Issue 168: A woolly mammoth enters the chat

Plus: upcoming photo show, more on the Pompidou, I completely give up when it comes to Jim McGreevey, and more!

Good morning! Well, parts of this newsletter were not fun to write (other parts were a pleasure and exceptionally easy to write!) but I hope that all the same you are having a wonderful morning and that your Sunday is off to a good start. Let’s get into it. — Amy

---

Solo show by Duquann Sweeney coming up

Ok, starting with the very best news up first! Amazing photographer, local legend, and friend of the newsletter Duquann Sweeney is having a solo show right here in Jersey City.

For You, For Us will be at the Communipaw Branch Library (295 Johnston Ave) and it sounds like a pretty big show and a great opportunity to come see Sweeney’s work in full. It runs from Sept 26-Jan 14, with an opening on Oct 1st from 6pm-7:30pm. With a really nice, long run, you’ll have plenty of time to make it over to see the show at some point. And it sounds like there’s some new, big pieces in the show — I can’t wait to see them!

---

Pompidou update

I’m going to zoom through this update as quickly as possible — there’s a lot to cover.

Monday was the city council caucus, and Fulop showed up to explain the project to the council members in the room. Here’s an article about that, but the most interesting part of the whole meeting was, I think, when Ward C councilman Rich Boggiano brought up the idea that it may not be the Pompidou that’s going in the space after all:

“How much is this going to cost us taxpayers? Who’s going to pay for it? These are the questions they [voters] want to know. If Pompidou doesn’t come in, who is going to staff this place?”

Ok, there you have it — apparently now we’ve reached the point where maybe the Pompidou project might not have the Pompidou at all, and this is getting insane.

Concerned about this statement, I reached out to the Pompidou press office. Asking them specifically about the plans released by the mayor last week, I asked them if they were aware of these plans and what their comments on it were. They responded:

Dialogue is continuing with Jersey City but it is still too early to say more.

And then strangely, responded again a few hours later:

The Centre Pompidou has acknowledged the State of New Jersey's decision. It remains committed to ongoing discussions with the Mayor of Jersey City to jointly determine the project's future direction.

I’m glad to hear that they’re at least aware that something is happening, but this doesn’t sound like a full-throated endorsement of the specific plan we have in front of us. It sounds like maybe they’ll be interested, maybe not — they’re keeping their options open. Which makes a whole lot of sense for them, and potentially like JC might be stuck with a 100,000 square foot space with no specific tenant in mind. We just need to trust that some ol’ cultural space will be in it, and I’m sure everything will be fine.

As a result, from what I can tell, this project is now really, really in trouble. I know I keep saying this, but all museums are not the same. It makes a difference if we’re bringing the Pompidou to JC or if we’re bringing… something else entirely. You don’t just stick a bunch of things on the wall and start reaping the benefits. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame museum brings one kind of economic development; the Holocaust Museum brings another; a museum like the Frick will bring in a totally different set of people. None of them are bad — if handled correctly and with enough support — but they’re different and we deserve to know how this is going to play out. If we’re seriously now approaching this project like “oh just build a huge space and don’t worry, someone or another will show up and move in” we have completely lost the plot and this is now full on gaslighting to the people who live in that area. Walk around Manhattan and tell me how many gigantic storefronts are vacant and have been for months or years. We’ve gone from a potentially good idea to something that is completely unclear and along the way a real estate developer is going to get millions in tax breaks.

Sam Pott, founder of Nimbus dance, wrote an amazing letter to the JC Times that I highly recommend you read. From the POV of someone who has run a large arts organization in Jersey City for many years, he breaks down many of the problems with the Pompidou plan in detail. Honestly, this is the best thing that has been written critiquing the plan. Just a few highlights (but seriously, read the whole thing):

To present this concept, which potentially represents hundreds of millions of dollars of expenditures over years into the future, much of it taxpayer funded, with less than a week for the City Council to consider before a first reading, just two weeks before a final vote, with the building scheduled to break ground in 60 days, represents an impossibly short timeframe to consider. On those grounds alone, this proposal should be considered with extreme caution.

