The search "New Jersey" yielded
47 articles

Most controversial blog posts: a truculent top five (plus one).

With another year coming to a close, and ushering in what will be the start of my fifteenth year at this blogging venture, I decided to attempt something that is mostly good for a laugh: a ranking list.  A listicle, if you will.  Since this is a blog whose most loyal followers are relatively few

Hoboken NJ: gentrification in a time-lapse overdrive, but without all the improvements.

Hoboken, New Jersey isn’t a particularly obscure suburb.  Peering right across the Hudson River toward Greenwich Village, it’s a fortuitously located municipality that basically everyone in metro New York knows.  Odds are good that most adults living in the tri-state area have passed through it at one point in time.   Tiny though it may

24-hour turmoil: Walgreens eliminates one of its biggest selling points.

With holiday and work commitments colliding every day, my posts this past month have been unusually slight—shorter and less than pithy.  This tendency may have to continue until the year’s end, since it isn’t going to let up all that much.  But I still hope to home in on the obscure, the typically overlooked, or—something

Building back a better bike rack: do the creative ones keep your two wheels safe?

Over the last three decades, as bicycles have become a more commonly accepted means of getting around—especially in areas where they previously were a rare sight—the need to accommodate them when “docked” is more important.  Sure, it’s usually perfectly reasonable to lock a bike to anything that’s already bolted to the ground: a parking meter,

Summit, New Jersey: does a promenade between two buildings represent an opportunity gap?

For much of the twentieth century, it was an all-too-common occurrence: an old commercial structure in a declining downtown struggles to compete with the strip malls cropping up everywhere on the outskirts.  Over time, the old building—retail on the first floor, office or warehousing on the next two/three/four levels—becomes functionally obsolete.  It’s drafty, the plumbing

In the urban jungle, a crosswalk for guineafowl.

As I manage issues regarding data migration from my old computer to new—apparently a process that, so far, has involved over four hours with tech support and no success—I must resign myself to another mini-post to keep things going when time is scarce.  On a bright May morning, I was trolling around downtown Trenton, New

Keeping the peace in Paulsboro.

While we’ve all seen “crime watch” or “neighborhood watch” placards upon entering a residential area, I couldn’t help but be a bit alarmed by the sign I saw as I swerved onto a local road in Paulsboro, New Jersey. Needless to say, it’s the upper of these two signs that merits consideration. Not only because

In the urban jungle, a crosswalk for guineafowl.

As I manage issues regarding data migration from my old computer to new—apparently a process that, so far, has involved over four hours with tech support and no success—I must resign myself to

Keeping the peace in Paulsboro.

While we’ve all seen “crime watch” or “neighborhood watch” placards upon entering a residential area, I couldn’t help but be a bit alarmed by the sign I saw as I swerved onto a