The Tris McCall Report
January 31, 2005
What are you looking over here for? All of the action is over at Critics Poll 2004. Albums and Singles results are up now.
January 27, 2005
I spent much of January reading The Power Broker, Robert Caro's exhaustively-researched, twelve-hundred page vilification of Robert Moses. I mentioned this to some of the cats at the Museum, and to a man, they were all like "what are you doing that to yourself for?" To educate myself on why the New York metro area is so screwed up, I guess, but now that I'm done with it, I see the point. The bullying and intimidation tactics that Moses made synonymous with his name (turning off the heat and hot water, starting demolition on buildings where people are already living, vandalizing properties to decrease their value, burying his opponents by forcing them to fight interminable court battles) would look familiar to anybody who followed the Arts Center controversy. But even if I'd been living on a horse farm in Somerset County, it would have been hair-raising to read the chapter-long story of how Moses destroyed countless neighborhoods and thousands of lives so he could push through the Cross-Bronx Expressway.
The Power Broker is, among other things, a really good history of Twentieth-Century New York. I really didn't know thing one about Vincent Impelliteri or Herbert Lehman before reading this book, and Caro draws a portrait of Al Smith so vivid that it's almost a separate biography-within-a-biography. I'll never look at the Triborough Bridge the same way now that I know its cost in dollars, twisted arms, and in sweat, and the next time I take a ride on the Southern State, I'm going to understand the reason why the overpasses are so low (Moses didn't want poor blacks and Puerto Ricans taking the highways out to the state parks, so he made sure there was no clearance for busses.) This week, when the suits at the MTA were predicting that the C Train was going to be out of service for five years, many New Yorkers wondered why the subway system in the biggest city in the world ran on such antiquated equipment. But I knew why: for thirty years, Robert Moses and the Triborough Authority stood in the way of every attempt to modernize and expand mass transit.
I'm sure that this book is required reading for first-year public planning students -- and for good reason, as they've got to learn what not to do if they want to keep their communities afloat. But The Power Broker taught me two overarching lessons that have nothing to do with urban development. First, like others who walk around all day with a guilty conscience, I think I have a tendency to believe that in a pinch, most humans will help out other humans. I think I wrote several times right here on this site that if Lloyd Goldman could just see the suffering and hardship his policy was causing, his heart would melt and he'd come to the assistance of his tenants. I have always felt that our civic and public leaders at all levels had the capacity to grasp the inherent dangers that go along with wielding power, and that if counseled properly, they'd be careful with the meat axe.
What The Power Broker shows is that this is total bullshit. Robert Moses's story proves that there actually exist powerful bastards who will destroy you just for getting in their way -- that these villains aren't fictional, but are, in fact, some of the same public servants who are popularly called heroes. If you crossed Robert Moses or interfered with his plans to build another of his asphalt monstrosities, he would screw you out of your house, your career, and your life. He did it within the parameters of the law, and he did it with a smile; he loved ruining people. He knew exactly how much damage his policies were doing, and he carefully obscured his blood sport from the public.
Which brings us to lesson number two. For thirty years, Robert Moses pushed everybody around: mayors, governors, councilmen, reformers, people like you and me whose homes happened to be in front of his ever-swinging wrecking ball. Until his hold over power began to slip, none of this was ever reported in the press. Instead, the public image of Moses the selfless public servant was continually fed by sycophants in newsrooms. The New York Times, that alleged beacon of liberalism and honesty, was about the worst of it: no matter what Moses perpetrated, all that they saw fit to print was praise. Caro shows meticulously how this press blackout was effected, and it ought to scare the hell out of anybody who cares about public disclosure: Moses made pals with editors and reporters whenever he could, and bullied and destroyed those he couldn't befriend.
It's easy, I guess, to knock the era -- the Thirties and Forties were the age of heroes and hero-worship, and the Fifties was a time of complacency. But my gut tells that nothing has changed. If the New York Times and the rest of the Gotham media refused to carefully investigate Robert Moses in 1935, chances are, there are plenty of other titanic stories they're refusing to cover in 2005. If one charismatic guy could effect a media blackout just through the force of his personality and his threats, imagine what an entire administration could do.
