced demands upon the police force, as allowed them to devote more of their attention to areas outside Gateway Center, and more in need of attention.

The main benefits of the complex as it now works [are] the all-weather nature of the retail corridor and the safety of pedestrians from vehicular traffic in having vertical separation of cars, trucks, and buses in that very busy area. Newark is in the temperate zone. It gets cold here, for months at a time. It also rains and snows and occasionally sleets here. Being able to get to and from the Station, and from one's office to restaurants and shops, without getting wet, cold, or run over is a very big deal. I worked for a couple of years in One Gateway, and generally got 'lunch' (tho I was on a swing shift, from 2pm-9pm, so my 'lunch' was not at the same time as most people's) from either the food shops (pizza, hotdogs, sandwiches, etc.) in the Station or from the Subway sandwich shop in the retail corridor within the complex. In good weather, I would walk the shorter route (than the skyway) out the side door at street level and across Raymond Plaza West into the Station, maybe sit on a bench between the Station and Market Street and toss bits of pizza [crust] or bread to the pigeons, then return to One Gateway across Raymond Plaza West at ground level again, watching out for traffic.

The skyway shown above connects the Legal Center, far right in this foto, to the Hilton Hotel (mostly hidden by Newark Penn Station in the foreground) and One Gateway Center, far left.

People who do not work in the Center can nonetheless enter the complex, patronize the stores, or just get out of the cold or rain in walking between Mulberry Street and Raymond Plaza East. It's a great thing. Fortresses do not allow people from the street to wander in.
+
Duluth, Minnesota also has skywalks. I have been there and wandered thru parts of it. Duluth gets VERY cold in the winter, and avoiding the cold, traffic, and slippery sidewalks and streets is important there. Montreal has an extensive underground city. There, too, the prime concerns are weather and traffic. Realize that not only is traffic dangerous to pedestrians but waiting for lites takes time away from people who may be trying to get more done during lunch hour than just eating lunch. Skyways are not at all unusual in cities. Duluth is 93% white; Montreal is only 7% black. The insistence of some black militants on attacking Newark's skyways as racially motivated has less to do with reality and more to do with a racial chip on the shoulder. Blacks are not excluded from Gateway Center, but are as free as anyone else to walk the complex and use its services.

There are skyways in a couple of other places in Newark, here connecting two former MBNA buildings, now Bank of America credit-card division buildings, over University Avenue south of Market Street.

That being said — that there are legitimate reasons for having skyways internal to the Gateway Center complex and connecting with the Legal Center and Newark Penn Station — yes, security, both actual and perceived, was a concern to the developers. And a legitimate concern. I did not move to Newark until June 2000, but I did occasionally pass thru it between Manhattan and my family's residences in Monmouth County. I was never scared of Newark, but kept my wits about me, as I did in Manhattan, on the rare occasions I ventured into it. I had heard the cautions/slanders about how dangerous Newark was, but one day when I had a wait between connecting trains, I wanted to get a closer view of the giant, temple-like building I could see up Market Street from outside Newark Penn Station. So, 'taking my life in my hands', I walked there, and back, and actually lived to tell the tale!

That temple, Cass Gilbert's Old Essex County Courthouse, with Gutzon Borglum's statue of Lincoln in front.

The Downtown area was NOT, as I understand, devastated by the rioting in 1967. Its destruction was more gradual[ ], as white flite and fear of Newark destroyed businesses. Americans, you see, are very cowardly, for the most part. Our ancestors fled Europe rather than stayed to fite for justice and opportunity. And much of the impulse to "Go West, young man" was again flite from perceived restrictions on social mobility Back East as much as a desire to see the West and make a new life there. The white middle class, and then even the black middle class, ran to the suburbs at the first sign of trouble, often using 'the safety of the kids' as excuse. Part of the "American dream" is the white-picket-fence version of small town America, transmuted into the tidy suburb with single-family houses on open lawns. Part of the move to the suburbs, in short, was positive pursuit of an American Dream. The uglier part was flite from black people in the cities.

Skyway from Newark Penn Station to Gateway Center and Hilton Hotel, daytime. If I'm not mistaken, at least one of the two people shown inside the skyway is black. So much for Gateway Center's keeping blacks out.

Here, too, there are positive and negative aspects. "Birds of a feather flock together" works in people too. We are most comfortable when we are surrounded by people like ourselves. When immigrants establish Chinatowns or Little Italy's, few people are indignant at their "racism", and excuses are made for their wanting to be with "their own kind", preserve their language and culture, etc. When white people want to be with white people, however, all that "isn't it quaint" attitude turns ugly, and instead of merely wanting to be with people like themselves, whites are seen as not just clannish, as other communities might be, but Klannish (in case you, being from Taiwan, don't get the reference, the Ku Klux Klan is an American organization devoted not just to white people's right to have places of their own but to DOMINATE society to other groups' disadvantage). I don't know how much of the dynamics of race in the United States you currently understand, nor how closely the dynamics between native Taiwanese and/against Kuomintang mainlanders who took over Taiwan in 1949 compare to the situation here. If we meet, perhaps we can discuss that. By the way, I am part of an alliance of organizations working to enlarge the United States geographically, and one of the member organizations is working to make Taiwan (which they prefer to call "Formosa") a State of the United States.

