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It used to greatly.

I loved those days. There is a natural beauty to decayed buildings/infrastructure.

What disappoints me about Jersey City is the loss of the downtown area that looked post-apocalyptic.

Anyone know of other cities that look like JC used to? Abundant non-ancient ruins.

This was posted on the Event Calendar, but hopefully more people will see it here.

Wine Tasting
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Come sample over 30 types of wine, right on the Jersey City Waterfront. The wine tasting will be outside of Portside Towers near the Korean War Memorial under a tent and will have a beautiful view of downtown Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty. Wines will be provided by Portside Deli & Liquors

Tickets for the wine tasting are $30 or 2 for $50.

Benefiting WomenRising Inc.
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WomenRising is the foremost community based organization for women in Hudson County. Governed and managed by women, WomenRising assists women and their families to achieve self sufficiency and live safe, fulfilling and productive lives, through social services, economic development and advocacy services.

http://www.womenrising.org

Charity Raffle
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Enter to win a sunset cruise for 2 around Manhattan on the 116' superyacht Vivere. Four winners will be selected, and each can bring a guest. Dinner and champagne will be served. To charter this yacht normally for a similar event would cost you over 600 times the amount of a single raffle ticket.

Tickets for the raffle are $20.

Wine tasting and raffle tickets can be purchsed here (starting soon):
https://www.merchantamerica.com/womenrising/echopay/index.php

Music
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There will be live music performed by bands to be announced soon.

Also, please invite your friends! Last year's event raised over $20k!

If your car has been damaged in an attempted car robbery, you should log it into the Downtown JC Watch group or file a police report.

At the Downtown JC Watch meeting or the Captain's meeting, you will find out that a string of BMW robberies or 97 Honda robberies have been occuring lately. If it is a series of robberies, the robbers are usually caught. This too, can be found out at the meetings.

Just remember to please remove your GPS and your GPS holder from the car as well as any valuable items. Even if you remove your GPS, the holder may indicate that it is hidden in the car.

Also note where you park your car. Dark areas may be ideal for hits. You may look into requesting a street light be installed in front of your house (FOR FREE) or request that trees be trimmed.

A key car alarm, one where the owner is notified from the key chain, that someone is attempting to open the car door is a good way to "catch someone in the act."

Good luck and be safe.

Walter's Luncheonette (which later became Kitchen Cafe)

In high school we made up a song to remember the daily special sandwiches at Walter's. Monday was sausage day and you had to get there before 12:30 or they would probably be sold out. I can still taste the hot pastrami sandwich there and have not had one as good since they left. They had a few booths and a long counter to sit at. The kitchen was in the same spot it is in now. I used the old wooden phone booth there to call in sick to school before hopping on the PATH into the city. Walter (really named George, I think Walter was his dad?) was a class act with a great sense humor. This was the late 80's and early 90's.

Okay, so do bad guys break into just about any cars? Or do they choose more expensive cars? I drive a Honda civic, and I just don't see how anyone can benefit from breaking into my car. Should I still be concerned? Or unless I have a more expensive car, I won't have to worry about it? Since it's an old and cheap car, I'm not afraid of the cost to fix it. But I just hate to have the inconvenience.

But removing a fuse sounds like a great idea. Does anyone else do that?

Atsushi

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Not according the our leaders. The way they make all income disappear is one of the great magic acts of all time! This city is run by and for it's employees and contractors, not it's citizens.

I've said this here before but it bears repeating: They managed to run the Parking Authority in the red a few years back, an agency essentially chartered to make money like a mint. Think of what that means for the rest of the JC govt arms that have less obvious standards of productivity than turning a profit.

Thanks for your support on this, people. Obviously, there is a fine line between offensive and not offensive. Everyone has a different definition of that boundry. I don't want to force my definition on anyone nor do I want to offend people unnecessary, but I examined what I had written with my common sense and best judgement. I really don't believe that my comment was offensive.

Again, I really believe that there are people who like to be offended. I feel sorry for people who are overly sensitive. They must be offended from left to right every day! That's no fun. But what can I do? I have really asked if my comment could have been offensive, and for the life of me, I just cannot see how it could have been.

Atsushi
PS. I am indeed Japanese, believe it or not.

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Miss them, and add Lisa's Roti recent demise to the Caribbean losses. Nicole's jerk doesn't compare to either of theirs.

And Al and Moe's Pizza! you could get a killer lunch plate of eggplant parm and ziti for $3.

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There was some pretty good guff and graw going on in the parking lot, too.

