‘New Jersey’ Archive

Finding North Asbury 7 January 2019 No Comments

After running some errands last week, we took a different route home, not too far afield, but just far enough to engage in some urban exploration of the psycho-geographical sort. Call it drifting down the shore. And that’s how we found this happy vestige of North Asbury Drug, a horizontal neon sign in silhouette along […]

Speculations on the Origins of the Jersey City; or, Geographies of Drinking, cont’d. 21 February 2015 No Comments

Some months back, I chanced upon an unfamiliar book on a shelf in my parent’s kitchen: a little volume on cocktails that was jazzier than the venerable Mr. Boston (the book to the left) and less learned than William Grimes’ Straight Up or On the Rocks (the book to the right). Published by Peter Pauper Press in 1953, The ABC of Cocktails […]

Motor City/Brick City Comparative Ecologies, Part I: Geographies of Drinking 2 November 2014 No Comments

DesignInquiry‘s Year of Agitation commences with a follow-up to its DesignCities expedition to Detroit: a residency at MOCAD‘s Department of Education and Public Engagement. The DEPE Space “enables adventurous, multidisciplinary programming in which the museum and city of Detroit function as sites for investigation and experimentation,” and that pretty much sums up the exploratory nature of […]

Remembering Ma Bell (& Aunt Lois, too) 28 June 2013 No Comments

Thirty years ago this summer, consumers across the United States were starting to contemplate what the impending break up of AT&T (effective on January 1 of 1984) was going to mean for telephone service and billing. Having just graduated from high school I was, as yet, unconcerned with choosing a service provider or paying for […]

Penn Station, for the record 17 April 2013 No Comments

Last week, the New York City Planning Commission held a public hearing to decide the future Pennsylvania Station.  At issue, as Michael Kimmelman has explained thoroughly in the New York Times, is whether to allow Madison Square Garden to continue to operate an arena on the site it has occupied since 1968—squarely on top of […]