The Jersey Citoyen

A couple of pictures around Jersey City. Click to enlarge.

This is the usual shot of Liberty Harbor, only now the fence is gone so you can walk around the street.



This will most likely be the style of the building that I want.



Here's a skewed shot of the plot they plan on putting the building on. Note the blank face of the neighboring brownstone.



This is the Boys & Girls club behind the plot. This is the one eyesore in the Liberty Harbor development. The question is how bad it is. Enough not to buy the condo?



This is the view over the plot from the parking lot of the B&G. Notice the beautiful red tree right in front.



This is the New York facing direction from the plot, at ground level. Notice in the distance the World Financial Center buildings and some others in Lower Manhattan. The view of the Freedom Tower, etc. would be stunning. The large building is the Goldman Sachs tower on the NJ Waterfront.



Here's a view from the front door on Grand St. down Grove St. towards the PATH station. To get a sense of how far away the station is, the buildings at the end of the street are the block after the station.



Here I switch to Flickr to upload the pictures b/c blogger was just hell. Click on them and then click the magnifying glass w/ a plus sign in it to get a larger view.

This is the view from Marin Blvd one block down Grand St. of the construction site. We can see the ugly side of the B&G and many unfinished buildings. Over the next few years they're going to fill in this entire plot with development.



Between the Gull's Cove (the giant Condo building) and the developed portion of liberty harbor they've finally put in new roads. Only the sidewalks are paved so far. I think the square in front of me here is going to be a park!



Here's a view of that same square which sits behind the B&G. That building really is hideous, except the roof is kinda cool.



Finally I'm including a video just to give you a better sense of space. This also has a few shots of the light rail and construction site.

In Jersey City! Unbelievable!

Imagine, the Jersey Citoyen returns from a terrific jazz festival in Montreal to find this done to my bike:


What kind of asshole takes the wheels off someone's bike? Just to prevent me from riding around town with my girlfriend for a few days? Fortunately, the BORB* is still in good shape:


I also noticed some signs of perhaps more drastic vandalism down the street:


This is the unmistakable broken glass from a car window. So despoilers are hitting cars now too? You'd think the local law enforcement would make this their top priority, rather than busting local music shows. But change is slow.


* Stands for Big Orange Road Bike. Get it?

With enough reflection and review of beautiful urban landscape, the Jersey Citoyen has finally figured out the main problem with the buildings in a previous post. They are incomplete. This incompleteness is rampant in new developments: beautiful (or at least decent) fronts to buildings but a reverse side composed of garage, vinyl, and blank brick wall. I claim that this incompleteness embodies the putative American lack of a soul.

Jersey City is a prime example, because we can find incompleteness all over town. There are two kinds: the one where the buildings' aesthetic used to be complete but has since deteriorated, and the kind which was never there to begin with. Consider this picture of the side of my building:



Clearly this blank brick wall is far from aesthetic. But it wasn't built to be good-looking; in fact there used to be another townhouse next to it which has since crumbled away. Townhouses which were built an exposed side do take this into account, as seen in this picture.



Now compare this with the new townhouses down in liberty harbor, where the developer clearly and intentionally neglected the sides and backs of the buildings.

Front doors:



No sides:




Perhaps this was done to save money. It is obvious to any urbanist that the dead space provided by the back of these buildings will permanently ban any life from happening back there. However, this is a practical criticism not an aesthetic one. Aesthetically, the fronts of the buildings are also now corrupt because the viewer knows of their inherent artifice. In the same way that Disneyland is no fun because you're only allowed to have well-regimented, paid-for, formalized fun, these buildings are not beautiful because you're only allowed to perceive well-regimented, paid-for, formalized beauty.

What saves my building despite its blank brick wall? The viewer perceives his own beauty; he finds it.

It looks, however, that the new townhouse development slightly inland, down the road, and west of the aforementioned won't have this problem:



But by God who came up with these stars??

I've finally found my own place in Jersey City, and barring some unforeseen complications with the realtor, I'll have it by next week. Here it is:



Now I'm not saying exactly where it is more as a pedagogical exercise for you natives than as a matter of security. If you're like me, streetscapes get gradually but permanently burned into your brain. I'm convinced that to this day I could recognize any corner in downtown Montreal by low-resolution photo alone. So, where is this?

Tris McCall has begun what promises to be a multi-stage rant against the new condos being built in JC. Good shit-- I suggest you read it.

I've pondered, however, how one can actually develop community-based scructures, as he prescribes. Anyone this stooped in development politics has surely read the Death and Life, wherein Jacobs provides what I see as an explanation to our plight.

She says there needs to be varying ages to the buildings. But in Jersey City, as in the rest of the country, all post-war construction basically amounted to shit. If a building was shit when you first built it, it'll never be anything more than shit. Jersey City is stuck with deteriorating radiant towers, brownstones which are beautiful but in many ways too old, and brand new, inward-facing condos.

These three do not mix. To argue for "low-income" building stock is flawed, since it will once again get demolished the next go-round. Outward-oriented mixed-use condos would certainly be an improvement over what's currently being built, but won't achieve true city nature because only one income level could ever inhabit the stores and condos above. And since these projects are over vast swaths of land, they basically create dead zones.

I'm having a hard time discovering how houses were built 100 years ago. I imagine that plots were sold and houses built individually, varying the age, style and use accordingly. What we see today is a very expensive Metro New York, in which any developer with any land will automatically maximize height, privacy, and luxury at the expense of the surrounding neighborhood.

I've been asking myself if deep down I just want to recreate montreal in jersey city. Or, have jersey city recreate montreal for me. This is an internal, existential debate, surely, so let me not deal with it here. But there are a few features of the cities which line up well.

For one thing, as one gets closer to the waterfront in Jersey City the building size increases just as in Montreal. Nestled within these tall buildings is the mall, built-in, half-underground, where you need to be. Personally I'd pass through the Eaton Centre almost every day in one direction or another on my way from one transit to another. Similarly the walk from the Hamilton Park region to the P-N Path will have to pass through the mall.

This is no trivial feature: to me, the worst part of suburbia is the inconvenience of shopping. One has to *go out* to do it (props to Tris McCall on that style). This is already a huge pain for things like groceries, drugs, and alcohol, but for clothes, it's a whole nother matter. Here the shopping must be completely natural, completely involuntary, completely subconscious. Otherwise it turns into a therapy session at best or a nervous breakdown in some cases. (Cf. "That's not my style, but what is my style? Must everything match? Must they not match so I'm truly postmodern? But the non-matching shit doesn't look good because I have no aesthetic sense, so I should formalize the wear and thus abandon my philosophy...") Yeah, we don't want that.

One more subtle similarity is the topography of the two cities. One literally descends from the heights to the water in Jersey City. Beautifully, this walk points directly towards lower Manhattan, which will one day include a gigantic needle reenforcing the orientation. In Montreal there was always a gradient to my travels: downward to start the day and back up at the end. The opposite of Sisyphus. While it may be subtle, it's this kind of orientation that will build the city's character within me.

I haven't spent enough time in Jersey City to know the situation for bikes down there. I've seen a few people here and there, not unlike anywhere, but certainly nothing like a community. So, in the words of Pink Floyd:

Is there anybody out there?

This is a genuine question, not a plea. Now that there are at least two people out there reading this damn blog I figure I might get a response. Respond away! Or don't, but know that bikes are going to figure in in this space sooner or later.