Issue 206: Consider the SID
Also, Q&A with Lorraine Freeney, RIP Oscar the Dog, ICYMI, and turtles getting feral.
Good morning! Here’s your newsletter for this week. — Amy, Katie, and David.
Neighborhood Character: Lorraine Freeney
By Katie Jennings
Know someone who’s got a cool story or is having a big impact in the community? Please let us know by emailing neighborhoodcharacter@gmail.com.
This week we caught up with Lorraine Freeney, founder of Jersey City Birds, a nonprofit that promotes the appreciation and protection of wild birds and their habitats. We corresponded with Lorraine over email.
Lorraine’s appreciation for birds started with her dad Patrick. Growing up in a coastal town in Ireland, she and her dad would walk the public gardens outside Malahide Castle. That’s where she learned that “if you’re paying close enough attention, there is always something new and fascinating to see, no matter how often you walk in the same place.”
After moving to the U.S., between working in publishing, getting married, and having two children, Lorraine didn’t have much time for birds. But she said everything changed after a bike ride in 2016 that ended in Lincoln Park West.
For folks who aren’t familiar, there’s a bridge in Lincoln Park between the football field and track where there are more ballfields and parking lots, but beyond that are walking, running and biking paths through the marshland.
“That area’s restoration had recently been completed and here, in the middle of a densely urban community, were all kinds of shorebirds and songbirds,” she said. “It felt magical.”
Jersey City birds began in April 2020, a few weeks into the pandemic. It started with a Facebook group that now has more than 1,600 members. In addition to birds, Lorraine is also a Master Gardener and native plant advocate. Last week, Jersey City Birds hosted its annual art show! You can view the art available for purchase here.
Green Heron by Michael Stubblefield, taken in Liberty State Park
Vote for your favorite bird! The group recently hosted a bird primary election. “The plan was to have the top three birds go on to our general election in a couple weeks (stay updated here). We’ve ended up with four because there was a legit tie for third place. So the contenders are: Great Blue Heron, Tree Swallow, Red-tailed Hawk, and Northern Mockingbird. We’re going to have all four do some posts and state their platforms before people vote online.”
For someone who has never gone birding, how do you recommend they begin?
“Get some binoculars and join a walk. Jersey City Birds, Feminist Bird Club of Jersey City, Bayonne Nature Club, Bergen County Audubon Society, Sierra Club, Liberty State Park all host bird/nature walks. (Check out the event calendar here). Birding with someone knowledgeable is really the easiest way to begin. But you can also download a bird ID app like Merlin or grab a guidebook and get out and explore by yourself.” What’s your favorite bird and why? “My actual favorite is among the finalists for Honorary Bird and I don’t want to be accused of having my thumb on the scale. So I’ll name a runner up: Blue Jay. True, they’re loud, but they are just so beautiful and full of personality. They also have an unfair reputation for being aggressive. (If you want to see really aggressive, just look at house sparrows. They are jerks. Sorry.)”What’s one fact about birds you think people should know? “One of my favorite nerdy facts that combines birds with native plants is from a study that Doug Tallamy did. A pair of chickadees needs between 6,000 to 9,000 caterpillars to successfully raise a family. Which is a key reason why native plants and trees are so important – because they support insects and caterpillars in far greater numbers than non-natives.”
Lincoln Park West versus Caven Point – what’s the best spot for bird watching in JC?
“I really love both. Caven Point is closed during spring and summer to protect nesting birds, so I spend more time in LPW then.”What’s next for Jersey City Birds? “For the past four summers I've helped with the Greener JC High School Urban Ecologist internship program, and that's about to start up again. I get to take a bunch of amazingly smart high school students on bird walks twice a week and help them learn to identify birds, plants, and other wildlife, and they gather data to put together a research project. In September we’ll reunite with Feminist Bird Club JC for our For the Birds collision monitoring program, getting up at dawn to collect data on window strike victims and, hopefully, save some of the injured ones.”What’s your favorite native plant? “Blue Vervain. I saw it growing in DeKorte park a few years ago and fell in love. It’s a tall perennial with delicate blue flowers on spiky stems that look like a little candelabra. It’s both very sturdy and very intricate when you look at it closely. Pollinators go nuts for it.”
Is there anything the City could be doing better to support birds and/or native plants?
“There are a number of very positive city initiatives in the works, and others that I’d love to see happening. My hope is that, in the not-too-distant future, we will have legislation that makes both new and existing buildings more bird-friendly, and citywide Lights Out initiatives to help keep birds safe during migration. We’ll no longer use rodenticides that get into the food chain and kill hawks and other raptors. We’ll have increased the city’s tree canopy, focusing on native trees wherever possible, and we’ll balance the active recreation in parks (which we need) with areas of wildlife habitat. Caven Point will be permanently protected from development. And the parks—County parks too—will prioritize native plants and won’t use pesticides that kill pollinators and other wildlife. And since this is my fantasy, we’ll have school programs and after-school programs that help kids learn about birds and nature and ecology, sponsored by Jersey City Birds. And we’ll also have a Jersey City wildlife rehab facility, so that injured birds don’t have to be transported either to Wild Bird Fund in Manhattan or Raptor Trust in Millington, because it’s frankly nuts that we don’t have closer options.”
