Issue 208: The Lincoln Park fountain repairs
Plus: JC Summerfest, the results of the write-in votes for Sheriff, feral cat political drama, and more!
Good morning! David has a great story for you about the Lincoln Park fountain; Katie has info on Summerfest + that stampede that happened last week (I’m just casually fitting that in but it was kind of a big deal!), and I OPRAed the HC Sheriff’s race and got some surprising results. We hope your Sunday is going well, and as always, thank you for reading! — Amy, David, and Katie
Lincoln Park fountain won’t open for at least another month because of weather and maybe that architect
by David Giambusso
The work the county is doing to reopen the Lincoln Park fountain is about 6 weeks behind schedule and will take at least four more weeks to finish according to the county and the guys doing the work. And the contractors say that’s an optimistic timeline.
I was biking around the loop this week and saw a crew working in the fountain which, as many of you know, has been defunct all season. This has been a matter of some concern for folks around here, so I thought I’d ask.
When I first approached the person I thought was the boss, he regarded me with something like a defensive posture. To be fair, if a middle-aged white guy in a bike helmet approaches me, I’m also assuming something dark is about to go down. But this guy told me he’s been taking a lot of grief from passersby which is unfortunate for him, though not surprising.
It does feel a little precious to whine about our fountain not working when there’s so much horrible stuff happening around us, but that’s kind of the point: Lincoln Park is where we all go to get away from the horrible stuff and get a little peace, and the fountain is a big part of that.
Anyway this guy’s been hearing it from West Siders. I didn’t ask for his name or tell him I’d be writing this, which is what a trained journalist is supposed to do. He’s not a public official and I wanted some unvarnished intel. So I’m just going to call him “Boss” because he had on a white straw hat and was bossing people around.
Based on the truck parked in the circle, the work is being done by CTC Maintenance & Restoration, a New York-based company with not a lot of info on its site. New York’s LLC database likewise has scant details.
Anyway, Boss was nice after he realized I wasn’t about to berate him and he explained what he’s doing and why it’s taking so long. Basically the fountain, now more than a hundred years old, has cracks throughout. Water seeps in and makes them worse.
Boss said his team is waterproofing the entire basin with something similar to a “roof membrane” which sounds cool if you’re into this kind of thing. I worked in a metal fabrication shop for several years in the aughts, so I’m not a total rube when it comes to weird building materials and how they work.
It’s basically a surface layer that seals the cracks and waterproofs the basin of the fountain. This material, Boss says, is like a rubbery concrete that goes on wet and really needs low humidity and sun to dry and harden. I don’t know that I can recall the last non-humid, non-rainy day around here, so Boss and the rest of us are kind of at the mercy of the heavens and climate change.
He said “I need four good weeks” when I asked him how long it will take. That was Friday, putting us at mid-to-early August at the soonest. Building in time for other complications, I could see it easily going to September or even October.
I asked the County for their timeframe (and this time I did identify as a member of the Neighborhood Character editorial staff).
Commissioner Bill O’Dea, who takes park issues very seriously, responded right away and said he’s “as frustrated as everyone else” and that he wants the contractors to come to the HudCo Commissioners meeting Tuesday, where he plans to discuss the fountain and tell them to hurry the hell up. He confirmed the rain and humidity were the big factors.
Then the question becomes why didn’t they do this work sooner so it would be done in time for the summer? The head of County Parks, Jonathan DeFilippo, also got back right away and said that was always the plan.
“The work was started before summer with a scheduled completion date of early June. Unfortunately we’ve had a lot of setbacks due to weather, humidity/rain, etc.,” he said. “We definitely wanted to have the fountain finished and operating before the summer season for all to enjoy.”
Anecdotally, it does seem like it’s rained every day for the last 4 months. But I checked the stats at the Rutgers climate lab and between March 1 and June 30 of last year we had 18.4 inches of rain. In the same period this year we’ve only had 16.4. That doesn’t account for humidity though and if you’re working with sensitive materials it may be a legit factor.
DeFilippo went on to say, “with the history of issues with the fountain I feel that it’s important to get it done the right way once and for all so we can all enjoy it for many summers to come.”
He’s no doubt referring to the great fountain debacle of 2016-2021 when the county hired an architect to remake the fountain who just totally (allegedly) whiffed. According to the Jersey Journal (RIP), one of the firm’s biggest failings was having “designed and installed a fountain basin which, because of the failure to anticipate expansion, experienced extensive cracking.”