Traders Italian Restaurant! The Spidini was phenominal, service was great, the owners were sweethearts , the bar was fun! Wish they'd come back

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You hit the nail on the head with Tippy's but I have to say the plant, fruit & vegetable market that replaced it is ok in my book.

Downtown Eddie's

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I miss their panini sandwiches, you were able to get a side of cold pasta salad, the location was a good one, and there is no one else around that did it like them.

+1 on Harvest Cart.

More than anything, I miss Lombardi's. Now there isn't a single decent pizza place in Downtown.

Bueno Appetito is a good, recent, alternative. But still not as good as you can find, well, anywhere else in New Jersey.

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I lived across the street from Lucy's for several years, had breakfast and lunch there several times a week and never tired of eating there. Sad to see it go but happy for Lucy!

I used to love Tippy's which only the old-timers here will know, for their burgers, chocolate milk shakes and guff and graw the old timers would give each other at the counter.

Before Rachel, there was a place called Holiday's (named after Billie Holiday, I believe). The breakfast wraps were amazing!

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Good on ya! You'll do just fine around here. Welcome.

wait, you guys are trying to reign in the hyperbole of JClist posts?!

it's gonna be an awfully quiet summer here....

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Welcome to JClist. I myself have been unduly chastised for purely innocuous comments on poisoning dogs and the pope.

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You can't possibly be Japanese...

My comment on this topic must have offended a few people. But I've decided not to apologize. Many people are offended too easily these days.

First of all, comments like that, are not meant to be personal. And I believe that people who are easily offended by comments like that, usually like to be offended. That's why they are overly sensitive.

It was just my observation and my impression of parts of JC that I have visited, which I should be free to talk about here or anywhere for that matter.

Anyway, if some people didn't like what I had said, so be it.

Atsushi

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We had Jules up in the Heights, used to go there after little league games for pizza parties.

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I'll venture a guess that announcing your arrival by likening your new home to Hiroshima would turn off any neighbor of yours that has any sense of pride in their home and their community. But you should have no problem finding other self-identifying JChaters among the crowd.

Good luck making friends.

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I think you're crazy.

Seriously, there are plenty of child-free people around here, as well as others who may have children but find a way to actually do stuff without them.

If you're a musician, there are so many ways to slip into the scene in JC. Art House is a monthly poetry and music open mic, with world-class guest poets, great local talent and a very easy-going, fun vibe. And they produce plays and do other fun stuff too. The monthly thing starts up again in September or October, not sure which. Check the website. Art House Productions

Relax, and enjoy.

Jules on Westside Ave...the best homemade lasagna.....Then Family Tree for the same reason....Clackens on Old Bergen Road...Absolutely the best Jamacian...ox tails that melted in your mouth....
Duckys...now i'm really showing my age...it was italian and located where the veitnamese rest. Jordans currently exsists

Pronto Cena +1

This city is getting $9000 in taxes for this little place. I guess if I count all the windows of these apartment buildings that are condo owned then it's $9000 (or more) for each one. (window) The city (J.C.) coffers are bulging.

The Tripoli Restaurant locate 289 Newark Ave.,
Roy's Buena Vista located on Mallory Ave.
Illventos on Westside Ave.
The Tripoli was known for their Italian cheese cake. Roy's had a comfortable informal atmosphere, and Illvento's where I had my confirmation party was good for pizza, mussels, and wine. You were bound to run into someone you knew at Illvento's

Stacked wooden planks and video monitors in the CanCo lofts lobby in Jersey City.


Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano are fans of shipping containers and the industrial landscape.

The Architecture Issue
A Lot-Ek Solution

New York Times
By PILAR VILADAS
June 8, 2008

When you meet Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano, the partners in the New York architecture firm LOT-EK (pronounced low-tech), the first thing you notice about them ? apart from their Italian good looks ? is their enthusiasm, a trait that many of their peers in the profession conceal beneath a facade of chilly reserve. But Tolla and Lignano, who came to this country in the early 1990s after completing architecture school in Naples, can?t help themselves. There?s just too much great stuff out there waiting to be turned into architecture: shipping containers, scaffolding, truck backs, ductwork, plastic mesh. Huh?