[…]

[…] the Jersey City Pompidou possesses none of the basic ingredients that institutions worldwide rely on for their stability and solvency. The Pompidou proposal relies almost entirely on taxpayer funding without a clear plan for future income sources. This planning is being done backwards, with an “if you build it, they will come” approach – this is an extremely risky and cavalier approach to allocating public funds.

[…]

Has a thoughtful and realistic assessment of the repurposed lower floors of the Journal Square residential building been done? Anything less than this kind of specialized museum facility design will result in an inadequate, limited and ultimately unsuccessful operation. Could it be true that Pompidou management is confident about hurriedly jumping onboard with this facility concept without appropriate assessment? Can we hear from them and other qualified museum operators about the viability of this new space?

In reference to the notion that this space could be repurposed for a future non-Pompidou use: arts spaces are not interchangeable – a space custom-built for the Pompidou will almost certainly not be usable for future entities and will require complete retrofit.   

Anyway, on Wednesday, the council met and voted through the ordinance on what’s called “first read.” Ordinances like this one get discussed and comments from the public heard three times in an open meeting before it can pass. This is a bit of a complicated process that a lot of people don’t really understand, and on one hand it slows down the process to allow more feedback (a good thing) and on other it’s pretty difficult for activists to get people to these meetings to provide that feedback because now you have to really get people there three times to really make your point, which is a strain on everyone. But at the same time, there is an idea within our city council that “first read is a courtesy” (meaning, that they should just vote to approve anything that is up on first read, so that they can come back to another meeting and find out more about it and then “really” vote on it) which is complete nonsense, but the Fulop slate council members do it every time.

There were a few people in attendance who offered criticism of the plan (usually, so as not to ask to much of supporters, activists try to get people there for second or third read, but people do also show up to the first one). Sam Pott was there and added yet more to his criticisms:

“… To present the new Jersey City Pompidou concept as part of a tax abated real estate development project, something that is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, a generational investment for years to come with one week of notice to deliberate on, a couple of weeks to decide upon, is the most irresponsible aspect of arts planning I’ve ever heard of[.]”

And then the council went ahead and voted it through first read. (I really want to return to this “first read is a courtesy” topic because no, that’s not how meetings like this should ever run, but that will be for another time.) Also Councilman Saleh complained he had “Pompi-overdose” because we’ve all been talking about this for too long(!!!), even though these new plans that make the project completely different and start over from square one all got dropped on us just a week ago.

John Metro, the business administrator for JC, promised at the caucus that there would be a community meeting. And this is it:

If you want to ask questions about the plan, go to this meeting. It will also be streamed on the JSQCA Facebook page, but to ask questions, you’ll have to be there.

If you know you’re against this plan and there’s nothing they can say at the meeting to change your mind, you might be better off skipping it and going straight to making a statement at the city council’s second read. I’m not sure showing up to the JSQCA meeting specifically to yell and complain about how much you hate this project is productive — but I leave that to you to decide.

It really feels like the more we learn about this project, the worst it is. This time last week, I really hesitated to put the idea that maybe the Pompidou wouldn’t be moving into the space in my post about the museum, because I thought why worry people with something that of course won’t happen? And here we are, and now maybe even that part of the plan — the one part that absolutely should be the core of the project — is falling apart. I’ve gone from being at least a tiny bit optimistic this might work to being completely convinced that there’s no way it will. Maybe there will be more information at the JSQCA meeting, who knows. But things are not looking great.

---

I am completely done with Jim McGreevey. Also, an apology.

Well, this has been several months coming, but here we are. I don’t want to write this, but it’s time.

As someone who advocates for her neighborhood and a number of different JC causes regularly, it’s in my best interest to at least get along with the various people who might get elected sometime soon. I don’t have to love them or donate to them, but it’s nice to get along, and it makes things better and more pleasant for everyone overall.

So it’s been in that vein, and also with the idea that I write a newsletter that gets read by a lot of people in JC who vote and I want everyone to be aware of the choices they have, that I have gone out of my way to try and treat Jim McGreevey as fairly as I can. I’ve seen him do a number of things during this campaign that I thought were embarrassing, out-of-step with JC, and so forth, but I really did try to be as generous as I could to him. He’s a credible candidate; he certainly does seem to want to be mayor and to be working hard to that end. I’ve chafed up against a number of statements he’s made over the last few weeks, but I’ve been trying to largely put them out of my mind in favor of the more important project of turning over a new leaf once Fulop’s term ends. I’ve been trying really, really hard to get along.

