TOWN WATCH By Walter Elliott
NEWARK – Former mayor Sharpe James, a second driver and a pedestrian, who were all involved in a Feb. 5 crash at a Central Ward intersection, may be released from University Hospital by when you read this. All three adult males were admitted in stable condition.
James, 85, said Newark Public Safety Director Brian O’Hara Feb. 7, had apparently run into the other driver and backed into a bus shelter, where the pedestrian was standing, around 9:30 p.m. Saturday at Springfield Avenue and Bergen Street.
O’Hara released surveillance footage from the southwest corner of Springfield and Bergen. The recording shows James’ 2009 silver Cadillac going north on Bergen and somehow got onto the southbound lane after crossing the intersection.
James’ car had a low-speed head-on collision with the other car. The Cadillac was then seen reversing back through the intersection, narrowly missing a westbound NJTransit No. 25 bus and a crossing pedestrian, out of the camera’s range.
An NPD officer, responding to a witness’ flagging-down, found the Cadillac in the southwestern bus shelter – and a pedestrian pinned underneath.
“Although James appeared confused,” said O’Hara in Monday’s statement, “it has been determined that he was not driving under the influence of alcohol or narcotics.”
James – a prior councilman, 1986-2006 mayor and concurrent state senator – told NJ Advance Media that police had handcuffed him and removed from his car petitions he was delivering. (He had announced his intention to run for an at-large council seat Feb. 1.) James said he did not hit a pedestrian nor was aware of doing so.
O’Hara said police handcuffed him “for his own safety and for the safety of the officers.” Buses on the #25 route were among Saturday night’s detoured traffic.
There is word on whether or not James retrieved the aforementioned petitions.
IRVINGTON – If New Jersey American Water customers here, in Maplewood and Millburn have noticed changes in color and taste since Feb. 7, they would be right.
NJAW, on Feb. 1, said that the taste and visual changes are temporary through April. The water provider is changing its chlorination process from a combined chloramine treatment to a free chlorine residual treatment.
The temporary change is being made at NJAW’s Canoe Brook Water Treatment Plant in Millburn. Similar maintenance is being made at its two other treatment plants in central and northern New Jersey affecting 69 other municipalities in six counties
EAST ORANGE – Upsala College received national attention by announcing an all-woman football team here nearly a century ago.
Newspapers and magazines published the college’s announcement that they founded their all-women gridiron team in Autumn 1925. Gladys Scherer, billed as “the female Red Grange,” was captain of a squad that included Estelle Fischer, Bernice Floren and Anne Sildker. (Harold “Red” Grange, a halfback who scored 31 touchdowns for the University of Illinois, was the 1920s star college football player.)
The female squad, following in the cleated footsteps of the 1915-founded men’s team, was overseen by a Ruth Pennington. A film clip shows Scherer and company in scrimmage practice. Their appearance came at a time when women were usually allowed to play team basketball at the most.
Beyond that flurry of press clippings, West Orange Historian Joseph Fagan said he has found more mystery than fact. There are no records of schedules or scores. Scherer, Sildker, Floren, Fischer and Pennington have faded into apparent oblivion.
If Upsala President Rev. Carl Gustav Erickson and the athletic department came up with the team for the publicity, then they had scored.
The college had raised $840,000 in 1924 to buy 45 acres in the city’s First Ward. They had been on Kenilworth’s New Orange Industrial Association campus, where they were mistaken to be in Essex County, since 1899.
Upsala enjoyed increasing enrollment to an average 1,500 student body. Enrollment peaked at 2,000 during World War Two before it dwindled to 345 when it closed June 30, 1995.
ORANGE – The public’s influence on PSE&G’s proposed new switching station here in The Valley may show up in one of the city’s Historic Preservation Commission and/or the Zoning or planning board meetings.
The statewide power utility held a live online “public workshop” Feb. 3 on what it calls “The Orange Heights Switching Station.” “Local Talk” understands that the meeting was requested by the virtual public during the Orange Planning Board’s Jan. 26 meeting on PSE&G’s preliminary and site plan application.
What PSE&G is proposing for 536 Freeman St. is a new switching station – a block southeast and in addition to the longstanding on at 456 So. Jefferson St. This is a part of a regional plan to upgrade and climate harden its power supply infrastructure.
