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History floods back with exhibit of stained-glass masterpieces | Legends & Landmarks

Posted Jan 27, 2020
By John Gomez/For The Jersey Journal

Editor?s note: This is the third in a series about historic houses of worship under threat of erasure in Jersey City and Hudson County.

Look at an ancient stained-glass window long and deeply enough ? into its fixed fields, terraces, depths, foregrounds; at its illumined hieroglyphs, impresas, inscriptions ? and the saga of a city church will stir, churn, come to life in the digital-age moment.

https://www.nj.com/opinion/2020/01/his ... es-legends-landmarks.html

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Another piece from the JJ series.

Erasure on Avenue E | Legends & Landmarks

Updated 7:58 AM;Today 7:30 AM
By John Gomez/For The Jersey Journal

Editor?s note: This is the second in a series about historic houses of worship under threat of erasure in Jersey City and Hudson County.

Perhaps it is the fractaled winter light radiating from the west that emblazons, amidst rush-hour traffic, St. Joseph?s Roman Catholic Church on Avenue E and East 25th Street in Bayonne.

Perhaps it is the end-of-decade sunset that gives the church, now nearly leveled to the ground, its phantom appearance.

https://www.nj.com/hudson/2020/01/eras ... -e-legends-landmarks.html

And the alternative was.....what? The author does not say. A church already doesn't pay taxes, if the parish doesn't need it, doesn't want it, doesn't want to pay to maintain it, and it doesn't lend itself to residential conversion, then...what? The city maintain it as a monument to something? Subsidize it's reuse as something below the market value of the land?

I think there should be landmarks, but not every old building is a landmark. I like to see things preserved, like I'd like to see the Cap1 bank on Newark & Jersey preserved even though it's not unusual for a bank of that period, but I think locking a city in amber can be bad too. There's a lot of economic pressure to increase the density of JC and the similar areas of the outer boroughs, resisting that is one cause of the housing crisis.

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Heritage in the crosshairs: Historic Jersey City church demolished

Today 7:30 AM (1/6/2020)
By John Gomez/For The Jersey Journal

Editor?s note: This is the first in a series about historic houses of worship under threat of erasure in Jersey City and Hudson County.


Sunday morning ? and the voices and vespers that drifted out of the open oak doors of Grace Lutheran Church for over a hundred years onto the Summit Avenue sidewalk, in the Heights section of Jersey City, are no more.

Instead, an empty lot, neatly graveled with the rubbled fabric of a leveled landmark and fenced in tightly with chain-link, is all that remains.


https://www.nj.com/hudson/2020/01/heri ... ty-church-demolished.html