Skyway from One Gateway over McCarter Highway to Two Gateway Center, at nite.

In any case, fear of crime is closely aligned in much of the United States with fear of blacks and, in somewhat lesser measure, fear of Hispanics, which in turn is related to preference on the part of white people for being in a white community or setting, and to be among people of their own language, and all of these factors work to cause suburbanites to see things like the Gateway Center complex as a safer and better situation to work and have lunch in. Different people are more concerned about different parts of this complex of emotions, and it is impossible to separate them.

According to SanDonna Bryant, the construction of the four Gateway towers starting in the late 1960s and continuing another 20 years provided a major boost to Newark’s downtown development effort. Bryant is the director of the Newark Community Development Network, a consortium of community-based agencies in the city. While Bryant is often critical of the city’s development strategies for focusing too much on the downtown, she praised the impact of the Gateway Center on development throughout the city. She considered the corporate investment by the Prudential Company and the growth potential of the project as crucial elements that enabled the Gateway to maintain its status as the most desirable office space in Newark. Other observers confirmed Gateway as an optimistic sign of growth during the difficult decades after the riots, but they also portrayed the successful office buildings as walled-off fortresses designed to protect workers from the perceived dangers of Newark’s streets. NJPAC executive Jeff Norman described the style of the Gateways as "post-riot architecture designed to protect the building’s inhabitants from urban phobias."

[Note the word "phobias", which refers to excessive fears.] That paragraph is by one Jason Stevenson,

Playing Arena Politics[:] Newark's downtown sports arena is the latest flash point in the heated—and long running—debate about the kind of city it should be. A magazine feature update to my 2000 Harvard thesis.

An enclosed space allows display of art in public walkways.

A couple of years ago, in doing online research about the history of the Gateway Center complex, I chanced across a paper by Rutgers, I think it was, but did not find it among early results in a Google search today. It discussed the issue of the sociological reasons behind the design of the complex. I may have mentioned it and linked to it from my blog or my Resurgence City website, but do not recall and don't have the time right now to try to track down that paper. I assume (perhaps wrongly, however), that it is still online. Professor Clement Price, a Rutgers-Newark history prof (and a black man with connections to black militants in his youth), may be able to steer you to appropriate works about the controversy around Gateway Center's being 'walled-off' from the city.
+
In that the Gateway complex was started long before I moved to Newark, I'm afraid I have no more information about its motivations than you can find on your own.

The NJIT student followed up.

Thank you for providing ... information to me. These resources are very helpful to me. Thank you very much!! Do you mind if I keep in touch with you? Another thing is that I will go to my school this coming Sunday to discuss a presentation with my classmate for next week. I do not know whether you will be free to meet before my discussion with my classmate. If possible, maybe we can meet each other. It will be a great helpful to me to get to know Newark more by meeting some people like you who have passions for this city.

Another question, do you know is there any management department in Gateway Complex, in which someone may know about the history of Gateway Complex? The Rutgers professor who you mentioned in your last e-mail I will contact with him next week. Thank you very much!!

To which I replied:

I might be able to meet you some afternoon, but not morning. I'm still fiting to be up and active in the mornings (after many years of working in the evenings and overnite). What time and place did you have in mind?

I believe Advance Realty manages Gateway Center. I don't know if they have materials about the history of the complex, either as part of their website or things they could mail or email to you, but you can explore that with them directly.

He then suggested we meet today but I demurred on account of the cold. I think meeting someone from so far away would be useful to me in seeing the kinds of things that might appeal to potential tourists from Taiwan who might, for instance, be visiting New York. One thing I don't have in building my TourismNewark.org website is an outside perspective.

Speaking of outside perspective, this is the main entrance to the Gateway complex, on Mulberry Street. Note that the two tallest buildings in Newark are reflected in its glass. The new reflects the old.

In any case, I have made good use of my time confined to the house on account of cold, and have not developed "cabin fever" because I'm keeping busy, and because my home office has windows on three sides. I face south when working at the computer, so on a brite day the sun shines before me. I have added substantially to the drafts for my book on spelling reform. My list of words with more than one spelling in traditional orthography is up to 286, not counting entire classes of words that are spelled differently in Britain (-OUR, -ISE, etc.). I'll probably make the full table an appendix, and use only a dozen or so of the most striking (charivari/shivaree, chamois/shammy) as examples within that chapter, which answers the anticipated challenge that traditional spelling may not be clear, but it is consistent from era to era and place to place. No, it's really not.