In Hudson County even the most optimistic citizen must be concerned about some level of graft and malfeasance when it comes to contractors. But I think the county deserves a lot of credit for Lincoln Park because it is a true blessing and public asset for all of the West Side. That doesn’t happen without a lot of work.
I’m probably not the only one a little worried that LP will lose some of that luster under the new county administration. The Tom DeGise era spanned more than 20 years, after all, and built a lot of goodwill with its care of the park. This fountain debacle follows the installation of those stairs going from the flag monument down toward the basketball courts, pissing off everyone who uses wheels. But again, the Parks department has been responsive and mistakes from the prior administration often come back to bite the current one.
The commissioners have a caucus meeting at 4:30 p.m. July 15 at 567 Pavonia Avenue, First Floor, Jersey City, New Jersey. For more information, go here.
Let’s Hope Summerfest Is Stampede Free…
By Katie Jennings
Mayor Fulop’s office announced the 50th anniversary of Summerfest, the free outdoor concert series in Liberty State Park. Why they chose July 9 to promote this is not immediately clear, since it looks like the first shows were actually on July 6 and 8. Sorry if ya missed em!
From the press release: “The full lineup includes an exciting mix of soul, jazz, funk, R&B, Latin, Americana, gospel, and more from both nationally recognized musicians and top-tier local bands.”
“Liberty State Park is a free people’s park, and Summerfest is a perfect way to bring people together to enjoy its unmatched open space and scenic beauty,” said Sam Pesin, President of Friends of Liberty State Park.
The next show is Chico Alvarez today [Sunday, July 13] at the North Cove Field (behind the ferry parking lot) at 6pm. I couldn’t find a website for Chico, but a press release from William Paterson University earlier this year said: “Alvarez was born in New York City but grew up in Cuba and gained his musical background there. Now a New Jersey resident, he is an active singer, performing with the Afro-Cuban band Mafimba, mostly their lead singer, for nearly 40 years. He has also been jazz radio host of The New World Gallery on New York radio station WBAI, won an award from the National Association of Community Broadcasters, and interviewed many jazz giants.”
On Tuesday The Anthony Fuscaldo Group will perform on the South Lawn at 6:30pm. From his website: “Anthony Fuscaldo is a guitarist and composer from New Jersey. Inspired by Django Reinhardt, Wes Montgomery, and Joe Pass’s style of jazz guitar improvisation, Anthony's passion for music gives him a creative impulse that fuels each and every performance.” Looks like he’s performed with Chris Thile, who is an out-of-this-world mandolin player I really dig.
The free performances run every Sunday and Tuesday through August 17. Check out the full Sunday lineup and Tuesday lineup.
I’ve gone to Summerfest concerts in the past and they’re pretty chill. People sit on blankets and lawn chairs on the grass and there’s usually an ice cream truck nearby.
Just be aware, there’s not a zero percent chance you’ll get caught in an unexplained human stampede and find yourself searching for answers for days.
Thanks to Caren Lissner at Jersey City Patch, we finally have some clarity on what went down at the Exchange Place July 4th event. Per Caren’s story: “An annual fireworks celebration in Jersey City turned dangerous on Friday when people suddenly began running in a panic, police said. The stampede — caused by unfounded rumors of a shooting, police explained this week — sent one officer and a woman to the hospital, they said. … "The JCPD officers immediately ran into the area in question and found no evidence of a shooting or any crime scene," [city police spokeswoman Kim] Wallace-Scalcione said. … Jersey City's Emergency Services Unit and other law enforcement agencies conducted "a full sweep of the waterfront area," she said, but found no threat to public safety.”
What the story doesn’t answer is why it took City Hall and the JCPD five days to solve this mystery and speak to the wild speculation about the event.
Write-in votes for Sheriff
By Amy Wilson (and everything else further down in today’s newsletter after this story is also by Amy Wilson)
We have a bunch of new readers, so let me quickly recap the story so far:
Hudson County just went through an election for Sheriff where a lot of people were unhappy with both candidates running. As a result, I made a joke in an issue of this newsletter that people ought to consider writing in my elderly dog Oscar, instead of making the inevitable choice of one of the two people actually running. Then, on Election Day, unbeknownst (but fully supported!) by me, my neighbor Lorraine made a super cute poster hyping Oscar as a candidate and posted it online. For the rest of the day, I heard messages from people, about a dozen or more, cheerfully telling me they had written in Oscar. It was all very cute, and clearly Oscar posed no threat to either major candidate. Once the election was over, I then OPRAed the results, so that I could see how he did.