Learn more about JC Birds by going to their Facebook group or their Instagram page.
Consider the SID
By David Giambusso
Closer to when she departs, I’ll get more into a brief history of Amy Wilson, what she’s taught me and a lot of other people in this town about fostering community with hard work, unflagging will, genuine love and joy.
For now, let me attempt a reflection on that super sexy topic known as the Special Improvement District, or SID for short. Our tale is set on West Side Avenue, where people have been complaining for actual decades about the late night crowds, double parking, noise, yelling, harassment and other nefarious crap on the sidewalk next to the bodega at the corner of Gautier.
I’ve lived in cities since I was 18 and no one expects or even really wants a city to be quiet and sleepy. I love living in a city because it’s real – you live with people from all over the world with rich histories and traditions and stories. It’s loud, chaotic, adventurous, drug-addled, tragic, horrific and beautiful all at once. So I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about when something becomes a scourge on the neighborhood and all the people around it just try to live with the bullshit until they can’t take it anymore. People who live in an East Coast city of any size will be familiar with this phenomenon: some dangerous or annoying thing about city life that exists because maybe it made sense 30 years ago and no one has had the political will to change it so now basically it’s the law.
The police did a big push recently after a bunch of us complained to JCPD and the City Council about how the city was failing the West Side while taxing the crap out of us. The corner has been pretty good since then and I have to give them credit – the police took it seriously. The West District and the quality of life task force responded pretty thoroughly over the last month. They shut down the bodega for a few days. They send cars around more frequently and Captain Joe Olszewski and our community liaison officer, Ileana Anton have been very communicative about their progress.
But there’s been no fundamental change in the dynamics that lead to the situation and that’s not the cops’ fault. There’s an eye in the sky which is not ideal for a few reasons, not least of which is that if you have to have 24-hour police surveillance on one corner it doesn’t really give the sense of, ‘Hey yeah, they’ve really addressed the problem here.’
We go to the West District meetings and the police say they’re stretched too thin because they’re having a hard time filling their ranks. Now they claim it’s not a budgetary issue, but it’s got to be a little bit of a budget issue. I’m going to assume if they complain about the budget, someone from City Hall will get a little dyspeptic. As a reporter and editor, I’ve talked to hundreds of cops and civil servants from Newark to New York City and not one of them has ever said their agency has enough money.
Anton and Olszewski say no one wants to be a cop anymore. At the last Captain’s meeting, police said over the last four to five years, the department’s ranks have been cut by roughly 40 percent. I know people have a lot of feelings about police, but it’s often a tough and thankless job. (I say this as someone who’s covered cops but also someone who’s had brushes with the law during his misspent youth. Anyone who’s spent a night in a precinct lockup knows there is very little glamour in being a beat cop.)
So, yeah, we the people have to take some responsibility for what happens on these blocks. Enter the SID. Ours is called the West Side Partnership. A few of us did a tour recently with Commercial District Services (CDS), the company contracted to run the SID, and it was really eye-opening.
The SID operates with funding from a 3 percent assessment by the city on local businesses — an average small business will pay $750 a year. That yields a budget of about $250,000 for our SID, which runs about 30,000 linear feet of West Side from Broadway to Stegman Parkway. The SID also applied this year for an Urban Enterprise Zone grant from the state for about $290,000 which they’re hopeful will be approved.
I’ve lived in either NYC or JC for decades and I don’t think I’ve ever really reflected on the organism that is a commercial block. I’m talking here about West Side Avenue between Duncan and St. Al’s. We know the blocks we live on intimately of course, but most folks aren’t spending 12-18 hours a day just looking out onto West Side. We come and go from the park and the buses and our houses. (This is one of the things I like best about the movie “Do the Right Thing” is that it treats the corner around a small business like it’s an organism.)
Chris Bernardo, the head of CDS, led the tour, and it’s his job to figure out the best way to foster a healthy ecosystem for commercial blocks with very little money. He brought some of his crew to listen to us. Bill O’Dea and Joel Brooks were there, our interim Councilmember Maureen Hulings dropped by for about 10 minutes. The SID president Jake Gergues was there. There was a private security team called Omega which is supposed to be doing a six-week pilot assessing the area. The whole thing went on for about an hour.
The SID’s biggest job is cleaning up trash on the sidewalks which they do from 8am to 4pm every day. These are the folks you see in blue t-shirts pushing garbage cans and brooms up and down West Side.
In theory, they do a lot of other little things that are supposed to have a beneficial effect for the ecosystem, like putting up new awnings at the corner store. They’ll do this for your business if you apply, btw. But they said a lot of businesses aren’t interested in the hassle. We have a lot of solid businesses on West Side, mostly run by people, a lot of them immigrants, who put their whole lives into keeping their businesses afloat and then the asshole next to them is letting his empty broken-glass storefront crumble into decrepitude (Lookin’ at you Mac’s Video Center). I don’t think anyone disagrees that if you’re on a block where businesses clean up their sidewalks and have decent signage it’s a much different vibe than four smoke shops and a bunch of empty broken storefronts.