Tho I am taking very few fotos rite now, for not being willing to venture out into the cold on foto expeditions, I am reviewing fotos already used in this blog to create new slideshows for my TourismNewark website. Each webpage can have a slideshow of up to 50 fotos, and I want to put up at least one slideshow on Newark arts and another on such Newark tourist sites as have not already been covered in the slideshow on the Home page. I may also have a fair selection for a page on Newark churches, and perhaps one on the Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart by itself; possibly also Sacred Heart of Vailsburg by itself. Maybe a museums page, with pix of NuMu and JuMu (the Newark Museum and the Jewish Museum of New Jersey, that is), and the New Jersey Historical Society (tho I'd have to ask them for interior pix, since they don't allow fotos inside). Do we have any other museums or perhaps well-established historical displays within colleges or other institutions that could reasonably be included in a Museums page? And when are we getting the children's museum that I heard about three years ago?

My favorite foto of one of Newark's premier tourist sites, the Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart, as a wedding party exits.

As I review the 7,000 or so fotos (of mine) on my computer that I have used online (and which are thus already in an appropriate size for onscreen display), I may see other categories I can create into slideshows for TourismNewark. If you have suggestions as to categories of Newark attractions that should be included in the TourismNewark site, and suggestions as to particular establishments to include in the TourismNewark lists, with their address, telefone number/s, and website, please advise. We'll be in warm weather soon, and a lingering recession may cause many people to restrict their tourist ambitions to domestic travel. Let's bring them to Newark.

View from the platform for New York-bound commuter trains within Newark Penn Station. Trains take Newarkers to Manhattan, and suburbanites both to Newark and beyond it. The trick is to get some of the commuters to Newark to stay past work to have dinner and see a show, and to get some of the commuters to Manhattan to realize that they can make a stop in Newark on the way home and eat in a great restaurant and see a show for a lot less than they could in Manhattan.

HistDist Restricts Revs

Fotos today are of things I saw on a walking tour of historic Forest Hill sponsored by the Forest Hill Community Association (FHCA) and conducted by the doyenne of Newark tours, Liz Del Tufo, on May 31st, 2008. This tour (at $20 per person, as I recall) has not been conducted every year, but I can recommend it if you hear of one this year.

I mentioned yesterday that James Street doesn't much change in appearance because it is part of a Historic District, in which the exteriors of buildings ordinarily may not be changed. I received an email on January 14th that tells people more about the kinds of restrictions that are placed upon owners of properties in another Historic District, Forest Hill, which I pass along.

I think restrictions on changes to appearance apply to what can be seen from the street, not to areas out of sight, such as this backyard. Don't quote me.

Forest Hill is a designated Historical District

This means what you do to your home must receive approval from the Newark Landmarks and Historic Preservation Commission 973-733-3917 before any permit can be issued by the City Division of Building Permits.

This applies to painting, windows, doors satellite dishes, fences, decks, driveways, pools or any other items outside and possibly inside your home.

For more information contact the Building Permits Office at 973-733-5632.

If you do work without first receiving a permit you can and will be fined.

If you have done any of the items listed above without prior approval remove them now to prevent paying a fine up to $1500 per violation.

Remember what you do to your home not only [a]ffects you but[ ] it [also a]ffects your neighbors.

Need Funds to preserve your home: NJ Historic Trust

If you see violations of the code or work being done without a permit[:] Contact Jeanette Ravelo at 44 Mount Prospect Avenue, Newark, NJ (973) 733-5354

Preserve your home and Preserve our History

The Forest Hill Community Association
www.fhcanewark.org

Our Flickr Page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thefhcanewark/sets/

I don't know what the bunting is for, in that there is no patriotic holiday I am aware of around May 31st.

The City's official website contains a .PDF document about "Living and Working in a Historic District[:] A Guide for Owners of Historic Properties in Newark, New Jersey".

Here you can see Liz, center, with headband, telling us something about the area we were stopped in. She's getting up there, but keeps active physically and intellectually. Keep on trucking, Liz!

I guess I'm glad I don't live in a historic district. It's hard enuf for a person of modest means to do maintenance on an old house without extra burdens being placed upon him (or her). My house was built in 1930, as were, I imagine, a lot of houses in my area, leafy, semi-suburban Vailsburg, in far-western Newark. But there are lots of newer structures mixed in with older houses, and 80 years doesn't qualify for "historic", I suppose. Still, there are things not as old as that, that appear on Antiques Roadshow. I am, I confess, a little irritated that Antiques Roadshow this week is airing a show made in Atlantic City. They've never done any from Newark, the state's largest city. Why the heck not?

I think Liz said that the lovely house in this last foto today was occupied at one time by Marion Davies, an actress best known for her romantic relationship with the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, but I'm not sure.

Archives and Calendars

I have mentioned that I've been working on other things of late, that have reduced the time available for me to work on this blog. I would like to point out to new visitors or only-occasional visitors that, counting this one, there are 1,292 posts in this blog, 7 on this page and the other 1,285 in the archives that are clickable from a long list in the right sidebar, below my profile and the links to other sites of interest. Those many posts are illustrated with about 4,281 fotos that are still showing (not counting a couple of thousand that were erased by AOL when it closed all subscribers' online storage spaces — the last day without those fotos was October 19, 2007; all dates after that have fotos, stored to Picasa). So if you're looking for general information about and fotos of Newark, there is still lots to choose from on days I don't address anything new.