I’m ending that now. It came out on Friday that McGreevey is having a $1,000-a-ticket fundraiser in Ocean County co-hosted by one of the leading lights of the NJ MAGAsphere and, like, I officially give up. Clearly I misunderstood who McGreevey is, if this is who he is willing to court support from. This is bad, and aside from him immediately canceling this fundraiser and insisting he had no idea who the hosts of the event are (I wouldn’t believe him but it would at least be a start), I think we really need to start thinking hard about McGreevey being in this race and what that will mean for the most vulnerable in our city.

If you’re unfamiliar with one of the hosts of that event George Gilmore, he’s the chairman of the Ocean County GOP (described as “the most powerful county Republican organization” by NJ.com, and a regular supporter of far right wing candidates)¹ (←click on that footnote for more career highlights of the “great” people he’s surrounded himself with), and he ran into some tax problems a few years ago that then President Donald Trump personally pardoned him from on his last day in office. From an article from the Asbury Park Press in 2019:

He's accused of six federal charges including tax evasion, filing false tax returns, failing to pay payroll taxes and making false statements on a loan application.

I mean, ok — look, we all make mistakes, right? Maybe he had a family emergency like one of his kids got super sick and he just kind of dropped the ball on paying taxes and his life went sideways for a while — listen, that’s totally understandable. Or, like:

At trial, prosecutors presented evidence about Gilmore's spending habits, including the purchase of an $82,000 woolly mammoth tusk, a $33,000 life-size bronze statue of George Washington, and nearly $400,000 to remodel his 13,000-square-foot Toms River home — despite owing the more than $1.5 million in federal taxes.

This dude bought a woolly mammoth tusk. That’s who this dude is — he spends his days supporting far right wing candidates and his evenings collecting strange, rich people things, like some sort of comic book villain. The George Washington statue is nuts too, but come on. If you hide enough money from the feds that you can afford to buy a woolly mammoth tusk and then get caught and sentenced to jail and Donald Trump has to step in and pardons you, I think you should be disqualified from hosting fundraisers for Democratic candidates without things looking real, real bad for the candidate in question.

And despite the tweet about the fundraiser going locally viral, there’s been no statement from McGreevey, no clarification on why he’s doing this that would explain it all away, just loads of people freaking out online that a dude who is apparently pretty cool with MAGA folks is running for mayor, and radio silence from McGreevey’s campaign in return. He doesn’t seem too bothered with a lot of us assuming he’s on board with the MAGA agenda if he’s not going to bother to correct that record.

I’m sure I do not need to lay out the potential problems for someone associated with MAGA running for mayor. I’d imagine our Haitian community won’t be thrilled to hear about this association after the past week, and neither will our undocumented community given MAGA loves to boast about mass deportations. And then there’s literally everything else. My point is, if you’re going to run for mayor of this city and keep people in your orbit who feel this way, we have a right to know and to ask a lot of questions about you. (Remember the scandal involving Fulop’s aide with the right wing sister that was only a few weeks ago but feels like it was ten years ago? It would be hypocritical to be mad about that and ok about this. This is basically the same thing all over again.)

Anyway, with this latest twist, I’m done. Put this fundraiser into context with the nonstop barrage of tweets from McGreevey where he’s endlessly mentioning going to church or talking about us being “all god’s children” and repeating strange history lessons (I guess of when our country was great?) and, no. I’m sorry. It is totally possible to be a church-going, faithful person who loves America and still believe in and support progressive politics — there are loads of people who fit this description perfectly. The problem arises when you’re hanging out with friends of Trump’s and also quoting the Bible and talking about when America was great constantly in your tweets — that starts to heavily imply a belief system that does not sit well with me, but has been a tried-and-true path to electoral victory throughout this country over the last few years, getting some of the worst possible people into office. Every day he seems less and less like a credible candidate for mayor of Jersey City and more like a candidate for mayor in a small town in a deeply red, Bible-belt state. This is getting ridiculous.

