Author Archives: Zemin

Traffic Congestion: Mexico City and Newark

Tuesday, 15 July 2008 – 8:00 am

Starting Saturday, July 9, the municipal government began to take measure to cut down on pollution and reduce traffic. Drivers whose last digit on their license plates is a 5 or a 6 must stay off the road. Those with other numbers will take turns to be off the city’s streets. Violators [...]

Posted in Infrastructure | Comments (1)

Bicycles, Trains, and Children

Monday, 30 June 2008 – 6:36 am

Early Saturday morning, my 11-year-old son and I rode our bicycles in the middle of Market Street, once the most automobile-congested street in the country. Of course, we could not do it without over a hundred fellow Newarkers, who joined the Brick City Bike Tour.

“That’s how it feels in a city without cars,” my [...]

Posted in Children, Community, Development, Events, Featured, Infrastructure | Comments (5)

Bookstore, Café, and Imagination

Monday, 9 June 2008 – 5:00 am

In 1997, Jonathan Cole, the Provost of Columbia University, walked around the Morningside neighborhood in New York City, disturbed by the shabby conditions of a few older bookstores. After failing to lure the legendary bookseller Jack Cella from the Seminary Co-op Bookstore of Chicago, Columbia offered Chris Doeblin and his partner Cliff Simms a university-owned [...]

Posted in Business, Community, Development, Featured | Comments (1)

This Weekend: Newark Preservation & Landmarks Committee Tour

Wednesday, 7 May 2008 – 10:14 pm

On May 17, NJIT will honor Elizabeth Del Tufo, our greatest champion for a better Newark, granting her an honorary doctoral degree. I am proud of Liz, who has dedicated her life to the city. She has been honored twice in two years. First, she was fired as the Chairperson of the [...]

Posted in Events, Tours | Comments (0)

Newark’s Lethal Traffic: February 19, 1903 to April 25, 1972

Saturday, 26 April 2008 – 8:11 pm

Evidently, Newark had the most centralized downtown in the nation, making it extremely fragile and debilitating. The businesses, however, held a firm belief that people would always bring prosperity to Downtown, no matter where they lived, as long as accessibility was provided. In the above short period of ten years, as the figures indicate, American people’s understanding of “accessibility” shifted drastically from mass transit (e.g., trolley cars) to their beloved private motor cars. This meant not only could they drive to Downtown Newark, but also they had to find a place to park. As Miller McClintock of Harvard told the National Association of Building Owners in 1926, it would not profit a central business district with even the most convenient arteries of travel if there was not sufficient parking. After Raymond Boulevard was created above the old Morris Cannel in 1930, the corner near Military Park turned into the most congested spot and, a few years later, came the corner of Broad, Orange, and Bridge Streets. After the 1970s, the deadly congestion moved to Penn Station.

Posted in Environment, Featured, Government, Health, History | Comments (0)

Same River Twice

Tuesday, 26 February 2008 – 5:49 am

Upon those who step into the same rivers, different and again different waters flow.
—Heraclitus

Last Sunday, I went to the Grove Street Cemetery to look for the resting place of Louis Danzig. With a cemetery administrator’s instructions, I found only five, perhaps unrelated, Danzig’s. However, I was captured by the aura of hundreds of [...]

Posted in Architecture, Development, History | Comments (0)

City Without Memory

Wednesday, 13 February 2008 – 6:00 am

The demolition of the Westinghouse building is moving eastward slowly along Orange Street towards the former site of WJZ, a landmark in the American broadcasting history. According to Tommy Cowan, the radio station’s first announcer, “My Little Gypsy Sweet Heart” was the first show aired in 1921.

Memories are roses in the rain.
Days [...]

Posted in Architecture, Community, Development, History | Comments (4)

Coming of Age in Newark

Saturday, 26 January 2008 – 3:00 pm

Walking back from the Broad Street Train Station this morning, I saw a Rutgers student unroll her car window, toss out a pile of banana peels, Burger King wrappings, and school catalogs and testing schedules, and fall back to her before-class nap in her parked car on University Avenue. I picked up all her [...]

Posted in Architecture, Children, Development, Downtown (Central Ward), Environment, Government, History | Comments (8)

The Iron Cage: A Very Brief History of Parking in Newark

Saturday, 12 January 2008 – 6:00 am

They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot.
—Joni Mitchell, Big Yellow Taxi (1969)

Iron cage. I am not talking about the dark social and ideological “iron cage” of capitalism, coined by Max Weber, the founder of modern sociology. For almost a century since the advent of Henry Ford’s 1908 Model T, the world, the [...]

Posted in Architecture, Culture, Environment | Comments (1)

Newark: Architecture of Fear

Tuesday, 11 December 2007 – 12:36 am

The space man, in the 1952 movie The Day the Earth Stood Still, lands on the Washington Mall and announces to the earthlings, “I only fear that fear has replaced reason.” Thanks god that the alien did not come to Newark, where reason often fails to prevail. When Arthur Stern of Cogswell first [...]

Posted in Architecture, Culture, Development | Comments (4)