Fotos today are of parts of James Street, in the James Street Commons Historic District of Downtown Newark, taken the same day, April 22, 2008. This first shows regular trees with no leaves yet.

There are also several events calendars in the Links area to the right, in case you are interested in what's happening in Newark — which is quite a lot. There are as well some worthy websites to check out in the other portions of the Links area.

This foto and the next show cherry trees, which put out flowers before they or their neighbors put out a full complement of regular leaves.

I'll update this as I have time and energy, but a lot of the fotos in this blog aren't time-sensitive (that is to say that James Street always looks like this at the same time of year, year after year, because it is a historic district so the exteriors of building cannot be changed). So if you are interested in a particular topic, you can do a Search in the search box at the top left of this blog for that topic. A single unusual word will get the most relevant results. A phrase, like "Sacred Heart", will return all blog entries with those words in it, which will include not just the Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart but also Sacred Heart of Vailsburg, an entirely separate (but still Catholic) church in an entirely different part of the city. "Cathedral" would likely turn up all references to the Cathedral Basilica, tho it would also produce some references to the Episcopal Cathedral, Trinity & St. Philip's. So "basilica" would be a better search term.

If you want to see my pix on any topic entailing a phrase, you can go to Google Image Search. I experimented to see if adding "newarkusa" or "newarkusa.blogspot.com" or "schoonmaker" would eliminate other fotos, but it didn't work. Still, a great many Google Image Searches on many Newark topics will produce a lot of my fotos.

Google Analytics

I mentioned here October 24th that Newark artist Rebecca Jampol told me that I can track visits to this blog by means of Google Analytics, and that I wasn't sure I wanted to know how many, or few, visitors there were. But after some delay, I did sign up for Google Analytics, for this blog and a couple of my other websites, and I find the information pretty interesting.
+
Most visits (88%) are by newcomers, and they don't stay long. Many presumably found this site in a search for something else, checked out the particular item here that related to their main concern, then moved on. But almost 12% are repeat visitors.

More striking to me is this map of the world showing where visitors came from. The online map is faint, so I had my graffics program increase the contrast. The countries shown in green (and black for the U.S.) have registered at least one visit. Online, if I click on a country, I am told how many visits came from it. Note the oddity that not a single visit has originated in Communist China, which has 1.3 BILLION people. But this blog has had 1 visit from little Mongolia, which has only 3 million people. It would appear I am on Communist China's sh*tlist, perhaps because I warned of Chinese hackattacks September 13th, 2008. I'm honored. A person is known as much by his enemies as his friends. Of course it could just be that Communist China blocks all but major websites, but that seems unlikely.
+
As regards the U.S., when I zoomed in on the U.S. map I found that 47 of the 50 states have sent visitors, the exceptions being Wyoming, North Dakota, and Alaska. And to think, I have visited the first two myself. Ah well.
+
I don't know how to interpret some of the data, and it doesn't seem to provide me a way to know where frequent visitors come from (so don't worry that Big Brother is watching you), but what I do think I understand is very interesting. Thank you, Rebecca, for cueing me in to Google Analytics. I have some other sites still to set up and will be interested to see what Google shows about patterns of visits to them too.

Restored SHV Pix

(Note: I backfilled two days of this past week after I uploaded this day's entry, so if you have already seen this post but not those for last Wednesday (about Branch Brook Park) or last Sunday (about people from the Newark Diaspora getting reacquainted with Newark), please scroll down to see them.)

I got an email today that moved me finally to bite the bullet and restore 18 fotos to two posts from 2½ years ago.

My parents were married at Sacred Heart [of Vailsburg] in 1944 as were many of their cousins. They had described the church as magnificent in decor and size and were very proud that their relatives had helped build it. My parents are gone now and ignoring the advice of our relatives my sister, daughter and I visited the church in July 2009 (it was no scarier than the north west side of Chicago near where we live). We were there for a Sunday Mass so we did have access to the inside.

We were upset that this beautiful structure had been allowed to suffer and deteriorate from a leaky roof and broken windows. Do you know of any effort to restore and / or protect this gem of a building (I understand that the old convent is also suffering from neglect)?

The pictures that were to be with your article on Sacred Heart did not appear (big spaces) and I would love copie[s] of both the interior and exterior photos.

Did you take any of the wall of honor from WW2? several relatives had name plates there.

Thank You

I replied:

I haven't been inside SHV for a couple of years, and have heard that much of the time the bulk of the church is closed because of safety concerns. I'm glad you were able to attend mass in the sanctuary rather than a side room. There are actually rumors that the Archdiocese is thinking of closing the church completely. It has already sold the parochial school alongside it, and that is now a North Star Academy charter school. (It is also my polling place for primary and general elections.)
+
The school has a giant cross built into the concrete on the Hazelwood Avenue side. In that charter schools are public schools, I don't know what, if anything, they have done or are going to do to cover up or remove that cross. Newark may have very few Jews left, but it does have a significant Moslem population that may find such a cross offensive on a public school.

