Issue 31: The one where we go looking for Jimmy Hoffa's body.
Tyler Ballon at Deitch Projects, Jimmy Hoffa, Ward C election and more.
Good morning! Lots of fun stuff this week: dead mobsters, art, the usual. Hope you have a wonderful week and Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours! — Amy
Tyler Ballon at Deitch Projects
In what can only be described as the ABSOLUTE BIGGEST THING THAT HAS EVER HAPPENED TO A JERSEY CITY ARTIST EVER, JC native Tyler Ballon had his first solo show open at Deitch Projects in NYC last week. Put it this way: it’s such a big deal that when I walked by the gallery last week and peered in from the street (I was there late and it was closed but I could look in from the windows), I thought to myself “Hey, that looks like Tyler’s work. And weird — the artist’s name is Tyler too!” So unthinkable it was to me that a super young artist from Jersey City would be having a show here, that I convinced myself it was all a coincidence and an artist by a different name. Yes, I’m just that insane, but also this is just that big a deal.
For context: Jeffery Deitch’s gallery is one of the most influential galleries in the US, if not the world. The owner was previously the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in LA, in between his stints of running a highly successful gallery with outposts in New York and Los Angeles. I am so excited to see a young artist from JC get this opportunity to work with him and get this kind of exposure.
Tyler’s from and still lives in Greenville, where his parents are Pentacostal pastors. He has a studio at Mana, and I can verify that he is a super nice guy just from running into him in the hallway. His work especially stands out to me for its inclusion of imagery related to the church and to Christianity in general, which is a bit of a taboo in the contemporary art world:
This, to me, is what is most interesting about his work. On one hand it’s tempting to look at Ballon’s work as another example of inserting the representation of Black flesh and identity into the canon, ala Jordan Casteel and Kehinde Wiley — and as such, it is an important addition to the conversation of representation in art. But what I find most interesting about his work is how he sneaks (not so subtly) in his own religious identity as well.
The art world took a beating in the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s. As a result of this, at least in part, a lot of NYC art people really don’t like religion. In a country where Christians tend to be one of the more dominant cultural forces, it’s strange that when we walk into art galleries there are so few depictions of it. It’s notable in this show, the gallery has chosen not to include some of his most explicitly religious-inspired works. But there is some, and I’m glad to see they haven’t curated it out entirely.
Identity is complicated, but it’s most complicated to people who see the world in binaries: if you dismiss Pentacostal Christianity in a simplistic way where you cast believers as purely narrow-minded or reactionary, you’re likely going to dismiss his work. But if you’re open to the idea that maybe there’s something there — maybe something you don’t personally understand, which lurks below the surface but provides support and purpose to an awful lot of people — you might let it in. Good art is hard; it challenges you. And I find this work challenging. I’m excited to see him get this opportunity, and very excited to see where he goes next. (Tyler Ballon: The House I Live In; November 13, 2021–January 8, 2022; Deitch Projects, 76 Grand Street, New York City)
TFW Jimmy Hoffa winds up being buried in your neighborhood. (Part One of what will likely be an ongoing series.)
Oh cool — Jimmy Hoffa was buried in my neighborhood! Maybe!
From a NY Times story earlier this week:
The disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa, a mystery that has gripped the American imagination for half a century on its ascent to national folklore, is the subject of a new F.B.I. investigation centered on the site of a former landfill in Jersey City. A worker, on his deathbed, said he buried the body underground in a steel drum.
F.B.I. agents armed with a search warrant arrived in Jersey City at a plot of dirt and gravel the size of a Little League diamond below the Pulaski Skyway on Oct. 25 and 26 to conduct a “site survey,” according to the Detroit field office, which has led the investigation into Mr. Hoffa’s disappearance in 1975. The steel drum is said to be buried about 15 feet below ground, in the shadow of countless millions of drivers who have passed it by.
I mean, look. An almost fifty year old nationwide hunt for a dead body seems to be winding down with the eventual conclusion looking increasingly like it will be in my neighborhood — what, I’m supposed to not go out and investigate? I started putting together some plans with my friends Katie and David, who are new-ish to the neighborhood and need to put in some time looking for dead mobsters if they’re ever going to fully fit in.
