what the f?

It's very scary that something like that could happen in broad daylight.

Daylight attack by 4 Downtown
Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Four men hacked at a Bayonne teen with a machete and beat him with baseball bats in Jersey City on Monday evening, police said.

Police said the 17-year-old boy from Broadway in Bayonne told cops he was walking on Jersey Avenue near Newark Avenue at around 6 p.m. Monday when four armed men charged him, screaming profanities in Spanish. The boy was struck with bats and the machete, but managed to run about half a block before the men scattered, police said.

A witness told cops she saw a dark-colored minivan speed away from the scene.

The boy was taken to Jersey City Medical Center to be treated for lacerations to his wrists, police said.

N. CLARK JUDD

Locals snap up Jersey City condos

Jarrett Renshaw -- Jersey Journal -- August 29

Real estate pundits love to highlight New York City's supposed love affair with Jersey City's real estate market, citing the familiar trend of Big Apple residents being seduced across the Hudson River by lower prices and proximity to Manhattan's job market.

But although they may lack the news appeal and marketing value of the mighty New Yorker, Jersey City residents are purchasing homes here in great numbers, an interesting and often overlooked trend in the local housing market.

For example, roughly 53 percent of the first 223 properties sold in the Liberty Harbor North development went to Jersey City residents, according to the project's developer Peter Mocco.

"What it clearly demonstrates is a large number of Jersey City residents who had been renters or temporary residents have made the decision to be permanent homeowners in Jersey City," Mocco said.

"It validates that people are voting with their pocketbook," he added.

No surprise, developers tell me that many of these local buyers are not lifelong residents, but transient people who came to Jersey City for work and decided to stick around.

Many of the buyers have previously purchased property in the area and now want to trade up to some of the city's more luxurious condos, according to developers.

"People are here, and they see home prices rising, and they are buying a home with the confidence that they are going to continue to rise," said Mary Boorman, senior vice president of Pinnacle Properties, which has seen 40 percent of the first 161 units at its Mandalay on the Hudson go to local buyers - compared to 25 percent to New Yorkers.

There are similar trends at The Residences at Dixon Mills, where roughly 50 percent of the first 50 available units went to local buyers, while 22 percent went to New Yorkers.

The media's focus on New Yorkers' affinity for Jersey City is largely due to spin doctors who sell reporters on trends that happen to coincide with a developer's marketing plan.

Local developers have long courted New York buyers for a number of reasons, so stories about people crossing the river for lower prices is not only a good news hook, it's also good for business.

Teens break his bones
New wolfpack outrage said to fit pattern

Wednesday, August 29, 2007
By MICHAELANGELO CONTE
JOURNAL STAFF WRITER

A 60-year-old Jersey City man who was brutally beaten in a wolfpack attack Saturday is recovering from surgery and remains hospitalized with broken ribs, a collapsed lung and a broken knee.

"I pray he's going to be OK," said the sister of Robert Wilkinson, who underwent surgery Monday night for his broken knee cap. "I don't know what's going on in these streets, but I pray for them.

"Can't they put themselves in my brother's place? They have families," said the sister, who asked that her name not be used.

At 6:30 a.m. on Saturday, the Union Street resident was walking home from a store when he passed five teens, ages 14 to 18, on Bramhall Avenue at Seidler Street, police reports say, based on the statement made by Wilkinson at the Jersey City Medical Center that morning.

"They came from behind him and started beating him," the reports said, adding that the band of thugs demanded money but Wilkinson said he had none.

One of the boys reached into his pocket and grabbed Wilkinson's wallet. Finding it empty, they "continued to beat him and demand money," as Wilkinson repeatedly told them he had none, cops said.

Eventually the robbers ran away and Wilkinson made it back to his building and dialed 911.

"We are still following up on this obviously very disturbing incident and we are coordinating resources from several different police divisions," Jersey City Police Acting Chief Hugh Donaghue said yesterday. "Simply put, it's a full court press to bring these punks to justice."

Yesterday Wilkinson's sister said the teens broke her brother's knee cap and five of his ribs. At least one rib pierced his lung and collapsed it. Doctors put a drain in his lung but she said worries about the possibility of pneumonia. He is recovering and was listed in good condition yesterday, said John McKeegan, spokesman for the Medical Center

"He's in pain all the time," Wilkinson's sister said when asked how her brother was doing when she visited after his surgery.

"These kids are running the streets till 1, 2, 3 o'clock in the morning," said a resident of Wilkinson's building, who identified herself only as Christine.

"They'll jump on anyone that's old or on crutches, in a wheelchair, disabled," said Kenny Britt, who also lives in Wilkinson's building.