I tried to take this nitetime picture with the camera handheld, and it turned out a little fuzzy.

I want to help preserve the church from decay and prevent its closure (it's less than 5 blocks from my house and can be seen from some distance), so will be addressing other emails I have received on this subject in the near future, with other fotos.

Back of former Sacred Heart School seen past part of the former convent. The school was built much later than the church and other structures in the complex, and the architects didn't even try to match the style of the older buildings, preferring to draw a contrast.

I'm glad you weren't scared off from visiting SHV by crazy notions of how dangerous Newark is. Actually, most of Newark is safe day or nite, to locals and visitors, and the area around SHV is one of the multitudinous safe areas (as cities in the United States go).

View of SHV from grounds of St. Mary's Villa, a Catholic retirement home right across South Orange Avenue.

Because yours is at least the third request I have had for the SHV fotos, I have decided to take the time today, finally, to restore all 18 fotos to both blogposts, exterior and interior. Enjoy.

This is the second old blogpost to which I have restored fotos after AOL removed them from the Internet in closing subscribers' online storage space. A few months ago I restored the fotos of the Guyon Building demolition in Harrison for the same reason: I kept getting requests to see the pix, so it was easier to put them back into the blog (easier, not exactly easy) than to round them up and email them each time.

Planning for the Cherry Blossom Fest

I mentioned here on Sunday that I tried to get the dates for the upcoming Cherry Blossom Festival in Branch Brook Park but couldn't find that information, and that I had sent an email inquiry about that to the Branch Brook Park Alliance. Here's the text of my email to the Alliance.

I received email from someone outside Newark who is thinking of going to the Cherry Blossom Festival this spring when an old high school friends flies in, and I went to your website to check the dates so they might arrange the time, but find only a mention of a fundraising event at Nanino's, not anything at all about the 2010 Festival.

Slitely fuzzy foto (and I don't know why) of a court for bocci (or boccie, boccia, or bocce — see why I'm a spelling reformer?) near the Welcome Center in BBPk.

BBPk is best known for the Cherry Blossom Festival, but no one visiting your site now would have a clue as to that. This is your biggest event, but there's NOTHING on your website except maybe fotos of past events. I'm stunned. Aside from the fact that many people from widely scattered areas want to know about the dates of the Festival — which is also not mentioned on the Essex County website — there is the matter of raising money to plant more flowering cherry trees, which should be a year-round drive.

When I was there, I thought this not-yet-completed structure between the welcome center and the bocci court shown above was a roofed bocci court, but now I'm not sure it is long enuf. Anyone?

Am I presumptuous in thinking there will be a Cherry Blossom Festival this year? If I, in Newark, don't know if the event has been discontinued, how are people in the Newark Diaspora around the world (which includes former students at Rutgers and NJIT from places as far away as Indonesia, whom I have heard from) to know to plan a trip this year?
+
Please correct this amazing error, and if there is indeed to be a Cherry Blossom Festival this year, pls let me know the dates, so I can pass the information along. Thank you.

And what is this? A sloping bench for adults (high part) and children (low)? Or is it something for people to lie down on? Note the many small wildflower blossoms in the grass.

Today, I received a reply.

As someone who from time to time visits your blog, it’s an honor to be corresponding with you directly!

I hope you’ve noticed that we have been updating the website every six weeks or so; we’re about to change it and while it will highlight the Gala (a BBPA event and our annual fundraiser), we will also direct visitors to the Festival (which we participate in but do not manage; that’s the County and they are in the process of creating a website just for the Festival). You should see something within the next week.

Branch Brook Park is by far the best-occupied, most-utilized Essex County Park I have seen. Here, some teens, probably from nearby Barringer High School, relax near the lake.

All of this is further complicated by the fact we’re trying to get a totally new website up and running... [original punctuation, not a deletion] it’s 90% designed but still has to be implemented. It will be a vast improvement over the current site.

Hope to see in the park someday.

Phys-ed class or sports team from Barringer High School exercises in the Park, without disturbing pigeons nearby.

I responded:

That the County may manage the Cherry Blossom Festival does not mean that the Alliance should not show information about it prominently year-round, whether the County has created the current year's website or not. A search on "Branch Brook Park" produces your website FIRST: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=branch+brook+park. That means that you are the first line of information about the Cherry Blossom Festival, whether you want to be or not. So it is incumbent upon the Alliance to act as gatekeeper as to info about the Festival and the purchase of cherry trees. If you look at the Google search results page I link to above, you will see that the County website is NOT among the top results, and visitors are looking at a link to Cuyahoga County's "Brook Branch Park" before they might (eventually; how far down?) get to the County's site. Other sites at that results page are quite out of date, one back to 2005.

Small fountain near boathouse seen past flowering shrubs of a type I can't identify. (Unless they are just very young cherry trees, tho I didn't think the County put in saplings that small, only good-sized trees.)

Surely the greatest interest in BBPk is the annual blossoming of cherry trees. That is the audience you must capture, by providing information about the annual phenomenon and the events surrounding it, and you must do that year-round.