I got the results on Thursday. Three files of write-in votes were sent to me, each breaking down the election in different ways. The smallest of the files is two pages; another is over 300 pages. Either way, control-F was my friend, and I gleefully typed in “Oscar” into the search field, excited to see what I’d get back. The results are… interesting. Definitely not what I expected.
One vote. That’s what Oscar got. Is it possible that over a dozen people are lying to me because they thought it was cute and they meant well and no one in their right mind thought I’d ever go the extra mile to OPRA the results? Well yes; absolutely — that would make total sense, and I could totally see that happening (it sounds like I’m being snarky, but really — I could see a bunch of people just politely telling me that because they know it would make me happy in the moment, and that’s totally fine — they meant well and sometimes social stuff is a little weird). But I know for sure that I voted for “Oscar the Dog” and that my husband did as well, in addition to our neighbor. At the very least, there ought to have been three votes for Oscar the Dog, and instead, there were none. Well, there was one for “Oscar,” but none for “Oscar the Dog.”
This gets a little weirder:
In going through the results, I couldn’t help but notice that a few people voted for me. This was of course very nice of them — and a bit surprising — but check it out. Some people apparently voted for “Amy Wilson” and others for “AMY WILSON” and the votes got totaled separately like their two separate names, when clearly they’re not:
(To be totally clear: when it comes to this situation, who the hell cares. I was not running for Sheriff in any way, neither was my dog. But this isn’t how write-in votes should work. Clearly, seven people meant to write me in for whatever reason, and it’s kind of messed up that those votes didn’t get tallied in a way that makes sense.)
(Also, I would like to point out purely for my own sense of amusement that I managed to beat Joel Brooks, Jake Ephros, Tom Zuppa, and even Kamala Harris in the race for this position which literally none of us wanted or were running for. However, a guy I don’t know named Ernest Boyd, who appears to live in Hoboken, completely kicked my butt. There was also a guy named Elvis Alvarez who seems to have actually put together a bit of a campaign as a write-in candidate for the position who came in second. But! Aside from those two guys and of course the actual candidates who ran, I totally did really well for someone who didn’t even know they were running. Hooray!)
I wanted to bring all this up because in case someone, somewhere does actually try to do a meaningful write-in campaign — not a clear joke like Oscar the Dog — this might be something to keep in mind. It makes no difference whatsoever in this race. But in the future, it might. Write-in votes are still votes, and they should be counted and tallied.
So what happened to the votes for Oscar the Dog? Say he only had me, my husband, and my neighbor vote for him. Where did those three votes go?
Up top on that first image I posted, you’ll see a bunch of options listed that I find confusing. Did lots of people write in “VOID” and “void” (“Void” appears later in the list), or were those voided votes? I assume it’s people writing it in, but that seems like an oddly specific framing to write in for a vote. Likewise “Not valid,” “not qualified” and “unqualified” — when I first saw these listed, I thought maybe the addition of “the Dog” to Oscar’s write-in name might have made him “not qualified” but I’m guessing that numerous people literally wrote in the words “not qualified” to express their discontent with the candidates. Maybe? (Later in the list, “None picked” is listed as a write-in entry which, I’m sorry, doesn’t that just seem like an odd turn of phrase for multiple people to write in? It’s entirely possible that people did this but, I don’t know — this seems weird.) It’s less clear if “Blank” means people literally wrote in the word “Blank” or not, but either way, it’s listed in the file twice with two separate vote totals. Here — I have to include a screenshot because I couldn’t figure out how to phrase that better:
Maybe his votes wound up in Void or Not Qualified, maybe? It doesn’t exactly make sense, but that’s all I got.