"It's a problem from Bramhall (Avenue) to Forrest (Street). The streets of this city ain't safe for old folks. The streets ain't safe since Cunningham died," he said, referring to former Jersey City Mayor Glenn D. Cunningham, who died in office on May 25, 2004.

Many people in the area blame the brutal crime on a lack of organized activities for children. The Jersey City Police Department Juvenile Bureau is investigating the incident.

Jersey City Landlords Prosper in New York?s Shadow

By J. ALEX TARQUINIO
Published: August 29, 2007

Although a few companies in other industries have begun moving in, office real estate in Jersey City is still very much an annex of Wall Street. Since modern towers started springing up along its waterfront in the 1990s, its fortunes have usually risen and fallen with the ebbs and flows in the financial markets.

In the last year, rents there have risen smartly, although not nearly as much as the rise in Lower Manhattan. Landlords are asking $36.85 a square foot on average for Class A office space in Jersey City now, up almost 14 percent from a year ago. During that time, average asking rents in Lower Manhattan rose more than 25 percent, to $50.59, according to Cushman & Wakefield, a real estate services company.

Brokers say the Jersey City office market is tight right now, especially along the waterfront, where most of the Class A towers have been built within the last 20 years. The waterfront has 24 office towers holding 14 million square feet of space. That is significantly more than the 14 top-quality office buildings holding 8 million square feet in Downtown Brooklyn, another business district within easy reach of Wall Street.

There are no development projects in sight in Jersey City, and the best-known buildings have had a flurry of lease signings recently, putting their occupancy rates above 90 percent.

For example, several companies recently took space at 10 Exchange Place, a 30-story, 700,000-square-foot office building. This includes a lease for 36,000 square feet that Opera Solutions, a global business consulting firm, signed in April, and a lease for 73,000 square feet that Rabobank International, a large Dutch bank, signed in May.

The building now has an occupancy rate of 92 percent, and is asking rents around $40 a square foot annually, said James J. Gillen, who is responsible for real estate in the New York metropolitan area for Invesco, a global asset manager based in London. Invesco manages 10 Exchange Place for a German institutional investment fund.

?Our building has all of the things you would want in a modern New York City building,? Mr. Gillen said, ?and it is right at the foot of the stairs of the PATH train,? the commuter line running between Northern New Jersey and Manhattan.

Some global financial giants are carving out a bigger presence in Jersey City, but most of them are supplementing operations in Lower Manhattan.

Beginning last year, Deutsche Bank, a large diversified German company, signed a series of leases totaling almost 400,000 square feet at Harborside Financial Center, a Jersey City office complex with more than 3.6 million square feet in six office buildings. Some 300,000 square feet of that was new space, while 90,000 square feet was a renewal.

Lehman Brothers Holdings, the New York investment bank, recently signed a lease for more than 71,000 square feet at 101 Hudson Street, a 42-story, 1.25-million-square-foot office tower along the waterfront. This brings the total space Lehman leases in this building to more than 270,000 square feet.

And BNP Paribas, a financial company based in Paris, signed a lease this year for more than 110,000 square feet in Newport Tower, at 525 Washington Boulevard. This was the largest single lease signed in Jersey City this year, according to Cushman & Wakefield, whose brokers worked on both sides of the deal.

This week, BNP Paribas began moving in the first of 600 workers it plans to relocate from Manhattan. The company, which has about 2,400 employees in New York, plans to increase its local staff to around 3,000 employees by 2012. Larry Sobin, the chief operating officer of BNP Paribas North America, said 1,000 would be in Jersey City and the rest in the regional headquarters at 787 Seventh Avenue in Manhattan.

Mr. Sobin said most employees moving to Jersey City had jobs in departments like accounting, technology and human resources that support the capital markets and investment banking groups, which will remain in Manhattan. ?We plan to take advantage of new technologies, like videoconferencing,? to make the arrangement work smoothly, he said.

Although lower costs are undoubtedly the major draw in Jersey City, many executives also want to decentralize their operations across the metropolitan region for security reasons, according to Patrick Murphy, who heads the suburban business for the CB Richard Ellis Group, a commercial real estate brokerage company.

A number of regional disruptions, both large and small, have occurred since the terrorist attacks in September 2001. A power grid failure caused a blackout in 2003. In July, a steam pipe exploded near Grand Central Terminal in Midtown. Also this summer, a tornado struck Brooklyn and a fatal fire broke out in the vacant Deutsche Bank Building, which is being dismantled near ground zero.

Mr. Sobin said the difficulty of getting people off the island of Manhattan during a crisis was one factor in BNP Paribas?s decision to put part of its operations in Jersey City. ?In the event there?s a crisis, we want to make sure that the bank continues operating,? Mr. Sobin said. ?We already have a data center in a different location in New Jersey and a backup data center in a suburb of Philadelphia.?