Some trash mars this view of the large fountain in the lake. I don't know if cleaning up such litter is part of the Alliance's program, but somebody's got to do it. Ideally, people caut littering (anywhere in the county, since this is a county park) would be compelled to do it as community service (in addition to a hefty fine).

I suspect, tho do not know, that the greatest interest in providing financial support to the Alliance comes from people who want to plant more cherry trees. You MUST give them that information, even if the purchase and planting of cherry trees is not your own project. You can piggyback your own projects onto the tree-planting, but if you don't tell visitors about tree-planting, they will LEAVE your site to look elsewhere, WITHOUT having considered a membership or contribution to any of your own projects.
+
So, when IS the 2010 event to be held? I'd like to mention that info, indeed put it in the template for my blog, along with a link to a website for complete information, be it your site or the County's. Are the dates dependent upon weather forecasts, and thus not known until good long-term forecasts are available that enable a projection of peak bloom? In this day and age, when air travel is so difficult and expensive, most people need to plan WEEKS in advance to get good prices on airline tickets. And we do want to gather in people from the Newark Diaspora, in Florida and elsewhere, don't we? — not just locals who get to the Park by driving or public transit.

Foot bridge framed by Park Avenue road bridge overhead, walkway on lower left.

An occasional redesign of a website might not be a bad thing, tho the casual visitor will see no need for it unless the current design is ugly or hides crucial information. But whatever the new design, the blossoming of BBPk's cherry trees MUST, at all times of the year, be THE most prominent item on your site.

It occurred to me only later that I should have been a little more gracious, as by saying I appreciate his appreciation of this fotoblog. I'm sometimes too purpose-driven, and lack the social graces. That's one reason I like to attend art receptions and such with a friend whose social aptitude is better than mine. In any case, I have not yet heard back as to the dates of this year's Festival, but will give that info here when I get it.

Getting Reacquainted with Newark

I got an email yesterday from a woman in Allamuchy, a township of about 4,000 people just inside Warren County on the far side of Morris County (about 40 miles from Newark).

Hello, I am not a nut or wacko so please don't delete this without reading it!

My family moved from Newark (South 16th Street between 14th & 15th Aves.) in 1963.

I want to get to know the city but don't know where to start, I visited my old neighborhood the other day, visited the Historical Society, Museum, Sacred Heart and St. Lucy's.

By any chance would you be willing to give me some kind of advice or guidance? I don't know what to avoid, where not to walk around alone, etc.

I am 54 years old, female, Italian, and don't know the best way to go about getting to know the city. The couple of people I encountered on my old block did not seem to want to speak to me.

If you do choose to respond, thank you in advance.

The desire to get reacquainted with Newark is more common than some people might think. Two fotos today show the crowd on a walking tour conducted by Jeffrey Bennett, webmaster of the Newarkology website, in August 2008. The Newarkology tours started very modestly, but when The Star-Ledger mentioned one, a big group came out — about 60 people!

In the foto above, the heap in the background is part of what remains from the former Brick Towers complex that Cory Booker lived in before he became Mayor. Bricks and concrete are nowadays ground up into gravel that can be used for backfilling holes, leveling sites, and other construction-related purposes.

I replied:

I don't personally know the area you used to live in, and it's very hard to say what areas are safe, because that varies from one block to another. For instance, areas where drugs are sold may be restricted to one block on each side of a major thorofare (say, parts of South Orange Avenue), and it is probably advisable to stay away from those areas, especially at nite. Drug dealers aren't generally interested in mugging anyone, of course, but fites for turf can involve violence, and one doesn't want to be caught between competing drug gangs. Such activities are generally restricted to very small areas, mainly in residential neighborhoods of low income. But knowing exactly where they are is something non-drug users don't know.
+
There are large parts of Downtown Newark that are pretty safe at all hours, day and nite. This would be the bulk of the area shown in the map of the Downtown Business District that I got years back from the GoNewark.com website. Unfortunately, that map appears no longer to be offered at that site, tho the GoNewark site does link to an online map at NJ.com that shows a smaller area that is safe 24 hours a day: http://www.nj.com/newarkguide/map/cantmiss/. [Note: I did not know until I looked at that map again, that there is a 3D tour clickable from the lower left on that map, which produces a striking, even startling portrait of the skyline! Neato keen.] If you'd like, I can send you the .PDF map of the wider business district which is pretty safe. It is about 3.2MB in size.
+
Most of Newark is safe during daylite hours, but there are parts of the South Ward and Central Ward that are pretty iffy. Again, there is no way to say which areas are chancy, in that it might be that there are two or three bad blocks in an area that is otherwise not bad at all. If I am safe in assuming that you would be driving a car in your explorations, you can keep your doors locked and feel pretty safe — carjackings are virtually unheard-of in Newark — then keep your eyes open for things that don't look quite right. Of course, if you haven't lived in a city for a long time, you may not know what looks off. The Forest Hill area is very safe, as is most of Vailsburg, at all hours. I go everywhere, by car, and take pix of things that strike me. But I lived 35 years in Manhattan, so acquired some street savvy, so can sense when I should probably keep driving.
+
I have found Newarkers more friendly than standoffish, tho some people, few in number, may have a racial chip on the shoulder. This may especially be the case if they are black and think a white person looking around may be thinking about gentrifying a marginal neighborhood, as might force low-income renters out. Already, thousands of poorer Newarkers have felt they had to move to East Orange or Irvington because of rising rents inside Newark. There may also be a language problem, with Spanish- or Portuguese-speakers being simply unable to converse in English rather than being hostile to conversation.
+
My basic question is, what is it you want to see in and know about Newark? If you are interested in the touristic things, like historic sites, museums, galleries, and the like, most of those are in pretty safe areas. If you are thinking of moving back to Newark for sociability and closeness to NJPAC, clubs, and the arts, you should scout the areas around what you'd like to be close to, and the bulk of those are likely to be very safe indeed. Note that I speak as a man, and even an old man with a barely detectable limp is unlikely to attract the kinds of unwelcome attention that a woman might get. If you're looking for the enjoyable things about Newark and feel uncomfortable, perhaps you should have a lady friend, or gentleman friend, accompany you until you know what is safe, and feel safe there.
+
If you have other questions, as to specific places, for instance, do not hesitate to ask. Cheers.

