TOWN WATCH
NEWARK – Although Washington Park has been renamed Harriet Tubman Square here since June 20, do not expect its centerpiece monument to be erected and unveiled until nearer to Winter 2022-23.
A dispute between the State Historic Preservation Office and City of Newark officials on how the Tubman monument was created has led the former’s Historic Site Council to unanimously and temporarily deny the latter’s proposal at a June 16 meeting in Trenton.
Newark Arts and Cultural Affairs Director Fayemi Shakur has until at least SHPO’s July 28 meeting to consider and maybe implement correction recommendations to the city’s plan. The SHPO officers recommendations include adding input from the Newark Landmarks & Preservation Committee, local Italian-American groups and other stakeholders on the project.
Landmarks committee founder Elizabeth Del Tufo said June 16 that her group “was excluded from every aspect of this plan.” While Del Tufo said that Tubman is “a heroine who deserves her own space, I’ve a significant concern that they didn’t consider other locations in the park as an option.”
At least two Italian-American groups said two years ago that they were not informed of the city’s removal of the 98-year-old Christopher Columbus statue from its pedestal and placement in a public works yard during the summer of 2020. Mayor Ras Baraka authorized the Columbus statue’s overnight removal to prevent any possibility of vandals pulling it down and/or destroying as had happened in other cities in the wake of protests over George Floyd’s May 29, 2020 murder by a Minneapolis police officer.
The Baraka Administration has since sought replacing the entire Columbus monument with one for Tubman. Baraka said, during the June 20 Juneteenth federal holiday observance in the park that the new monument would be up this autumn. Baraka, that Monday, also renamed 239-year-old Washington Park Tubman Square as being the heart of the Newark’s Arts & Education District.
The SHPO had entered the Tubman monument proposal since the 22-acre park is within its designated James Street Commons Historic District.
IRVINGTON – A township man was treated and released from East Orange’s CareWell Health Medical Center July 4 after being shot in that city July 3.
Responding city police officers said they found the 18-year-old man who was shot by the Park Avenue Tenants Association apartment building at 329 Park Ave., off North Arlington Avenue, at about 9 p.m. Sunday.
The victim and witnesses said that someone had fired three shots at him from inside a moving car. One of the shots went through one of his shoulders, the second grazed him.
It is not known whether traffic, including buses on NJTransit’s No. 41 bus route, were detoured during the field investigation.
The victim was taken to CareWell, formerly East Orange General Hospital, for overnight treatment and Monday release.
EAST ORANGE – The identity of the motorcyclist who died after colliding with an East Orange Fire Department truck July 1 has not been released by the ECPO as of press time.
Responding city police officers told county detectives that they were responding to a motorcycle-truck accident here in the Greenwood section at about 6 p.m. Friday. They and a called EMS ambulance crew found an EOFD truck, the motorcyclist and the ejected rider at the 90 block of Greenwood Avenue.
EMS technicians applied CPR to the wounded rider – who died at the scene a short time later.
It is not clear whether the driving firefighter was responding to a fire or an emergency call at the time of the collision. It is also not known how much damage the fire truck had incurred or whether it had to be taken out of service.
The fire station at Steuben Street/Greenwood Avenue and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard/New Main Street is the closest one to the collision site.
ORANGE – Local authorities and historians are asking lot cleaners and the public to notify them should they see or find a sealed iron box among the rubble that was once the Masonic Temple here at 235 Main St.
The hermetically sealed box was a time capsule interred behind a brick in one of the temple’s former walls when it was dedicated by Union Lodge 11 in 1887. Its contents include a tile from an ancient Pompeii ruin, a photograph of the old Masonic Hall here and a medal from German Kaiser Wilhelm II.
Copies of June 19-24 weekly and daily newspapers – from the “New York Tribune” to the “Orange Chronicle” and the “East Orange Gazette” – were also interred. Coins and paper currency from the U.S., Germany, England, Canada and France were entered before sealing.
The box or time capsule is considered lost since the April 19 fire that destroyed the Main Street landmark and its subsequent demolition. The commemorative book “One Hundred Years of Masonry in the Oranges” published a list of the above said contents.
Union Lodge 11, which was established here in 1809, was known to be the first Freemason hall in New Jersey to accept African American members. Lodge 11’s membership dwindled in the mid-20th Century and merged with the Livingston lodge in 1972.
235 Main St.’s storefront was Orange’s U.S. Post Office until it moved to its present site, 384 Main St., in 1912.
WEST ORANGE – Township Interim Superintendent of Schools Dr. C. Lauren Schoen hopes to have her three-step plan to correct racist attitudes and actions, as reported to her and the West Orange Board of Education by public speakers at three previous meetings, in place before the start of the 2022-23 school year.