Brokers say the rise in rents in Jersey City is largely an indirect effect of the soaring rents in Lower Manhattan. But they expect the tight space and the lack of new construction to add to the pricing pressure.

But if developers decide to construct buildings in New Jersey, they have one big advantage over their counterparts in New York City, said Bob Alexander, regional chairman of CB Richard Ellis. They can build much more quickly. ?If it?s built to suit, Jersey?s going to be able to put it up quicker than in New York,? which is notoriously slow in granting permits, he said.

He estimated that an office tower could be completed 12 to 18 months faster than in New York City. So, he said, developers did not feel the same pressure to build ?on spec? ? without a major tenant already signed up ? in a strong real estate market. They prefer to sign an anchor tenant first and design a building to suit its specifications.

There is certainly room to grow. For example, enough land exists for three new buildings, totaling 3.5 million square feet, at Harborside Financial Center, said Mitchell Hersh, the president and chief executive of the Mack-Cali Realty Corporation, a real estate investment trust based in Edison, N.J. Mack-Cali owns most of Harborside Financial Center and 101 Hudson Street, among other buildings in Jersey City.

Mr. Hersh said that initially he would like to build a million-square-foot building at Harborside, in Plaza 4, at Exchange Place and Christopher Columbus Drive. He said he was in preliminary talks with a few potential tenants that have offices in Midtown Manhattan and are ?examining very carefully the options of moving significant parts of their work force, for obvious reasons of cost savings.?

But Mr. Hersh said he had no plans to build anything that size until he was able to prelease about 350,000 square feet. ?I have been reluctant to build on spec,? he said.

Click here for New York Times article

Actually, the brevard has their own parking lot behind the building, which is a huge advantage that all the others on the block don't have

Quote:

Haha, and what kind of job are they doing of that? Read the news? Ever?

Moderator Strikes again. I am beginning to think this guy is a real asshole.

http://www.hobokenx.com/html/modules/ ... p?topic_id=19812&start=10

Kannekt.com Moderator: "If you guys didn't tell lies and act like jerk s maybe your post would remain"

You just cannot make this stuff up.
So, McCann's guy lives without utilities.
The person checking up on HIM from the city had an address that was a self storage place??
If it wasn't so sad it would be funny -- Perhaps Woody Allen would be a good choice for a movie on our city "government"...

I had lunch at Pho Thang Long Vietnamese Restaurant today. I had the grilled chicken on rice. Delicious.

After lunch, I walked up Duncan Avenue to see what this building looked like. It doesn't look as nice as the pre-war building next door. But I like the big front yard. It is set back from the street which is nice. The block seems nice in the daytime. There were some parking spaces on the street. I don't know what it looks like at night.

My new Mastercard came in the mail a few days ago. But it has to be activated from my home telephone, and I have to talk to some fake American half the world away who was trying to sell me credit monitoring.

There will always be out-of-towners and newcomers who will leave things in the car.

oh lordy, if they so much as left a lens for a 35mm format on my stoop, i'd go apeshit... $20k cameras? i definitely wouldn't be happy.

identity theft, yeah. but i mean if its just some teenage punk what will they do with it? are there people who will buy info from them or something?

and i have no idea why a UPS would leave a package out anywhere in an urban area. stupid.

but i once had a DHL guy leave a very expensive medium format camera, packing slip containing the price of it, in front of my door in my apartment building when i lived on staten island. i never even asked for it to be delivered but the store screwed up. needless to say i was infuriated because of how much it was worth. thankfully, it was still there when i got back.

yea, I know we have had a few small packages taken from our mailbox area. Easy grab when the USPS leaves packages out that they cant fit in the box.

Quote:

Identity theft in mailboxes.

Called yesterday and they said they are not opening for another 3 weeks.

what the #OOPS#! why would someone try to get in a mailbox? you think there is just cash sitting in there? jesus, break into my mailbox and you can have my god damn bills. please. that is just so annoying. i don't care who you are, you must have something better to do with your time. #OOPS#ing scumbags.

OOPS!...haha.

that sucks, I was just there with my dog around that time and didn't see a thing. On the other hand, I did see some kid on a bike trying to get in my neighbors mailboxes around the Van Vorst area until he took off when I saw him. I wish I was closer so I could of seen his face or say something.

Wow, that is brazen.

Too bad no one threw a rock at the kid. Bet a gash in the head would stop him from pulling this crap.

Again, though, don't leave anything in your car unless its locked in the trunk.

i hate stupid young people! ban them.

Totaly not nessasary.More rec.programs is what is needed.We used to have the best all around rec programs in the county.Other towns were always scared to play in our league.
Give the kids something to do,very simple.