Several people have recently suggested to me that I've gone too hard on the local press. It's true that I came out the gate swinging this year -- blame it on Nas, my first-thing-in-the-morning inspiration. But there's a difference between reiterating the news and doing journalism, and reading The Power Broker really drove home that difference. Newspapers can be filled every day with the party line, or with rehashed press releases from influential people. For thirty years, that's what New York City newspapers did: they printed whatever Robert Moses told them to print. This is the big city press, now; the reporters who are supposed to be out there slugging away at the power structure. Here in Jersey City, we don't even have that reputation for tough investigation to fall back on. We need to get that reputation. Robert Moses wasn't stopped until insurgent journalists got together and started digging. Our own Jerseyside versions of Robert Moses won't be deterred until writers over here do the same. So if it looks like I'm jockeying the local press to get tougher on the rich and powerful, that's because I've learned a few things over the past year and a half. We can't stop city-wreckers by hoping the municipal government will ride to the rescue. Nothing changes for the better until there's public pressure to make a change happen -- and that public pressure won't happen until we're all better informed.
January 25, 2005
Steven Fulop ran for Congress in 2004. Although he was backed by Glenn Cunningham's political organization, his bid against Robert Menendez was never supposed to be a serious threat to the Congressman's career. Most of the area hacks I talked to considered it an outgrowth of the HCRDO-HCDO feud, and a way to put a burr in the saddle of Menendez. But the Congressman himself took it seriously enough to press flesh all over town. Robert Menendez took the measure of his primary challenger, and deemed him worthy of a fight.
If Cunningham hadn't died in May, would Fulop have done better? (He was trounced, by 82% to 18%) We'll never know, but for a few weeks here in Downtown Jersey City, Fulop fever was running wild: businesses all over Grove Street had the young Iraq vet's poster in their doors, the "beat 'Boss' Menendez" trucks were out in force, and people were talking about the challenger as a budding player in local politics. I never seriously thought that Fulop could unseat Menendez, and he probably didn't either. But he hasn't let that defeat knock him out, or discourage him. Eight months later, Fulop is back, and running for a more attainable office: Ward E Councilman.
It might look like Fulop has found an appropriate weight class, and a good public application of his leadership skills. But what strikes me are the similarities between the Congressman he attempted to beat in '04, and the Councilman he's running against in 2005. Just as Robert Menendez is the highest-ranking Latino official in Jersey state politics, there's no more prominent Latino politician in Jersey City than Ward E chief Junior Maldonado. Both Maldonado and Menendez are considered conscientious and hardworking incumbents even by those who don't like them. And both have attained the power that comes with a certain level of seniority: just as the national Democratic party listens to Menendez, we've got reason to suspect that Maldonado has Mayor Healy's ear.
I commend Steven Fulop for getting a website up quickly. He seems earnest, intelligent, and likeable, and I am glad he's involved in Jersey City politics. But before we throw over a proven asset in favor of a new face, it's incumbent upon Fulop to tell us why we need a change in leadership in Ward E. I also believe that it is salutary for Ward E (and the rest of the city, for that matter) to have an outspoken Latino leader representing the City's largest ward on the Council. This isn't to say that our Councilperson must be Latino; that's not what I'm arguing here at all. I just mean that it's been good for us to have a voice from the Latino neighborhoods in a position of such prominence, and that it would be a shame for us to lose that voice.
I have my own personal reasons for this position -- Maldonado is, easily, my favorite figure in Jersey City politics. But I don't give that designation out capriciously. I've given it after careful consideration, and after watching Councilman Maldonado in action for the better part of a year. I am always open to persuasion, and I can imagine that Fulop, if given enough time, could convince me that he's our better bet. But for now, it's on Steven Fulop to do that hard convincing.
January 24, 2005
John Martins wrote to me and let me know where to pick up the Hudson Weekly. Look for it at: Ground, Basic, Baker Boys, LITM, Isabella’s Cafe, White Star, The Merchant, Tia Marie’s, Uncle Joe’s, Balance, and The Daily Grind.
I also want to give Ricardo Kaulessar his props for getting an interesting interview with Gerry McCann. Journalism around here has come a long way in a year. Now if somebody could just drive a stake through the heart of the undead Current, maybe we can free up some advertising dollars for publications that are actually interested in printing the news.