There’s also yet more context to consider. Put this fundraiser into the mix with his tweet just a couple of days ago where he was wishing former NJ governor/former Donald Trump inner circle member Chris Christie a happy birthday. Given that Christie is wildly unpopular and the butt of every other NJ politics joke, my first response to this tweet was just complete bafflement — why in god’s name would any candidate for office in NJ align themselves with him? I doubt most NJ GOP candidates would have tweeted such a thing, knowing Christie isn’t even popular in those circles. I’d imagine if Christie walked down Bergen Avenue, people would probably throw things at him. What could possibly be gained by putting such a tweet out there for voters to see?

But now I’m thinking, ok — first the Christie tweet, then the announcement of the fundraiser with GOP folks, and all this is alongside the constant barrage of Bible-talk. Suddenly things seem less like Jim has a very big tent and instead he’s just in a totally different tent than I realized he was in. Obviously, we are way beyond this being a coincidence or misunderstanding. At a certain point, I just have to accept that this guy’s politics are not at all what I thought they were, and this is a big problem.²

To be totally frank, I’m angry at myself for sitting down and meeting with him and giving him a chance, as well as writing nice things about him in this newsletter in the past (I’m more angry about the nice write-up than the meeting but I’m annoyed at myself for both). I quite honestly wanted to give the guy a try, and to believe all the things he’s been saying about second chances and so forth. In addition to my newsletter write up and in good faith, I introduced him to a number of people in Ward B — who met with him because I encouraged them to — because I believe very much that a strong campaign by a number of candidates will yield a better, more effective mayor in the end, no matter who wins. I want all of the candidates to connect meaningfully with people in my ward, so they can understand the issues we face — and so that’s why I did this. I wanted him to meet them and vice versa, so maybe we could have a truly open conversation about all the directions Jersey City might go in the next four years.

And, now I regret it. Apparently — in my pursuit of a rigorous campaign that I hoped would shed light on a number of problems facing our city that have been long ignored —I helped platform someone who is somehow fine with the MAGA agenda, if not actively a supporter. I never intended to do that, and I apologize for my actions. Apparently, in our crazy political times, you can’t even assume that someone who won numerous elections as a Democrat over many years believes in the same core values you’d assume they did. What a frustrating and depressing lesson to have to learn.

---

Send me your Halloween pics!

I love a good Halloween house! If you’ve got one — or if there’s one in your neighborhood — take a snapshot and send it my way (just respond to this newsletter that’s in your email inbox). Let me know where it is so everyone can go admire the spooky decorations! There’s bound to be some really good ones this year, and it seems like folks are getting started pretty early (I saw the first decorations popping up in late August).

---

Feral cat of the week

I had a few to choose from but coming off the Halloween announcement, a black cat seemed most appropriate.

---

ICYMI

• CarePoint starts talks on financial restructuring options that may include bankruptcy

---

1. Gilmore is also: a top advisor to Bill Spadea’s PAC, with Spadea being a far right radio host who is also running for governor; his wife has been accused of being given a job that benefits from public contracts through shady connections; and he backed anti-abortion candidate Phil Rizzo, a far-right pastor with a number of very questionable opinions, who ran against Jack Ciatterelli for the NJ governor’s race last time (if you thought Ciatterelli was pretty far right — and he was — well, Rizzo was even further to the right of him. This is not a great guy to be associated with when you’re running for mayor of JC).

2. Something I should make really clear — I have people in my life who are Republican. Not super close friends (because politics are important to me) and there’s not a whole lot of them, but a few people with whom I have shared experiences and history. The difference is, the people in my world who are Republican are honest about who they are; also, it doesn’t hurt that they also don’t have any actual political power. They’re just random people who go to their jobs and live their lives — they’re not trying to run for office to enact laws against trans people, immigrants, women, and so forth. I would probably not be ok with being friends with an elected official who was a conservative Republican (it’s never come up but I seriously doubt I’d be able to stomach that). Meanwhile, I am completely fine with some random lady down the street from me loving Donald Trump, as is her right. I just don’t want her to be mayor.

We all have to coexist and share our world with people who are different than we are. But there’s a huge difference between coexisting peacefully as equals and voting in a candidate whose POV is problematic, to put it lightly.