There are other single name entries. Someone wrote in “Elmo” and another person “Gaza.” So not having a surname must not have been held against Oscar. There are also numerous spelling errors as you go through the list of who got written in: Liberty State Park activist Sam Pesin got one vote as “Sam Pesin” and one as “SAMPEISIN;” DSA activist Isaac Jimenez is identified somewhat painfully as “ISACC JIMINEZ.” But I couldn’t find alternative spellings for my dog’s name anywhere. Meanwhile, an awful lot of people wrote in Jimmy Davis and Frank Schillari — who were literally on the ballot and the very people voters were writing in write-in votes to protest — to the point where I feel like I might be losing faith in humanity a bit if I spend too much time thinking about that.
So, anyway, this is all a bit strange. As everyone probably knows by now, I’m moving to a different state in about two weeks, and believe me when I tell you the last thing in the world I want to do with my remaining time in Jersey City is to start World War III with the Hudson County Clerk’s office over my dog’s placement in the Sheriff’s race. But it seems to me that maybe write-in votes aren’t being tallied in quite the way they should be, if we really took them seriously. So I just wanted to point out a few things in case anyone decides at some point in their life that this might be the way to get elected to office:
Be sure to get everyone to spell your name and capitalize it in a uniform way. If you get a bunch of votes under an alternative spelling of your name, I’m guessing an attorney could probably get those votes to count in your favor, but this adds a layer of complication.
If you’re ever in a super tight election — like where there’s only a handful of votes separating candidates — probably worth it to OPRA the write-ins, as apparently people write in candidates who are on the ballot already.
Obviously, running as a write-in candidate is a pretty terrible idea. In a race where over 10k votes were cast, only 362 were write-ins. Honestly it is so worth your time to just get some signatures and qualify for the ballot. (Sorry everyone.)
I guess I’ll never know how many votes Oscar got, which is kind of a bummer. I’m honestly really curious to see what reactions I get to this article — if people suddenly fess up to just being nice and saying they were voting for him when they didn’t, or if more people come out saying they did and somehow the votes didn’t get recorded. I’m happy to share the documents I got to see if I’m misreading them (I don’t know how I would be — his name is just not on them anywhere) or what. Again, I don’t really have the energy or wherewithal to take this on, but if anyone is interested in OPRAing further to find out what happened, I’d be all for that. I feel like I’ve kind of reached a dead end here.
Feral of the Week Part One
Earlier this week, I talked to someone who told me that there was tension between some of the folks who provide services for Jersey City’s feral cat community and mayoral candidate James Solomon. This rumor sort of passed by my ears and I added it to a mental list of things to look into for this week’s newsletter, when — just a few hours later — a quick spin through social media channels suddenly served me up this image, from Jim McGreevey’s IG:
This is either a gigantic coincidence or one of the biggest trolling posts of the campaign so far, I’m honestly not sure, but I was amused by it either way. I think I am willing to say: touché, Jim McGreevey. You win this round.
A few days later, I saw a tweet posted by someone I know who cares for a cat colony, where she seemed to be alluding to the photo (later in the thread, she posted the pic above and then another from the Solomon campaign). I reached out to her and told her I was going to write a brief post about the picture, and asked if she had any kind of statement about the role of animal welfare in the campaign. She sent me the following by DM:
If you're in or running for office, and really believe animal advocacy is some hobby so many residents have upended our lives for, just because - "ooh, look! kittens & puppies!", then you're sorely out of touch with your constituents and voters & really no better than those "childless cat lady" maligning politicians. Animal advocacy, TNR, adoption events - These are all a NECESSITY and a civic duty, not some fun little project!
I genuinely don’t know the crux of the issue (if any) between the feral cat community and Solomon or McGreevey or any other candidate — we can return to this another day — but she makes a good point nonetheless. The folks who care for the feral cats in JC pour their lives into trapping, neutering, and caring for so many neighborhood cats, and it’s a largely thankless job that costs them so much time and money to continue. Animal welfare needs to be part of the conversation for the mayor’s race, because the amount that the city depends on these volunteers is unreasonable and probably unsustainable. They need our support, and they should be part of the conversation as we move forward and try to choose a new mayor.
Anyway, I’m hoping this is something we can follow up on in a later issue. But for now — lucky you! — we have a Feral of the Week Part Two:
Feral of the Week Part Two
I’ve been trying to get a pic of this big boy for weeks, and finally was able to approach him slowly, carefully, and quietly so that he allowed me to take a pic before quickly running away. Success!!! And sorry for interrupting your dinner, lil guy!