January 23, 2005
A guy named John Martins, who I don't know, dropped off the three latest issues of a new publication he's involved with in my mailbox this weekend. It's called Hudson Weekly, and no, I've got no idea how to get a copy. There's no masthead, and almost all of the articles are credited to "HW Staff". It's printed tab-style on crummy newspaper, and if anybody is buying space with these guys, I don't see the adverts. Right now, the name is a bit of a fib -- they might be hoping to switch to a different format soon, but for now, the Weekly is bi-weekly.
But Hudson Weekly has something that nobody else around here does: actual journalism. The unattributed pieces are intelligent, well-researched, well-written, and even have a little edge to them.
There are many reasons to feel hopeful about this new publication. For one thing, their listings section is both comprehensive and informative. We've been trying to get good listings in Chilltown for three months now, and we're coming up empty. Not only does Hudson Weekly do an excellent job of rounding up happenings, they also make critical picks and contextualize them with some real copy. Music pieces have been responsible: one on Karen Davis, one by Brooke Behrens (possibly related to Ahn Behrens?) on Hero Pattern, and a big picture of Amy Speace on the preview page.
But is anybody seeing this yet? I did a cursory walk around the neighborhood on Saturday after getting these, and I couldn't find a copy of Hudson Weekly anywhere. Meanwhile, the Hudson Current continues to pour copies of their shoddily-written farce all over our streets by the bucketful. The Weekly does everything that the Current ought to do, and if this publication could just get a little traction, it should be the one that can finally supplant the Reporter's folly as our local arts paper -- at least in Jersey City.
I'll continue to look for issues around town, and if I can find a stand somewhere, I will let you know where it is.
January 20, 2005
Folks will tell you that if the city had gone ahead seized 110 First Street by eminent domain back when they had a chance, we wouldn't be arguing whether the PAD was a viable district. That's true, but it's hardly the only missed chance in this town. For instance, why the hell isn't the Jersey City Museum in the Arts District? What is it doing on the odd side of Van Vorst Park, inside an antiseptic pillbox of a building that looks from the outside like the office of a failed dotcom? Just to rub a little salt in, every time I'm in this joint, I have to hear a guilt trip from the staff about attendance. Low turnout is not their fault, but they're not exactly located in a good walk-in spot. If they'd opened up in one of the warehouses by 111, not only would artists have constantly been in and out of their doors, but they would have been supporting the PAD vision and (ahem) concentrating our aesthetic resources. We have to start speaking with one voice. Having an arts district over here and an art museum somewhere else is a perfect example of the kind of conceptual incoherence that hobbles us.
No gripes tonight, though, since the museum has decided to dedicate an upstairs gallery to Shandor Hassan's Manhattan Project. I am sure the spot will be hopping, and not (just) because I helped out with the publicity. This is a general opening, which means no more Peter Paone and Chakiah Booker: they'll be some new exhibits up on the white walls and in the alcove downstairs. Presumably the press will be here. A museum means authenticity to many: spectators will take art that hangs in a museum more seriously than art on the walls of your favorite restaurant. I don't think Shandor Hassan is necessarily interested in that sort of monumentalization, but it's still nice to be recognized.
I press through the glass doors ten minutes early. The staff is running around, making last-minute preparations, decking out the canapes, opening bottles of wine, straightening frames. I'm just kidding about that last part; nobody is really straightening frames, that's just in the movies. A stiff doorman asks if I want to hang my big black beachball of a winter coat. Thanks, I think I'll hold on to it for now. I take off up the stairs; nobody is here yet, and this'll be a good chance to check out Shandor's work without worrying whether I'm blocking the sightlines of any little old ladies.
The exhibit occupies a corner. About a hundred and fifty photographs -- five rows tall and roughly thirty columns wide -- stare flatly back at the viewer. They're fragmentary images, yet oddly whole: bridges, apartment buildings, mounds of dust, electric lights. The colors and textures of each blend into their neighbors -- the terraced lights of an office tower become the striations on a dirt road. Snow and dust blanket automobiles, buildings, roads. There's a post-apocalyptic quality to even the most innocuous shots. Shandor knows how to tease eerie electricity out of daylight, and make indoor illumination seem explosive. Here's his semi-famous image of a simple one-family house with electric light pouring out the door with an almost thermonuclear intensity; there are his weirdly miniaturized cars and condominiums obscured by trash heaps. My favorite photo is included here, too: a blurry warehouse, angled streetlamps, a suspension bridge in the distance, and a midday sky that appears to be stained with fingerpaint.