In fact, LOT-EK ? which was a finalist in this year?s National Design Awards ? has been making architecture out of industrialized society?s detritus for more than 15 years, turning the drum of a cement mixer into a media lounge, or the tank of an oil truck into the bedrooms and bathrooms of a loft apartment, or recycled shipping containers into mobile clothing stores, offices and apartments. Unlike architects who envision a perfect world of jewel-like buildings in meticulously planned settings, Tolla and Lignano love the messy layering of ad hoc, incremental urban growth; they?ve described their aesthetic as being more ?Blade Runner? than ?2001: A Space Odyssey.? Olympia Kazi, the director of the Institute for Urban Design, a New York nonprofit, says of LOT-EK, ?The way they deal with urban reality is just to accept it.?

Since founding their firm in 1993, the architects have acquired a kind of alternative renown as a little firm that does small, arty projects. Indeed, their biggest U.S. commission to date is a 3,000-square-foot house for Lawrence Weiner, the artist, and his wife, Alice Zimmerman, which is nearing completion in Greenwich Village. But the fact that LOT-EK doesn?t do slick doesn?t mean they can?t do big. Mark Robbins, the dean of the school of architecture at Syracuse University, argued that ?it would be a disservice to trade only on the novelty? of LOT-EK?s work. ?They are very much architects,? something Robbins said will serve them well as they get bigger commissions. In fact, they recently had a chance to prove this in an extremely competitive arena: Beijing.

The Chinese capital is filled with mind-boggling projects, by superstar architects, that are going up at breakneck speed: Herzog and de Meuron?s ?bird?s nest? Olympic stadium; Rem Koolhaas?s enormous, cantilevered CCTV towers; Steven Holl?s two million-square-foot-plus Linked Hybrid development; Norman Foster?s Terminal 3 at the Beijing airport, which will be the biggest building in the world. This would not normally be the kind of playing field on which you?d expect to find a firm of LOT-EK?s size and style. But then, more than one architect has called China the Wild West of architecture today, and in the Wild West, pretty much everybody had a shot. Indeed, while the big boys were designing their supersleek megabuildings, it was Tolla and Lignano?s container fetish that got them not one job but two.

Tolla and Lignano were contacted by the well-regarded Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, who was commissioned by a Chinese development company, Guo Feng, to design the master plan and some of the buildings for a mixed-use development called Sanlitun North, not far from Beijing?s version of Embassy Row. Kuma admired the store that LOT-EK designed, featuring recycled shipping containers, for Uniqlo, the Japanese clothing manufacturer, and invited Tolla and Lignano to try something similar in Beijing for a 97,000-square-foot retail and office building. Ultimately, the developers decided that containers weren?t the right look for the upscale Sanlitun North, but the building does have elegant metal-framed windows that angle out from the building?s facade like ductwork, a prized element of LOT-EK?s vocabulary. And the developers liked the container idea enough to bring Kuma and LOT-EK in on Sanlitun South, a retail project they were planning nearby. (SHoP, another young, edgy New York firm, also designed buildings for both projects.)

In contrast to the North project, Sanlitun South was aimed at a younger market ? which, presumably, would be much more receptive to LOT-EK?s industrial-funk aesthetic. LOT-EK?s design for the four-story, 250,000-square-foot Sanlitun South, which uses 151 shipping containers, orange-painted stainless-steel mesh and steel scaffolding, was based on the layout of the traditional Chinese hutong, the densely packed neighborhoods punctuated by alleys and small courtyards. The result looks like a kind of retail beehive. ?It?s a huge-scale jump for us,? Tolla said. ?We could never build like this in Europe or America.?

The notion of a frontier waiting to be explored is central to LOT-EK?s vision, and in all cases, that frontier is an urban one. Tolla and Lignano, who are in their mid-40s, grew up in the same Naples neighborhood but did not really know each other until they were university students. After graduation, they spent three months traveling around the United States and were bowled over by what they saw ? especially in contrast to Europe?s ?untouchable history,? as Tolla put it.

And as if America?s size and relative newness weren?t enough, the two were particularly awed by its industrial landscape, which would ultimately shape their design vocabulary. ?We were like two kids in a candy store,? Lignano said. They longed to return to New York. ?It had the same chaotic energy as Naples,? Lignano explained. So in 1990, the pair (who are not a couple) got a postgraduate fellowship at Columbia and found an apartment in the city. They waited on tables at night, did their work by day, began a never-ending love affair with hardware stores and started ?making things out of what?s out there.? They also began recording in notes and photographs the chaotic, random and banal elements of the man-made landscape. This giant database became what the architects call the Urban Scan, which is their bible and which is also the title of the book on their work that was published by Princeton Architectural Press.