The utility has proposed a 70-foot-tall perimeter wall to surround the two-acre corner, depicted to resemble a warehouse or factory. Members of the public who logged into Zoom said that the intended wall will stand out in the historic Valley Arts District, where most buildings are 14-feet tall.
That wall is taller than what PSE&G had installed around its expanded Hoboken substation last year and its new Newark’s Fairmount Heights Switching Station in the mid-2010s. Both of those walls are 20-feet tall.
The “Orange Heights” station in the Valley Arts District. – which means that PSE&G’s plan would have to go before the Orange Historic Preservation Commission. The utility, however, directly filed “Application 12-21” to the OPB in December.
PSE&G had first gone to the OHPC in 2018 with an earlier application. The Commission rejected that proposal – but presented a vacant factory lot by the Orange railroad station as an alternative. A workshop recording was being aired Dec. 7- 13 on Orange Channel TV-35 and Application 12-21 is on file with OPB.
WEST ORANGE – Dr. Jeremiah Stamler, 102, who died in Sag Harbor, N.Y. Jan. 26, became the latest example of how far one can go with a West Orange High School education.
“The Father of Preventive Cardiology” founded Northwestern University’s Department of Preventive Medicine in 1972. It was from that Chicago school of medicine where he and co-researchers linked hypertension to smoking and a high-fat diet.
Dr. Stamler and colleague Yolanda Hall waged an eight-year legal battle that helped abolish the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee.
He was Jerry Stamler in the halls of WOHS (now the Seton Hall Prep building) 1932-36. Born Oct. 27, 1919 in Brooklyn, his dentist father and schoolteacher mother, who were Russian emigrants, soon moved him here.
Jerry, according to the 1936 West-O-Rama yearbook, played interclass baseball and was a member of the German and debating clubs, among others. The class valedictorian graduated for Columbia University, Long Island (now SUNY) College of Medicine, a Kings County Medical Center internship and a radiology hitch in the Army during World War Two.
Gloria Brim was Jerry’s childhood sweetheart until she married scholar Bernard Beckerman and he married Rose Steinberg. Dr. Stamler found and married Gloria in 2004 after Mrs Steinberg-Stamler and Mr. Beckerman had died.
Son Paul Stamler, stepsons Michael and Jonathan Beckerman, five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren are among his survivors. Gloria died in 2021. His funeral services were private.
SOUTH ORANGE – The decades-long merger of South Orange and Maplewood’s fire departments are headed for a July 1 consummation – unless the village’s two firefighter unions can persuade enough residents in both towns that the consolidation is a bad idea.
The leadership of SOFMBA Locals 40 and 240 have been conducting a “Cutting Costs? Or Cutting Corners?” campaign since the Christmas holidays. They, with the help of Montclair public relations BGill Group, have mailed palm cards to residents last month and issued two press statements on Dec. 30 and Jan. 19.
SOFD Deputy Chief Michael Commins, in his Dec. 30 release, credited a department fire station proximity to a Dec. 23 house fire at Western Drive North. Commins and the first SOFD unit rescued a mother and two children from the second floor. Six village firefighters, two fire engines and a truck were at the scene; mutual aid units from Maplewood, Irvington, Orange and West Orange provided station coverage.
“Response time makes the difference between successful containment and rescue,” said Commins, “or a situation escalating to where injury and tragedy are much more likely, as does proper staffing levels.”
Commins also issued a statement on the 22nd anniversary of the Seton Hall University Boland Hall fire, which killed three people and injured 58 others. “It’s unfathomable that South Orange and Maplewood are moving forward with a fire department merger plan that would reduce and redistribute resources in such a manner that we wouldn’t be able to respond in such a manner as we did 22 years ago,” said Commins.
The SOFMBA, with financing from the state association, has established a sofitrefacts.org. A counter group as responded with sofirefacts.com.
Village President Sheena Collum spent 12 minutes during the Board of Trustees Jan. 24 meeting refuting the unions’ assertions. The trustees’ meeting was carried on WebEX.
MAPLEWOOD – The use “of a pepper spray-like irritant” in the Columbia High School library here Jan. 31 briefly putting the building into a Code Yellow lockdown.
CHS Principal Franck Sanchez said that two students got into a fight there that Monday. School staff members quickly separated the combatants – but not before one of the students sprayed the other.
The lockdown to clear the air of the spray lasted 20 minutes. Maplewood police and local EMS responded to the scene. One teacher involved in the breakup was reported as being “traumatized.”