I compare Shandor's show to the Ed Fausty exhibition at the Meagher Rotunda. Where Ed's images confront the viewer on their easels and threaten to spill out beyond their edges, Shandor's shots seem poised, self-contained, geometrically arranged windows into a surreal world. Here are two complimentary but wholly individual views of the Warehouse District -- one animated, invested with warmth and human scaled, filled with gentle washed-out tones and evidence of human occupancy, and another that is frozen in time, extraterrestrial, vibrant with impossibly bright jewel-box colors, and very nearly radioactive. This has been a hell of a week for Jersey City photography.
Downstairs, the museum has started to fill up. Jim Testa is here, probably lured by my promotion. ProArts has its contingent in the house: Kathryn Klanderman and Patrick Boyd, Charles and Annie Kessler, and new vice president Megan Klim. To my surprise, everybody seems to have seen Chilltown, and I'm getting congratulated on the magazine. Just wait until next month when my interview with Kathryn runs, folks.
And the 111 tenants are out in force -- smiling, talking about the future, making plans. If they seemed down a couple of weeks ago at the Courthouse, there's almost no trace of despondency now. This is the Arts Center community as I know it best: optimistic, energetic, and essentially undefeatable. With the courtroom ordeal behind them, these guys are ready to get back to their palettes, their darkrooms, their real work. We won't be able to call them 111 artists for very much longer, and some of them we'll be losing for good -- local developers won't have tenants' leader Bill Rodwell to kick around anymore. We're going to miss him terribly. But other groups from the building are branching out and finding space elsewhere. Maggie Ens, Marc Sloan, and several others (including Ed, I've heard) are taking space by the Garfield stop in Bergen-Lafayette. Nicola Stemmer, Jeff Baker, and Elizabeth Onorato have found studio space in Marion. The community is dispersing, but against the odds, the members are sticking together and hanging on to Jersey City. As Lee Perry told me on Tuesday, it's not over, it's just evolving.
January 19, 2005
If you don't know Charles Kessler, he's a longtime Jersey City activist and former ProArts president who has been tireless in his advocacy of the PAD. He's also very good about correcting this site when I don't have my facts straight -- which is often enough. Anyway, here's a letter from Charles:
Last Thursday I got a report from one of the artists in 111 First Street of a deluge of rain coming in to the third floor (of a five-story building) and a lot of plaster was falling down. The water was draining through where the roof flashing was removed on the SE corner (Washington and Bay Streets) of the building. I called another artist in the building who confirmed it. Apparently the thin plastic sheeting that was used to seal the demolition area had blown away. The Historic Commission allowed for the careful removal of the roof flashing but they also required the sealing up of the area to prevent just this type of water damage.
Management claimed the entire roof was leaking but it was pointed out to them that the rest of the roof was dry and you could see the water pouring in from the SE corner where the flashing was removed. After complaints to the building management a dumpster was placed on the third floor to catch some of the water. If this is what is happening when the artists are still there to observe, what will happen when the artists leave the building?
People should be aware that for apparently good legal reasons, two of the major protections against demolition by neglect are being taken out of the Powerhouse Arts District Redevelopment Plan. Nevertheless the city has enough tools to prevent demolition by neglect if they have the will to employ them. Chapter 254, the Property Maintenance Ordinance, allows the city to inspect any building as many times as it wants, and any city employee can be designated to inspect properties so you don’t even need to use our overworked building inspectors.
Sometime in March the owner of the building goes before Judge Gallipoli to try to get approval to demolish the building. Since we can no longer rely again on the artists in the building to come up with thousands of dollars in legal and engineering fees to defend the building, it is now up to the city to fight to preserve it. I hope the City of Jersey City will put up as good a defense as the private citizens did.
I would just like everybody in the municipal government reading this to know that I volunteer for the job of temporary building inspector. I'll go by the Arts Center ten times a day if I am asked to. Mr. Healy, deputize me.
January 18, 2005
Run, don't walk, to the John Meagher Rotunda at City Hall. Ed Fausty's photographs there are absolutely world-rocking. I had thought that this was going to be another exhibition of his rooftop photography; always welcome, but also familiar to me by now. It wasn't. Instead, Ed has is showing shots of the post-demolition interior of 111 First Street. He makes the destruction look gorgeous, because that's what he does -- he can coax the beauty and the personality out of any inanimate object. But he never lets you forget the violence behind the disassembly and the cruelty that animates the cranes.