I ate at Cafe Nia early Saturday morning on their grand opening day. Inside looks very nice - warm colors - looks like they redid the floor, stained dark wood and had dark wood tables, very nice. Food was great - I had pancakes & bacon - hubby had a bagel w/ butter & we got 2 drinks - it was about 8 bucks. We'll be back. Also I think the owner's young daughter's name is Nia - hence cafe Nia.

At approximately 8:15 this evening the front driver's side of a silver accord (NJ KMA ---) had its window smashed in. According to a woman at the dog park, "a black boy on a black bike" hurled a rock through the window before grabbing something and pedaling off. Note this is a separate incident from yesterday's post, Mercer at Varick.

Was walking by this afternoon - and there were like 4 fitness equipment delivery trucks parked along Newark & Barrow - looks like the equipment was getting loaded in :) I'm so excited for it to open!

Quote:


Not according to the JCPD's own stats. Looks like there's been no overall change, except for the "pre-election" dip:

http://jclist.com/modules/xcgal/displ ... random&cat=13190&pos=-746

I am a resident on Palisade ave nearby Christ Hospital. I work in NYC and don't leave until about 8pm.

I have been taking the 8:20pm bus which conveniently left me right in front of my house.

There are no Jitney buses that operate to palisade that late at night and the 99s was my only alternative.

I am concerned about my safety walking from central avenue to palisade at 9pm for obvious reasons.

So now the only alternative is to get off on congress and palisade or Paterson plank and palisade via 123 or 99s and pay an additional $1.50??

How come the residents of JC heights/palisade avenue were not involved in the decision making process. I wasn't even aware of the schedule change until the bus continued to central avenue yesterday!

I hope the Jitney operators get it together and offer later service or else I'm screwed, along with all Christ hospital employees or lower palisade ave residents who make the same commute.

The National Guard is not covered by the Posse Comitatus Act.

I think that, under the Posse Comitatus Act, Manzo's plan is illegal. The military cannot be assigned to handle civilian law enforcement matters.

I laughed when I read Fast Eddie's posts. I remember those brown Central Avenue buses. One used to also run up Hutton Street from Liberty or Terrace Avenue to Central Avenue and then to Journal Square. Ony thing is that my memory stretches back to 35 cents!

Anyhow, that privately owned company abandoned the route. Another one took it over and then Coach. When Coah first took over, it used to go all the way to Liberty State Park.

For those of you living near Kennedy Boulevard in the Heights, you will be better off using the jitneys there. The route is longer as they take the Blvd. up to 30th Street and then turn east (unless the driver is savvy enough only to pick up NY commuters and take a shortcut throughh Hoboken). However, the Kennedy Blvd. jitneys run every ten minutes to NYC and Journal Square during rush hour. In addition, they are a bargin -$2 and change to NYC, $1 to JSQ. The NJ transit buses that also are on this route not only are twice the price, they tend to treat bus schedules like some people treat marriage licenses - like a piece of paper to which there is no commitment.

I have lived on Palisade Avenue for three years now and, outside of the Light Rail and jitneys that run from Newport Mall to Bergenline and points north, have been very unimpressed with all of the service. The 99S rarely is on schedule. In addition, they charge a ridiculous price for a very short ride. I hear that with the new route has come an even higher fare. The Palisade Ave.-NYC jitneys only run five minutes ahead of the 99S, almost disappear during off-peak hours and weekends and stop running after 7:30.

During rush hour, the #87 to the Hoboken Path is supposed to run every ten minutes. In reality, you get four buses every 20 minutes to a half hour. I hear that this is because of congestion at the southern end of their route but I notice that in the evening, after rush hour, buses are either late or skip altogether.

iI moved east because I was in dire need of a pet-friendly, reasonable apartment. The irony is that many other people moving to the eastern end of the Heights do so because there is easy access to transportation to Hoboken and NY. What no one knows until they move there is that there are plentiful stops and many buses but nothing ever runs. THANK HEAVENS I HAVE A BIKE!

I noticed in the latest Jersey Journal article that some commuters voice fear about walking east of Central late at night. Living on the armpit of Palisade, between Franklin and Ferry, I can certainly understand that fear as stretches of New York, Sherman and Webster can be pretty gruesome.

Whenever I ask the police captain at block and association meetings why there are not foot or bike patrols on Palisade (cars are useless because the trash just scuttle away); the police captain of the Western Precinct explains they are reserved for Central Avenue because of the stores. (I have not seen either foot or bike patrols on Central Avenue, particularly at night. However, I notice gangs of 5 to 12 youths whooping it up. That is for another thread.)

Other attendees have pointed out to our captain that the stores are not going to get much business if folks are afraid to walk there. If commuters feel the same way about walking home from Central Avenue at night, perhaps there will be enough voices to get something done.