The incident, said Sanchez, is being treated as “a serious criminal act.” Members of the Maplewood Community Board on Police, on Feb. 2, are looking to have a meeting with Sanchez and Maplewood Deputy Police Chief Albert Sally to discuss restorative justice for youth offenders.
BLOOMFIELD – The saga of Jeffrey Sutton vs. the Bloomfield Police Department may shift to the latter’s Internal Affairs Department since an Essex County grand jury had decided not to indict the officers involved in the Nov. 9, 2020 shooting.
The grand jury, on Jan. 31, handed a no bill of indictment on the four BPD officers who surrounded the silver Mercedes-Benz Sutton was driving at the 400 block of Bloomfield Avenue. The officers shot into the Benz, wounding him.
Some readers may recall that Bloomfield officers, aided by traffic congestion, stopped Sutton at 1:45 p.m. that Nov. 9. He was spotted driving a car west on Bloomfield Avenue at Ampere Parkway that matched the description of one reportedly involved in an East Orange felony.
The officers wrote on their Nov. 9, 2020 reports that they fired in self-defense. They said that Sutton struck two of them with the car, causing injuries to that pair. Sutton was able to speed away to Orange, where he abandoned the car, and admitted himself in Newark’s University Hospital with a gunshot wound.
A police dashboard camera recording, released on June 24, 2021, showed no injuries to any officer, nor Sutton running into them. The discrepancy led the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office to impanel a grand jury Aug. 9, 2021.
The officers may not be off the hook depending on what BPD’s IA department does. They may face disciplinary charges based on investigators’ findings.
MONTCLAIR – The Montclair Center Business Improvement Business District employee who was indirectly struck by a passing salting dump truck during Jan. 29’s snowstorm here may have been released from St. Joseph’s Regional Medical Center in Paterson before press time.
Both MCBID Executive Director Jason Gleason and Essex County spokesman Anthony Puglisi said that a southbound contracted salting dump truck was headed east on Bloomfield Avenue when its raised truck body bed struck a temporary overhead electrical cable at North Willow Street.
The cable pulled down the intersection’s southeastern traffic signal pole- which then struck BID employee Christian Lawrence’s head and back. Lawrence and a second employee were salting sidewalk ramps during the Jan. 28-29 snow and wind storm.
Edison Max Transport driver Edwin Cruz, who stayed at the scene, has not been charged as of press time. Edison Max is a contractor for Essex County, which owns Bloomfield Avenue.
The overhead cable, said Puglisi, was strung up by another county vendor who has been upgrading that intersection’s signaling system. County DPW Roads & Bridges Division employees replaced the toppled signal that day.
The 10 p.m. – Noon Nor’easter, according to the National Weather Service, dumped 7 to 7.1 inches of snow in the Newark-West Orange area. It was part of a three-to-six-inch band that stayed to the west of the Jersey Shore. The Shore, Long Island and New England got between 13 and 24 inches of snow in blizzard-like conditions.
Up to 40 mph wind gusts and below-freezing temperatures followed into Jan. 30. The storm prompted NJTransit Bus Operations and most private bus carriers to halt their service Jan. 27-28.
BELLEVILLE – Proposed legislation that would amend the township’s zoning laws in 41 places may or may not appear in the council’s Feb. 22 agenda.
The ordinance – which would affect zoning, site plan and land subdivision chapters of the township code – was placed on the council’s Jan. 11, agenda.
There would be 38 changes, from automotive use and surface parking to the Zoning Map, to Zoning Chapter XVIII alone. The amendments would affect seven zoning districts, including the Silver Lake Hospital and Silver Lake Residential Districts.
An amendment each to Chapter XIX, Land Use Procedures and Chapter XX, Site Plan Ordinance, are also proposed.
The legislation, however, has not appeared on the council’s Jan. 25 and Feb. 8 agendas. Its introductory vote has not been taken, let alone advertised. A spokeswoman in the Municipal Clerk’s Office said Feb. 9 that the proposal “will be taken up in a future meeting.”
A 35-page copy of the Jan. 11 proposed ordinance is accessible from the clerk’s office.
NUTLEY – Police detectives had been investigating the circumstances of seven decapitated birds found on a township street here overnight Jan. 25-26.
Responding NPD officers found two shopping bags along Erie Place that Tuesday night-Wednesday morning. They found “five chickens with brown feathers and two pigeons with black and grey feathers.”