Before we left, David asked, quite reasonably: if the FBI had already gone to the site, dug up a barrel with Hoffa in it, and taken it away, what exactly were we looking for? Ah, this would appear to be a very good point, but there would still be so much for us to search for, even if we assume that after all this time the FBI actually got all of Hoffa’s remains (which I’m not ready to assume is true, necessarily, because why not and it makes for more of an interesting afternoon). But also: we could at least find the exact site that the FBI dug up, or evidence of the FBI having been there, right?
[The location chosen to bury Hoffa] was on a desolate patch of unused state property just outside the dump, between eight and 15 feet deep, the father told his son. He buried the Hoffa barrel first, followed by as many as 15 to 30 chemical drums and chunks of brick and dirt, he told his son.
Then he covered the whole area with dirt. He “placed something detectable just under the surface of the grave site, which I am willing to disclose to law enforcement,” Frank Cappola wrote. Paul Cappola told his son he never shared the location with his partner or anyone else.
If nothing else, we could find the exact location of The NY Times photo that was published in the story, right? How hard could that be? With that, we took off.
The site that used to be the PJP Landfill is a pretty cursed stretch of land you probably haven’t had very much reason to really ever visit, at least not since the constant underground fires got extinguished sometime back in the mid 1980s. It’s bracketed by two very nice things north and south — the Skyway Golf Course and Skyway Park. From the east and west, it’s contained by the Hackensack River on one end and Route 440 on the other. In the middle is a stretch of enormous warehouses that look like weird Lego blocks just dropped from the sky, and they’re surrounded by parking lots that seem to go on forever; there’s also banks of trucks with grocery store logos, and large areas of marshlands all around. There’s almost no people walking around and it’s just empty of most signs of life.
It’s a little hard to describe exactly where we were for a number of reasons. For one, more than one street we were on didn’t have a name or any really identifying characteristics to it. For two, we were likely trespassing and I don’t want to encourage you to do that — but it’s weird, because there were no signs to demarcate where private property started and stopped. There were parts that were clearly trails meant for the public to walk on, and then other parts that weren’t, but the line between them was very confusing. Also — what were those trails we were on? I’m not talking about Skyway Park or the golf course — there were weird little back roads that were in between and totally unconnected to either, but clearly designed to lead you to the river. It was all very confusing.
Anyway, at one point we decided to go up a hill that seems pretty likely was created out of pure toxic landfill because it had venting set up to keep those underground fires from starting again:
The area under the Pulaski Skyway has what I’d describe as some pretty menacing vibes. I don’t know if this is because it suddenly started to hit me that we were looking for traces of human remains in a vat — this seemed very abstract before, but being there it suddenly felt real — or if it was the lingering toxicity from the old landfill, or the ghosts of dozens of mobsters who had been buried there, but it was pretty creepy.
Things like this completely random gravel pit that probably doesn’t relate to anything took on an air of special significance:
Or how these industrial barrels:
kind of took on a whole other dimension, because of their location, and with them being surrounded by nothing but empty trucks and the sound of traffic passing over us on the Pulaski.
We eventually passed over an area where the river sort of breaks off and dips into land a bit, which had a dilapidated and abandoned bridge spanning it:
Once we crossed the river (by cutting through the water), we were led further under the bridge. At this point, I started getting concerned we were going to run into either A. a grizzled old FBI guy I would annoy with ridiculous questions to my own personal delight1, or B. a homeless encampment that didn’t want to be found. I started getting a little spooked at the very real possibility of running into B, but there was nothing.
Along the way, we found this weird plastic briefcase thing:
Anyway — we found nothing of note, anywhere, that we could concretely point to as part of this new discovery. No trampled brush from FBI guys descending on the area. No big pits of freshly disturbed ground where a bunch of barrels had once been. No police tape. No sign of any kind of investigation anywhere. Was the FBI really here at all? Seems unclear.
Whatever — I am going back; as in multiple times, as in this is my new hobby, as in I’m headed back over there this morning. I still haven’t made it over to Skyway Park yet, and there’s so much to explore in this hidden little enclave of JC. More to come, I’m sure.
