A quaint place on a quiet street May 2, 2024
I had to go to Journal Square yesterday to cover a protest held at the start of rush hour, always a dicey issue since I’m living two and a half miles further north than when I lived at the top of Jersey City.
We moved to the Neighboring Mayor’s city in the summer of
2016, just about the same time our poet moved across the river to New York
City.
I’m still not certain if her move was a reaction to mine.
I was motivated by a pending revaluation in Jersey City that
would have massively increased our property taxes because we lived on a double
lot. We put the house on the market before the reval hit and thus got a buyer
right away.
The house we bought was owned by the former police chief, his
family house in which he grew up and wanted a buyer that would not knock it
down to build luxury rentals.
He mistakenly gave me credit for putting him on our publication’s
power list back in 2011-12, when in fact it was our poet who did so.
I didn’t correct his error.
It’s a quaint little house on a quiet little street, with
two of the busiest streets in the county only a block either side of us.
It is also two blocks from the light rail station, which I
mostly use to get around, although yesterday, I decided to take JFK Boulevard
instead. Because bus service is so irregular in this neck of the woods, I
usually walk down to 30 th Street (slightly more than a ten block walk) to
catch one of the puddle jumpers that makes regular trips between New York and
Journal Square.
This time, I didn’t have to walk more than a block before
the NJ Transit bus arrived – although because it comes so infrequently, there was
standing room only and jockeying for seats whenever someone got off and before
someone new could get on.
Traffic sucked the whole way making me grateful I had taken
public transportation regardless of how uncomfortable.
There are easier if somewhat more circularous routes from
where I am to Journal Square, such as the light rail to 2 nd street
in Hometown and a long walk up the hill behind Christ Hospital, or if I am truly
lazy, the light rail to Exchange Place and then the PATH to Journal Square
(which is the route I took back).
I under dressed deliberately, assuming that I would be
overheated with any walk, and as it turns out, the summer-like temperatures stayed
until I got home later.
Journal Square isn’t the same Journal Square I first
encountered decades ago, but a new mid-town Manhattan, with a massive new court
house and massive towers filling up every inch of available space.
For me, it is hideous. But not to the construction workers,
whose protest I went to cover. Each floor of each tower means jobs for them,
and good wages (if they are union as they guys and gals were). But the madness of
Jersey City recreating itself brings all of the pain of progress previous generations
suffered, out with the old, in with the new, even when some of us still like
some of the old, and felt a real loss when good got bulldozed down with bad and
something else, something starkly alien is put in their place.
At the end of the day, however, I got to go back to my quaint
place on our quiet little street, where we are – for the moment – immune to
change, something we know just can’t last.
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