In a beautifully-written personal note that accompanies the photographs, Ed apologizes for his preoccupation with toilets. But the bathroom fixtures and plumbing that stands, stark and alone, in the middle of the deserted studio need no deep explanation. It's striking to see so many fixtures, so many distended fuse boxes, wires leading to nowhere, dangling lights and open pipes: it is as if the entrails of this building have been torn open and frozen in time under electric light. Fausty photographs are usually radiant with warmth; these are curiously chilly. Instead of shooting into the light, it's the nighttime that seeps between the cracks in these bricks.
The color palette hasn't changed a bit, though. He still manages to make alchemy from his weird extraterrestrial green, the washed-out red of faded brick, the blinding hot-blue of daylight, and the institutional off-white of old industrial paint. The menagerie of broken fixtures, unwanted objects, and old gorgeous what-is-its are back as well. But animate figures populate these landscapes, too -- a child with a toy-machine head, a dog curled up on the floor of a soon-to-be-vacated studio, a construction crew huddled guiltily like coal miners in a hole in the wall. A panoramic shot, taken from the northside of the Arts Center, frames the last wall of 110 against the red brick and asphalt expanses of the slick new waterfront development. In open mockery of the city government, the workmen have spraypainted "historic landmark -- ain't I pretty" in huge letters on the building they're tearing down. For the next month, the politicians at City Hall are going to have to look at that image, and answer that charge for themselves, and ask themselves why they were so powerless to stop the bullying. A small comfort, sure, but these days we will take what we can get.
January 17, 2005
This is officially Awesome Photograph Week in Jersey City. Tomorrow night, a display of Ed Fausty's works will open in the Meagher Rotunda of City Hall. On Thursday, Shandor Hassan's Manhattan Project show opens at the Jersey City Museum. I will be there for both shows.
January 13, 2005
Despite my best efforts (and my wretched, wretched web design), this site keeps getting lumped in with the blogs. I'm very close to saying screw it, throwing in the towel in my completely unnoticed fight against web standardization, and just installing Wordpress. But dammit, before I do, I want my cookie. I would like a little credit for making this entire site out of Dreamweaver, coding it all in HTML, and refusing to indulge in all the blogrolling, RSS feed, and trackback garbage that is currently ruining the Internet. Never mind that my site does not look good. At least it looks different. I never thought it was possible for a platform as expressive and open-ended as the 'net to become visually boring, but it has.
As for the Journal article itself, it omits my favorite Jersey City website (also not a blog) -- but that was my own fault, as I should have mentioned it when I was talking to the reporter. Instead, I drew a blank, and the only thing I could think of that was updated regularly was The Illuminated Donkey. My own stirring hyperbole about the County Executive continues to have legs, which I think I could have figured since the Healy endorsement was the moment at which people who aren't used to the gonzo rock critic mode began to read this space in substantial numbers. They probably weren't used to my slash-and-burn style, and took the old opprobrium a little more seriously than I meant it. Anyway, I'd like to say that not only am I now down, on a personal level, with Tom DeGise, but that he took up my challenge and, unprompted, sent in a 2004 Critics Poll. So whether or not he considers me part of the media, we're super-cool. There's only one person in this town whose hand I won't shake, and I'm not going to tell you who that person is.
Elsewhere, when I said to the Journal that I was absolutely sure I had nothing to do with Healy's win, I meant that. (The interview was conducted a few months ago.) But lately, so many different people have written to me to say that they voted for Jerramiah Healy because of my endorsement that I've begun to have an odd, uncomfortable feeling of power. Many of those people now clearly regret following my advice, and are probably looking at me as some sort of demented Pied Piper. I always knew that if Healy was elected, I was bound to take some heat, because it's always easier to throw stones from the periphery than it is to make excuses for an incumbent. Like most others who write for their own ill amusement, I make a much better agitator than I do a flack.
So I don't really think it's accurate to say that I came away from my meetings with DeGise or Healy or anybody else with a substantially-changed view of government. If you read this site closely, you know I have always had a grudging sympathy for the HCDO -- and that includes some for a Congressman who would certainly not recieve a hate-post from Downtown Jersey City with surprise akin to a splash of cold water. No, it's my relation to those figures that's changed. Where once I didn't know any of these guys, now I've, at the very least, shaken hands with many of them, introduced some of them at public gatherings, and determined to my satisfaction that they're all human beings. Since you probably know I'm the guy who recorded "It's Not The Money, It's The Principle", and "Robert Menendez Basta Ya!", and "The Ballad Of You And Me And Bret Schundler", you know I was never far from that position in the first place. But the reporter didn't know that -- and I can't blame her. My kind of rock is not for everybody.