Tolla and Lignano embraced the idea of low-tech, of operating on the small scale as well as the large, like a workshop, and thus invented their firm?s quirky name, which is also influenced by Jamaican patois and computer language. (It?s still a puzzle to many; Lignano once got a letter addressed to Mr. Ek.) They didn?t want to shun technology; on the contrary, they use it in many of their projects. But, as Lignano said, their work goes ?against the grain of thinking that you have to design every single thing.? They discovered the display windows at Barneys and wrote to Simon Doonan, now the store?s creative director, who came to visit them. ?We were like, wow, this really is America!? Tolla said. Doonan put some of LOT-EK?s work in Barneys? Madison Avenue windows in 1993, and the firm was off and running.

A number of art-world commissions followed, including interiors for the Sara Meltzer Gallery, Henry Urbach Architecture and the Bohen Foundation, a nonprofit organization that shows art it has commissioned. In 2001, Urbach ? for whom LOT-EK had designed several innovative art-fair installations, including one called SURF-A-BED, in which 16 television screens were suspended above a bed ? commissioned LOT-EK to design ?MIXER,? the cement-mixer/media cocoon, for his gallery. Urbach, who is now the curator of the architecture and design department at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, admires Tolla and Lignano?s commitment to installation-scale work, their passion and the fact that their found-object fixation is recycling in the most fundamental sense. He loves ?their inventive spatial sense ? the idea that TV light makes space, for instance,? and the fact that their design is humane without being sentimental. Moreover, Urbach said, ?I don?t find a trace of cynicism or nihilism in their work, and those things are not in short supply these days.?

For the Bohen Foundation, which is housed in a former printing plant in the Meatpacking District, LOT-EK turned eight recycled shipping containers into discrete modules that function as offices, meeting rooms or video rooms and which move on tracks set into the concrete floor. Walls interspersed among these modules pivot out to create flexible exhibition spaces. For the Weiner house, a former bakery, Tolla and Lignano gutted the interior, moving the staircase to the back of the building, and inserted metal ductwork vertically through the building to house not just ventilation but storage, bathrooms and an elevator. Truck-container backs, with glass instead of a pull-down door, were inserted into the facade, creating a modern version of bay windows, and the architects added a penthouse and a green roof. The industrial elements are tough yet elegant; there?s no trace of conventional domesticity in the house, save for its open kitchen, which takes up much of the first floor, a decision that in itself is unconventional. The master bathroom has no door ? something the owners insisted on.

LOT-EK?s design for the lobby of the CanCo lofts in Jersey City (a former American Can factory) includes stacks of Douglas fir planks that become upholstered benches on the floor and that contain lighting when suspended from the ceiling. A wall of electrical conduit forms the backdrop for rows of video screens. The idea was to create a place where residents would congregate, not simply pass through. Mikhail Kurnev, the president of Coalco New York, the company that developed the project, described LOT-EK as an unorthodox but appropriate choice for a project that was aimed at young professionals. ?We wanted to position ourselves as up and coming, not like every other building,? he said. LOT-EK?s design, he continued, ?definitely put the project on a different pedestal? and got the firm the commission to design the apartment interiors for the development?s next phase.

Tolla and Lignano?s coming projects include an 11,000-square-foot traveling pavilion for the footwear and clothing manufacturer Puma?s entry in the Volvo Ocean Race. The design has not yet been made public, but it?s safe to say that it?s consistent with the vocabulary of two people whose idea of a good time is to photograph stacks of shipping containers in the New Jersey Meadowlands. ?The spontaneous built environment is really our master,? Lignano said. ?This stuff makes up a much bigger percentage of the environment than architecture ever will.? He cites highway overpasses and airplane graveyards (two unbuilt LOT-EK proposals involved recycling airplane fuselages as buildings) as examples of ?the infrastructure that?s in your face all the time.? And grungy as it is, Tolla added that ?it?s about the idea of abundance ? like the hardware store, but at a bigger scale. It can be in the desert of Namibia, in Los Angeles, or Tokyo. You can see this layering everywhere, because it?s about the way we really operate as human beings.?

www.nytimes.com

Somebody attempted to break into my car Thursday night on the South West corner of Barrow and Mercer between 1:15 and 2 AM. They didn't get in but messed up my door handle and scratched 2 panels. I was in Barow Bar for less than 45 mins and this was right across the street from the smokers outside so I'm still scratching my head as to the balls of the perp. If anyone saw anything please PM me. It's a dark blue 07 BMW 328 coupe. It's my baby and it really pisses me off that it's all scratched up. I would have loved to catch this SOB in the act.