She responded:

Wow, thank you for going through all this effort on my behalf. Truthfully I expected you to ignore me, what a refreshing surprise in my email today. You have given me a lot of info, I will read this a couple times and start out! My old High School girlfriend is flying out to visit me in spring, and I am attempting to time it when Branch Brook is at its best. By that time I hope to get my bearings so I am able to show her around. You have been more helpful than I hoped for, thanks for your kindness to a stranger. If you want to be hired out for a day in the spring at a tourguide's rate, we would be pleased to hire you.

And I replied:

I had hoped to tell you the dates of this year's Cherry Blossom Festival, but the websites of the Branch Brook Park Alliance and Essex County Parks Department where I expected to find that information prominently displayed have not one word about that event. Curious, no? In any case, I sent an email inquiry to the Alliance, and if I hear back as to the dates (assuming the event has not been discontinued), I'll pass the word along. Cheers.

I went to Mapquest to see how far Allamuchy is from Newark, and was again irritated in the extreme to see that Mapquest apparently has some crazy anti-Newark bias. Note that even tho this foto shows, in the black bar at the top of the screen, that the route partly on view in this map is from Newark to Allamuchy, the word "Newark" occurs only in the name of the Airport. At zoom levels farther out, "Newark" does not show at all.

What is going on? What is Mapquest's problem with Newark? It's like the Soviet Union declaring some people "nonpersons" and erasing all trace of their ever having existed. (see the retouched foto of Stalin in the Wikipedia article on nonpersons). The omission of "Newark" from Mapquest maps cannot be accidental, nor happenstantial. Someone has deliberately instructed the Mapquest software not to include "Newark" on maps.

Artists Talk (to Me)

I attended the artists' talks at Rupert Ravens Contemporary ("RRC") last nite but got there very late. I get bogged down in the things I am writing for my spelling-reform book, and other projects, and have to force myself to stop, get ready for things outside the house, and get to them.

I arrived as Loren Munk was addressing the crowd. He had explained one of his works to me at the opening reception October 23rd, so of course I got there just as he was addressing that same piece. But he did go on to talk about another work while I listened.

And that was the last of the 16 artists' talks! Then everybody went down to the first floor for hot cider and baked goodies like pumpkin bread and praline- or brownie-type things with pecans.

There were a couple of big pieces toward the front of the main floor that hadn't been there at the opening reception. I'll save one of them for a blogpost shortly before the show's closing, February 13th, but this foto shows one of them past a case of sculptural works by Linda Ganjian. Fred Gutzeit, one of the artists (from Williamsburg, Brooklyn) who had spoken earlier, was near when I saw this new assemblage of mirrors, feathers, and lites, and he told me it was by Rich Wislocky. I had met Rich at the closing of the 33 Washington show that ended the Newark Arts Council's Open Doors '09 arts whirl, and showed the interior of his glass box as the last foto of my post of November 2nd. Here's an exterior view.

It turns out that I had passed Rich on my way in, without recognizing him. Two young men were outside the entrance, perhaps smoking. (Fie!) One said hi as I passed, but I didn't recognize him and thought it was just another Newarker being friendly. Only after I stopped by his new work did he come up, and push back his waterproof hood, whereupon I did recognize him.

Here, a little kid with a big camera steps out from inside Rich's glass box.

We started to talk, and I realized I should share what he was saying. He had already explained this piece to the people who had arrived on time, so was practiced, and I asked if he'd be willing to explain it in a video that I would put online. He agreed. Here's a still from that video.