Yesterday evening, I defended Mayor Healy, and insisted that he shouldn't be blamed for the loss of the Arts Center when so many other public officials had contributed to its weakening. After reading through the reactions to my latest post, I want to make it clear that I believe that Healy's refusal to shoulder at least some of the legal fees for the fight against partial demolition at 111 was blameworthy. The Tenants Association shouldn't have been forced to divert desperately-needed money from their legal fund. Protecting the integrity of the historic structure was the City's responsibility. Jerramiah Healy should have seen to it that the City's attorneys handled the defense in conjunction with the tenants' team, and he should have picked up the bill. The landmarking ordinance is municipal law, and I think that while it's unrealistic to expect Healy to be visionary about the Warehouse District, we absolutely must insist that he protect and preserve the visions of others. That's why we elected him: we believed he'd uphold these laws, and enforce them to the best of his ability. In this case, he did not.
That said, it's unclear to me whether any other municipal leader would have done otherwise. The trouble here is that our choice isn't between Healy and some theoretical champion of the arts and sound public planning, it's between Healy and the other politicians who could concievably be elected Mayor of Jersey City. I'm going to be scrupulous and vigilant about holding Healy to his promise to protect the PAD and warehousing ordinances, but I don't think it's wise to pillory this Mayor until we've got an alternative figure to turn to. Right now, I don't see that figure, so until further notice, Mayor Healy has my support.
January 11, 2005
I've been getting a few versions of the following letter:
Thoughts on Healy to date? You wrote quite the endorsement prior to the election. Was curious whether you are still supportive given the events at 111.
The short answer: yes. I think Mayor Healy has gotten off to a decent start. But elected officials are always on thin ice with me, and Mr. Healy is no exception here.
But people don't write me for short answers. So here's the long answer:
For personal reasons, I would have loved to have seen Mayor Healy try to take down Lloyd Goldman. Just as it always was personally gratifying to me to watch Harvey Smith attempt to punch above his weight, it would have been nice to hear Healy get in some parting shots against the landlord who had done so much to ruin the Jersey City community I care about the most. If he had, that would have greatly improved by opinion of Jerramiah Healy, the man.
I am not sure it would have improved my opinion of Jerramiah Healy, the politician.
Just as I don't want my star leftfielder crashing into the wall during a meaningless June game, I do not want my mayor wasting political capital by picking fights he cannot win. From my perspective, by the time Jerramiah Healy took office, the battle to save the community at 111 was well over. Judge Theemling was never going to rule that the artists were residential tenants. The minute this dispute hit the courts, I felt it was going to take a miracle to pull the Arts Center out of the fire -- and I don't expect elected officials to be miracle workers. Once the case was thrown into the court system, the only way for the municipal government to challenge the deep pockets of New Gold was to take up the legal battle themselves. That would have meant a pretty huge expenditure, and the city still would have lost the case once Theemling ruled. I would have applauded the politician who took up that challenge, but in my heart, I would've believed he was nuts.
Frustrations need a focus, and the sitting mayor always makes a good lightning rod. Since the ruling, Mr. Healy has taken a beating from arts groups. Me, I am not an arts group, and I think that blaming Jerramiah Healy for the loss of the 111 community is like blaming the last man off the Titanic for the sinking of the boat. It took a village -- and several administrations' worth of bad moves -- to lose an Arts Center. Never did I seriously believe that Healy, Smith, or anybody else in this town had the stomach for an eminent domain fight. The practical difference between the two: Smith would have agonized longer, and been nicer when he said no.
Friendliness counts for something. But I do not count on my elected officials to be kind. I expect friendliness from friends, and I expect politics from politicians. By refusing to equivocate, and by stating his intentions and positions clearly, Jerramiah Healy did what I expected him to do: make a firm, straightforward assessment and stand by it. While it is hardly courageous to shut the door on a beleaguered arts community that everybody else in town had knocked around, there are many in this city (including me) who loved the Arts Center, and who wanted more than anything else to see it preserved. Healy didn't bullshit us, or equivocate, or try to spin or sugarcoat his stance. He promptly decided the city couldn't afford this fight, and he said so.