Those steps, as Schoen announced here at the WOBOE June 20 meeting, is to start with reactivating the district’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee and having Assessment, Accountability and Intervention Director Dr. Tamika Pollins head that panel.
Pollins, said Schoen, is to then work with “all district staff” to “develop more sustainable and meaningful practices and protocols relating to diversity, equity, access and inclusion before the new school year’s start.
Schoen recommended WOBOE to add the June 19 Juneteenth federal holiday to next year’s calendar. The superintendent added that the district will continue collaborating with the township’s Human Relations Commission.
Schoen was responding to 13 incident reports and complaints made by students, parents and a West Orange High School teacher/coach/parent on the board’s May 9, May 23 and June 6 meetings. The incidents – mostly recent but one going back to 2008 – reportedly happened at WOHS, Liberty Middle and Redwood Elementary schools.
One Liberty student, on June 6, said he had approached his teacher on why he scored 70 on a test when, after in comparing answers with a non-African American student’s 100 score, should have scored 80. The teacher said she had deducted 10 points due to his “behavior.”
WOHS business education teacher, coach and parent Jason Jackson said he had a formal meeting with Liberty Eighth Grade counselor over possible discrimination by the honors science and health class teacher his son was in. Jackson called that session the “worst meeting ever,” since Liberty’s principal did not attend and “the words and comments that came out of (the counselor’s) mouth were frustrating.”
SOUTH ORANGE / MAPLEWOOD – The respective South Orange and Maplewood fire departments, perhaps fittingly, quietly became the South Essex Fire Department as of 12:01 a.m. July 1.
By “quietly,” the merged department has had about the average volume of fire and emergency calls as had the former separate departments have had in recent pre-Independence Day weeks. The adjective is also appropriate after decades of studies, institutional negotiations and election year controversy.
Studies on the advantages and the logistics of consolidating the village and township’s fire fighting forces goes back to a 1992 study. Reducing the joint roster by attrition and centralized dispatching were seen as advantages. Merging a civil service with a non-civil service department – including joining a volunteer and an in-house municipal ambulance service, however, were among its logistical challenges.
The now-SEFD has a combined staff roster of 72, with four positions lost to attrition. There are to be three to six firefighters per station for 17 fire personnel per shift. A consultant had projected $600,000 in annual overtime savings in a 2017 report to the two-town Joint Exploratory Committee.
SEFD is governed by a joint committee made up of fire personnel and public officials from both towns. Funding is on a 55/45-percent split between Maplewood and South Orange.
The fire departments’ merger was challenged by South Orange FMBA Locals 24 and 240 and by then-Village Trustee Deborah Davis-Ford 2019-May 31, 2022. The two unions supported Davis-Ford and her “SO Forward” team in their unsuccessful 2019 bid for village president and trustee offices. The locals, with support from the Essex County Fire Chiefs Association and a Montclair marketing consultant, published letters and palm cards claiming South Orange would be inadequately covered, Jan. 1 – May 31.
BLOOMFIELD – The legacy of Trish S. Comstock may be found among her books that have been donated to a local library, the revived Bloomfield rent control ordinance and her work with various community activist organizations.
A Montclair nursing facility had announced that Comstock, 92, died May 27.
Comstock, a longtime Forest Hill apartment dweller, may be best known as the perennial president of the Bloomfield Tenants Organization. She and the BTO successfully pushed for a new township rent control ordinance. Bloomfield, except for grandfathered properties, abolished its original ordinance in 1994.
Comstock, whenever not looking out for tenants’ rights, was a member of several environmental and social justice organizations. She was also a regular Township Council public speaker. Comstock co-founded the Bloomfield Neighborhood Committee with Carolyn Vadala in 1990.
Shirley Patricia Comstock, who was born in Albany Jan. 25, 1930, came here by way of New Rochelle and Maine. Her father died when she was an infant. An aunt raised the 16-year-old when her mother died and helped get her into Syracuse University.
The bachelor’s degree holder in English had also graduated from the University of Maine with a masters in French literature. Comstock moved here to become a longtime English teacher here in the old South Junior High School and East Orange High School/Campus High School. She also taught French literature at the now-Montclair State University.
Friends said that Comstock was a voracious reader until her eyesight dimmed. She then had her two radios tuned to WBAI and WQXR. The New Jersey State Legislature passed a resolution hailing her for her tenant advocacy.
GLEN RIDGE – Hackensack Meridian Health Mountainside hospital here may have been served papers from the widow of the late celebrity chef Floyd Cardoz, by way of State Superior Court-Newark and the Jensen Law Firm, when you read this.
Cardoz, 59, of Roseland, was admitted to Mountainside Hospital with COVID-19 symptoms March 15, 2020. The Bravo Channel’s 2011 Top Chef Masters winner and founder of New York City’s Bombay Bread Bar died here March 25, 2020.