I have put the video on Blip.tv, and do not embed it here but merely link to it. The location on Blip is http://blip.tv/file/3095605. The video shows this work to great advantage, because it has flashing lites, and the video shows it from various angles and distances.
+
After the video, which runs a bit more than 10 minutes, I wanted to go inside the glass-walled box I had merely fotograffed from the outside before. I told him I hadn't known, at the opening, if it was OK to go inside, and he said, sure, but a lot of the lites were not in it at present. Rupert had taken the box to a Miami art show, and something went wrong with the electronic controllers on the move back, so it was somewhat stripped down that nite. I assume it will be restored to its full glory sometime soon. Still, it looks pretty good in this picture I took of Rich inside it.

I thanked Rich for the interview and wandered off to view some of the things I hadn't spent much time with at the opening, and to see if Rupert could introduce me to some of the artists who were still there.
+
Artist Gae Savannah was there, and knew the others, so introduced me to some. The first was Joe Lewis (spelled like the British billionaire, not the fiter). I used an RRC foto of one of his works at the end of my post of January 13th. He is presently working at Alfred State, the SUNY College of Technology, in the Southern Tier of NYS, south-southwest of Rochester. That is, 16 miles from nowhere. But he is moving to take a job as something like the art director of Cal State Irvine. I've actually been to that campus when one of my sisters was showing me around Orange County. (NY has an Orange County, but it's named for the House of Orange, the Royal Family of the Netherlands (ancestrally French) that provided the "William" of Britain's married monarchs, "William and Mary". Which is also a college. California's Orange County is thought to be named for the fruit, but may have been named after a pre-existing town within it called Orange in honor of a county in Virginia, which was also named for the House of Orange. How nice.)

Joe uses fotograffic paper with indistinct lite patterns to fill in outlines of ceramic vase shapes. He also weaves strips of fotograffic paper into mats that he incorporates into his works.
+
In this next work, he has cut the woven mat into an oval that looks like a round tabletop that the vase rests on. The fotograf within the shape is taken from a woman's dress. I think it looks like bamboo. He flipped the image vertically. The waist of the dress was actually at the bottom of the vase shape, and the top was the flaring skirt. So now I'm not clear on whether the dark lines are part of a pattern from the skirt or just shadows from folds of material.

Joe had seen my use of a foto of his work, which gave me an entree to ask if he'd be willing to pose for a picture by his favorite work. He said he really doesn't have a favorite. I said that everybody says that but ultimately does settle on one. He protested, no, you pick one. I said no, and he chose this one. I don't know if the reflection of my flash is from any glass that may be in front of the artwork or from the glossy surface of the work itself. I took a protection shot without flash, but this turned out much better, despite the reflection.

Then I spoke with Rosa Valado, whom Gae had introduced me to a bit earlier, and asked if she'd pose by her display of several works on the lower level. The liting is a little dim for good pix there, but we tried. We agreed that she should be in with the group of small wire-mesh works, and she crouched to be closer to the level of the low works.

In the foto above, the pattern of shadows is part of the appeal. We figured that flash would wipe out those shadows, but I wanted to see what would result, so took a flash foto. The shadows are indeed erased, but the increased lite shows more of the colors and forms of the wireworks.

I told her that I liked a large-scale group of half-cylinders that people had congregated by in another RRC show, so had called it a conversation cage. She had apparently seen that mention. I told her I had also seen some of her works in the Viewing Area, a room within RRC with more permanent displays than the regularly changing shows in the rest of the gallery.
+
I asked where she was from, because she has the barest trace of an accent, and she said Spain, and, more particularly, northwest Spain, Galicia (the C of which she pronounced in the Castilian fashion, like the voiceless-TH in "thing").

Rosa pointed to one of the small wire-mesh forms, an eight-walled group of half-cylinders that she called an "octagon", tho in English "octagon" refers only to a shape with eight straight sides. In any case, she said she has a large-scale version of that in wire but would like to enlarge it even more, to the size of a building. That would be an interesting structure to walk around or walk around IN, looking out.
+
We returned to the main floor, where I asked Gae if J.G. Zimmerman was still there. He was. (It occurs to me only now that I never did ask what the J.G. stands for.) He has used one of my fotos of his RRC video on his website, and was happy to pose by that large-format, three-paneled video for my blog. The liting here too was a problem. I first tried a face-front view, which didn't work. Then a profile between panels of the video. I wouldn't know how that turned out until I saw it on my computer screen.

Then we talked about what was being shown in the three panels. I said that the oil tanks in the left panel reminded me of tank farms here in NJ, except that there were so many tanks. It was Saudi Arabia. Yes, I could see that Saudi Arabia might have more oil tanks than New Jersey. The panel on the right was an aerial view of a dense suburban kind of area in the U.S. West. I didn't get to what the third panel was, because as we were talking about how he got the images (satellite fotos) and how they are manipulated (the fotos are moved in a continuous flow downward; it's not an airplane flying overhead relative to them), I noticed the striking pattern of him and his shadow against the video, asked him to hold still, and took this picture.

The "Vessel" show remains on view thru February 13th at Rupert Ravens Contemporary, 85 Market Street (near the corner of Washington Street), 11am-6pm Wednesday – Saturday.