Ward C, where everything is confusing
Hi! Did you know that there’s a runoff happening in Ward C, and that it’s between longtime City Council member and Team Fulop member Rich Boggiano and former JSQ neighborhood association president Kevin Bing? And that it’s gotten so goddamn weird you practically need a scorecard to keep things straight at this point?
Somehow, in a city with 260k+ people, which is incredibly diverse in terms of racial/ethnic/economic factors, and which faces a myriad of social issues and challenges involving funding the public schools, providing affordable housing, and preventing violence, the fight in Ward C seems to come down to… parking! It’s great! There’s no clean drinking water in the majority of JC schools, and every other day there’s a shooting. But sure, let’s talk about parking as the single most pressing issue facing our city. Here’s a recent mailer from Boggiano:
Now, the really weird part of all this is, bike lanes have been a signature part of the Fulop administration’s accomplishments and agenda. It’s one of the very rare instances where I actually agree with Fulop — bike lanes are good, overall. So it’s a little odd that in this race, the candidate that is anti-bike lanes is… on Fulop’s team. Boggiano’s campaign is funded with Fulop money. If you donated to Team Fulop thinking “hey, I like bike lanes, let me support this dude,” your money is now being used to fund a campaign that is anti-bike lanes. Ugh, politics suck.
Meanwhile, you might recall that just a few weeks ago this race was a three-way dance, with attorney Tom Zuppa raising a lot of money and doing all the right things to secure himself a significant amount of attention against incumbent Boggiano. And, you know, as these things go, usually when one challenger gets eliminated, he turns around and endorses the other challenger against the incumbent — except uh, in this case, when Zuppa jumped in and endorsed Boggiano.
Now, bear in mind, Kevin Bing is hardly Antifa. He’s pretty close to Fulop when it comes to being very welcoming to development and corporations. The idea of “oh no, must stop Kevin Bing” (because he’s… just too radical? I guess?) is just frankly weird, but then everything about this race has been weird. Why would Zuppa run against Boggiano just to endorse him? Conspiracy theories abound and I don’t know anymore.
You know what would make a lot more sense? If Boggiano had never joined Team Fulop and stayed a curmudgeon and an outsider. He could position himself as being Anti-All-This-New-Stuff and as a counterbalance to Bing, who he would paint as a Newbie-Who-Doesn’t-Get-It. Come on, does anyone actually believe Boggiano is in favor of a French contemporary art museum coming to JSQ? What about those big high rises? A disaster! That’s the Boggiano people liked and connected to.
Now, unfortunately, Boggiano has really betrayed his own legacy. Those of us who sort of liked him when he was a stubborn old guy ranting about everything new have lost faith in him, now that he’s sold himself out for what he thought would be an easy re-election by aligning with the same team he once stood in contrast to. And then he started falling asleep in council meetings. It’s not a great combination. Now Zuppa seems to be falling apart beside him, and it’s not anything I would have expected from either of them. To paraphrase how the Boggiano of the past might have described it: what a complete disaster. What a shame.
ICYMI
On Election Day, it was leaked to the press that Amazon was close to closing on a massive office space in Jersey City. Suddenly, this week, that got reversed, and they will not be coming here. What happened?
“Mayor Steven Fulop unveiled on Friday a new inclusionary zoning plan that will require new buildings of 15 units or more to include 10-15% on-site affordable units, depending on the income level of the census tract they’re in, and will not allow for developers to offer other benefits in exchange for building affordable housing.” This is less than activists had asked for, but an improvement over the initial plan. Link to story.
Union City Mayor Brian Stack has begun his massive 30k turkey distribution to the people of his city.
Found art
Somewhere on Claremont, I think?
I had, in my own mind the night before, workshopped what I would say to any terrifying Smoking Man -style “agents” we would have come across and come up with the following: “Hiiiiiii! Listen, I read about everything in the paper and I just wanted to come over to see if I could help you guys out a bit. I listen to a lot of true crime podcasts when I’m in the studio and so I just had a few suggestions like, did you guys think about making posters yet? You know like when someone loses a cat and they make a poster — maybe you could do that with Jimmy Hoffa’s face on it and like maybe it would raise awareness or something?” Clearly this would result in the agent’s head exploding or just his entire body melting from all the justified rage he’d feel, and that would clear a path for us to continue our search.