Cardoz’s relatives in India, when called by wife Barkha Cardoz, said they already knew of Floyd’s death. They had already read his being on a ventilator and other medical details in Indian media.
B. Cardoz is suing Mountainside, the doctor supervising Floyd’s treatment and associated healthcare workers for releasing his personal treatment information without her permission. The widow asserts that the hospital had violated the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act and “numerous statutes related to patient care.”
Barkha was unable to visit Mountainside and Floyd due to the prevailing COVID restrictions and did not hear from doctors March 15-17. She and the doctors spoke via the telephone March 18-25, including her granting permission to put Floyd on kidney dialysis.
B. Cardoz said she was given “little explanation or input into his medical care” and “the little information that she did receive, despite near constant effort to connect, was from nurses.”
Then-Mountainside Hospital CEO John Fromhold sent an email to B. Cardoz May 28, 2020 saying that their handling of her husband would be used as a “learning experience for the residents and employees.” The hospital, on June 2, 2022, said that it had concluded its internal investigation by “taking appropriate action” with one staff member and providing “additional training” for other employees.
MONTCLAIR – Township police officers, after visiting a house party along Christopher Street here June 17, returned with members of six law enforcement agencies later that evening.
MPD summoned – not invited – colleagues from Bloomfield, Glen Ridge, Nutley, Verona and Cedar Grove plus the New Jersey State Police and the Essex County Sheriff’s Office at 10:19 p.m. They had returned with reinforcement to close the party and disperse between 200 and 300 partiers.
MPD Lt. Terence Turner said the first officers, acting on neighbors’ report of a disturbance, came to the Christopher Street address early Friday night. They found “a small house party” and left. A 10:16 p.m. call, however, said that around 250 people were at the party, prompting the large response.
There were no arrests made or tickets written since “it appeared that the large crowd that appeared later were not known to the homeowners.”
Sheriff’s officers and police from Bloomfield, Nutley and Newark – but not MPD – were called to break up a “Sweet 16” party in Belleville June 24 where “a large crowd” began to fight among each other. Three Belleville police officers suffered minor injuries while quelling and dispersing juveniles outside of La Maison dining hall at 33 Washington Ave. 11:15 that Friday.
BELLEVILLE – The family of a 21-year resident is trying to find funds for his funeral while ECPO detectives are trying to find the driver who killed him here on June 24.
ECPO Assistant Prosecutor Thomas S. Fennelly identified the man who was struck by a motor vehicle while attempting to cross Washington Avenue here June 24 as Miguel Vargas, 57, June 25. Vargas, who was found by responding Belleville police with severe injuries that Friday night, was pronounced dead in that Sunday’s predawn.
Neither ECPO nor BPD have released details, including where along Washington Avenue was struck or details of the suspected vehicle, as of press time.
Mother Bertha Zuniga told a reporter June 30 that she believed that her son was crossing the avenue on his way home. Vargas came here from Peru to become a construction worker; he was also working to become a naturalized U.S. citizen.
Vargas was also working to get documentation to bring daughter Alexandra and Miguel, who he had not seen in over 20 years, to join him here.
Mother Bertha, youngest sister Noelia Rosales and her son, Nathalyn Rosales, are now trying to pull the funds and relatives together for Vargas’ last rites. Nathalyn had launched a gofundme.com page to help with Vargas’ funeral expenses. They are seeking temporary humanitarian visas from the U.S. State Department to bring family members from Peru for his funeral.
Vargas’ body remains with the N.J. Regional Medical Examiner’s Office until the ECPO completes its investigation. That investigation, which Fennelly said June 30 that it was not being ruled as a hit-and-run, is active.
NUTLEY – Neighbors abutting the ON3/ex-Hoffman LaRoche redevelopment campus here may want to attend the Nutley Board of Commissioners’ July 17 public hearing on a proposed parking time limit ordinance.
Nutley’s commissioners had introduced Ordinance No. 3494 at their June 7 meeting.
The ordinance, which would amend Chapter 228 of the township’s code book, would limit curbside parking along the entire length of Brookdale Avenue to 45 minutes between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. on school days.
A 60 minute limit on those same days and hours would be imposed on the north side of Spruce Street between Brookdale and Edison avenues.
Public Safety Commissioner Alphonse Petracco, who sponsors 3494, said that residents had told him that curbside parking had become scarce since more ON3 tenants have been opening there recently. Commuting drivers would park in the neighborhood and walk across Kingsland Street to their employers.
ON3, as of June 1, had at least 5,000 people working among the businesses, a hotel and medical school on its overall 116 acres it shares between Nutley and Clifton. ON3, a 12-minute walk to or from Franklin Avenue, is served by a three- to four-minute shuttle bus ride.