Do I think that fiscal assessment was correct? I don't. But then what the hell do I know? -- I'm not a public accountant, and I don't have the books in front of me. Unless I am ready to call the Mayor a liar, I have to take the word of his public officials. Hey, I hear the whispers, too: Healy supposedly took money from developers to "sell out" the building. I just don't buy it. Why would the developers bother? They had the artists pinned, and the courts stacked in their favor, and they knew it. I am sure Mayor Healy knew it, too; his cooperation wasn't necessary for New Gold to get what it wanted.
Healy started out on the sidelines. I believe he recognized that, and quickly assessed the costs of suiting up and jumping into a losing ballgame.
The PAD is another thing altogether. While it's hard for you and me to imagine the District working without the community at 111 First Street, Mayor Healy is a judge from the Heights who probably wouldn't know Ed Fausty from a Price-Pfister faucet. We didn't elect him to come up with a visionary plan for the Warehouse District -- we elected him to enforce the plan that other visionaries have put in place. We now need to hold Mayor Healy up to that expectation. We have to look very carefully at all the decisions he makes from here on out, and we can't tolerate any lax enforcement of these regulations. The Healy Administration must be judged not on the Arts Center controversy he inherited and then dispensed with, but on his ability to uphold the spirit and letter of the PAD and landmarking ordinances.
Mayor Healy has stated several times that he intends to protect the integrity of the Historic District and the PAD. Over the next four months, Mr. Healy will have ample opportunity to prove his fidelity. We'll be watching.
January 6, 2005
Shandor Hassan has a exhibition of photos, sculptures, and found objects that's opening at the Jersey City Museum on January 20. I'm helping him out with publicity. That means: hey, you, reading this, please click here and find out all about it -- and then set your calendar accordingly.
January 5, 2005
The first issue of Chilltown is on the street, and that means I'm bracing myself for new and improved versions of the letter I get every other week: you know, that one about how I ignore the rest of Jersey City and only focus on the Downtown. Never mind whether it's true or not -- as long as I continue to be a white guy, which will surely be forever, I will always be sorta suspicious to many in a majority-minority city. I take these complaints and comments seriously, especially since I'm now doing some journalism that I can't hop online and revise at my leisure. Since I appear to have stumbled into the editor's chair for this magazine, I believe I have a responsibility to be as fair as I can be.
But that doesn't mean I have a responsiblity to overcompensate. There are major planning projects going on elsewhere in Jersey City, like Journal Square, the West Side by NJCU, and the Main Street redevelopment on Monticello Avenue. But none of these stories have the juice that the Arts District does. I acknowledge that anything can be elaborated in narrative form, sure, but some items have a richness of cultural association that can't be approximated. Here you've got artists, planners, big-money developers, new businesses, land-grabbers; all angling in on a small piece of property and, whether accidentally or not, tripping each other up. The other redevelopment plans are stories, but this is a Story.
People forget that I've lived in Hudson County for close to fifteen years. For most of that time, I was up on the Palisade: my own commercial downtown was Central Avenue in the Heights. That's where I went to get my groceries, do my laundry, grab a cookie at Goehrig's Bakery. I love the Heights a lot; i am sure there is plenty of unrecognized action in Ward D. But you've got to twist yourself into a pretzel to make the case that the scene up there compares in any way to the Downtown. People who go back with this website to the very beginning might remember I actually did hold that pose for awhile. It can't be done forever.
So write that letter if you absolutely must. I am listening, and I am very mobile -- if you've got something going on in another part of town, tell me about it, and chances are I will show up and cover it. But what you aren't allowed to do is slam me for writing about the things I know about without telling me about any alternatives. If you're going to take five minutes to curse me out for ignoring your block, please take another five to let me know what's going on there that I ought to be interested in. If you want to say that the "real" action is happening elsewhere in town; fine, I believe you, as a direction. Give me some specifics, and I'll pay attention.
The problem is always the same: it's that old Jersey thing. Here in Jersey, people don't really want publicity. What we really want is to be able to hate others for getting publicity. If those others are somehow assimilable to the ruling class, or, better still, if they somehow look like New Yorkers, that's just gravy. We can then spend all our time disparaging the popular kids, and shut our doors to them and make fun of them, all the while nursing those big chips on our shoulders about how we're ignored, and how we're the secret cool stuff. That way, we get to hide behind our anonymity and pretend that we're the best, and we never have to lay anything on the line, or let anybody into our little closed circle.