The problem on Gautier illustrates another vital issue for a commercial corridor: windows. One of the reasons this corner is prime to hang out at is because it’s functionally an alley: you have a brick wall behind a chain link fence at the back of St. Al’s annex with no windows. On the other side of Gautier is the bodega wall which is almost all brick but for a small corner of the window stacked with pill bottles, knick-knacks, deodorant, bandaids and random household goods of questionable origin.
Now technically that window is supposed to be clear and act as an eye on the street. If there were two businesses or even residences with windows facing onto Gautier on both sides, it likely would not be the ideal party spot that it is now. Where, for example, would people throw their nip bottles, beer cans, condoms and syringes?
But if you’re trying to make a bodega work you have to cover every last centimeter you can with product because the profit margins are so tight. Between low-cost products and rising rents, bodegas really struggle to stay afloat.
Another small/big thing: Lighting and signage. The guys from Omega said you would be amazed at how much a simple sign or motion lighting can act as a deterrent. This came up in a discussion about the late-night, open air casino that we sometimes get to witness on the steps of St. Al’s Elementary, but it applies to any corner. I know there are spots on Bergen and Monticello where this is an issue.
Anyway I plan to go to more of these SID meetings as I think they can be a good resource for folks who see a better future for the Lincoln Park area. Like any group they reflect the priorities of the people who show up.
Amy and Katie and I are still figuring out the best way to do this newsletter but our number one core purpose is trying to make it a resource for the community and make it a community of its own. Please let us know if there are issues you want to see investigated.
RIP Oscar the Dog
By Amy Wilson
Well friends, I had a whole thing written up for you where I was reacting to the NYC mayoral primary and trying to take a stab at answering the burning question, Who is the Jersey City version of Zohran Mamdani? but that’s going to have to wait til next week. Unfortunately, this week something awful happened: my beloved dog of 17 years completely fell apart after a long battle of doggie dementia (I will spare you the details of that but it wasn’t great), and had to be put to sleep on Friday.
If you know me — even if you’ve just read this newsletter a lot — you know I’m obsessed with my dog, and Oscar was like a member of the family to me and my husband. In his prime, we went to everything together — Oscar was witness to an awful lot of JC political/cultural history in his short (well, long by dog standards) life. So this was extremely brutal, and I just need to take a little break right now.
Earlier in the week, before he really started showing signs of not doing well, I did what any responsible pet parent does: I OPRAed Hudson County to find out how many write-in votes he got for Sheriff. If it’s anything over two, I’ll be very impressed! But when I did that I had no idea that this is how the rest of the week would play out. I’ll let you know when I hear back — they are well within their window to respond to that request.
Also, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention a local business that really, really helped us during this time. Bond Vet (357 Marin Boulevard) was above and beyond fantastic. The second we walked in, they ushered us to a private room. There, they brought a blanket and put it on the floor, and gave us a ton of treats to spoil our dog in his last moments, allowing us as much time as we needed. The vet clearly explained to me how the procedure would go, and answered any questions we had. In the end, Oscar died peacefully in my arms. Everybody was so kind and supportive, and I’m so grateful for them helping us through this. (I don’t want to write too much more because if I do, I will start crying again and that’s no good. But I also want to shout out David G for driving us to the vet, and helping to ease us through this awful situation. Little acts like that really help, and make things so much easier.)
Anyway, everything sucks, but at least my dog is (hopefully) in a better place now. I’ll be back next week, and I’m also writing the Subscriber Exclusive with some analysis of the neighborhood-by-neighborhood vote totals for the governor’s primary. For now, I just need a little break. Have a great July 4th everyone, and I’ll see you soon.
Feral of the week
That’s right — it’s summer, which means it’s prime turtle peeping season in Lincoln Park:
The turtles seem to have moved from their usual sunning spot to an area in the lower southwest of the pond (my sense of direction is not the best and I hope I’m giving you good advice to see them) and they’ve gotten really BIG! Anyway, turtles can be feral too, and I just wanted to give them a shout out.
ICYMI
Nominate a Jersey City preservation project! The Jersey City Landmarks Conservancy is looking for community involvement in selecting excellent examples of restoration and adaptive reuse. Go to this page to nominate.
Reporter Dan Israel will be Bill O’Dea’s pick for Ward E council.
Chances are some of the best fireworks viewing for July 4th will be on your block, possibly in the middle of the street, but if that’s not your thing and you want to check out something more legit, here’s info on the city’s official celebration. No Snoop Dogg or Pitbull or any other big headliners, but plenty of stuff all the same: “Attendees can expect around 60 vendors, three DJ stages, including The Cookout Stage, The World Stage, and the House Music Stage, two beer gardens hosted by 902 Brewing Co., and a Kids’ Zone featuring a variety of activities and a bounce house. Presented by Fireworks by Grucci, the night will conclude with a fireworks display beginning at 9:30PM over the Hudson River, accompanied by a synchronized patriotic soundtrack.” Link for more.
RIP Oscar, the goodest dog