Go ahead, prove me wrong.
January 4, 2005
So what's left in the Arts District? 110 is dust, and 111 soon will be. If Lloyd Goldman is allowed to build a tower on the Mothership lot at Washington and First, it will separate the Powerhouse from the district that bears its name. The visual continuity of the neighborhood goes right out of the window, and the justification for landmarking the area follows. It's going to be very hard to make the case to federal and state historic agencies that the Warehouse district is a historic jewel after two of its centerpiece structures have been knocked over.
The hope now is that the District can somehow be re-seeded with artists. The Powerhouse Arts District ordinance actually has a major provision for this. Developers in the district must market their properties exclusively to artists during the first three months that they're on the market. Yeah, I'm not sure either how enforceable this is -- especially when the city shows no real resolve about sticking to any of the other particulars of the PAD. Still, there it is, right on the books. As Jerramiah Healy once said about the District itself, I hope this works.
Sadly, almost nobody at 111 will be able to afford to stay in the District. It's doubtful they'd want to, anyway: if I'm going to have a hard time walking down First Street once the wrecking crews have had their way, I can't even imagine how the artists are going to feel. It's also depressing to stay somewhere you've been forced out of -- especially a place you helped build.
New residents in the District, especially those who've bought into the expensive complex at 140 Bay Street, may or may not even know they've moved into the PAD. 140 Bay wriggled out of the exclusive marketing period, and nobody knows how many of its tenants will be involved in the arts. It's possible that some of the new tenants won't even be particularly tolerant of the arts, and will start complaining about the racket from Uncle Joe's across the street from the minute they move in.
159 2nd Street might be a little more promising. This is a brand new development, and right now, it's little more than just a sign on the street. The units here are being advertised as live/work, and the developers seems to be a general understanding of the needs of visual artists. But these aren't rental spaces, either: they're condominiums starting at $300,000. As my man Dan McGorry once said, that's a lot of paintings. The municipal government has set aside seven units to be sold to artists at that old ghost "below market rate"; what that means is anybody's guess, as are the identities of the lucky seven artists.
At the peak of its occupancy, there were more that 150 artists living and working at 111 First Street. You can't create a community like that seven units at a time. Other projects at the old A&P building (150 Bay) and the elusive 142 Morgan have been discussed, but I don't know yet how close they are to completion, or whether any local artists are going to be able to afford the prices. If the PAD is going to work, it's going to have to be done piecemeal: a few artists here, a few there, struggling back toward what we've lost.
January 3, 2005
The new year begins with a formality and a postscript: all the tenants at 111 First Street must vacate by March first. No last minute miracles, no courtroom drama, no government reprieves -- just a cold, quick divorce between Jersey City and its Arts Center. The wealthy benefactors never materialized, the wealthier adversaries never budged, and the municipal government -- as we long suspected -- didn't have the stomach or the pockets for the fight. Here at the bitter end, the Tenants Association was paying huge legal fees out of their own fund, with no help from the city, the state, or any interested NGO. The tenants kept it up as long as they could, but everybody knew that the outlay was unsustainable.
None of the politicians or city planners who have benefitted from the presence of the Arts Center in Jersey City turned up. No one was there from the municipal government or the Planning Office -- nobody who milked PR from the passage of the PAD came to show support for the people who made the District possible. None of the recent developers in the Warehouse District -- all of whom used the proximity of a "vibrant arts area" to shill their properties -- came to say thank you to the community they exploited. Used by so many for so long, the 111 First Street community stood, at the final hour, alone.
And maybe that was the best way to go down: starkly, without any illusions or misconceptions of loyalty or fair play. Certainly it was instructive to Citizen Me. It probably is always best to proceed as if poetic justice is unattainable. The government has no interest in redressing wrongs, or giving a hand to old friends and partners in need. Businesspeople here are out to make a couple of bucks, and then retire to Bridgewater. There's no recourse for those who get caught in the crossfire. All you can do is the best you can for as long as you can, and hold the line until they finally break you.
About 2004:
December, November, October, September, August, July, June, May, Scumbaguette, March, February, January.
About 2003:
