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Blog: Say NO to Rooftop Addition on the Montclair Police Building

BY Linda Cranston | Monday, Sep 28, 2015 7:00am | COMMENTS (18)

Linda Cranston is co-founder of the Save Upper Montclair Facebook group:

Say NO to Rooftop Addition on the Police Building Again! Residents have to ask officials and our town planner to do the right thing for our town.

The Gateway 2 Redevelopment Plan seeks to place a two story addition on the roof of the historically designated Police Station/1st Municipal Building, even though it is protected and a key building in our downtown historic district and therefore the exterior cannot be altered.

Even though, The Secretary of the Interior Standards for Historic Preservation Brief #14 States:

Blog: Stepdog

BY Mireya Navarro | Monday, May 18, 2015 10:30am | COMMENTS (3)

As odd as it sounds, I finally made peace with my stepdog Eddie in Montclair.

A 40-pound Blue Heeler mix with dark spots on white fur, Eddie and I had been waging war for nearly ten years, ever since I stayed over at my then boyfriend Jim’s townhouse in Los Angeles and his dog peed outside the bedroom door.
The message was clear — “He’s mine.”

When I fell in love with Jim, I had braced myself for two stepkids. Never, ever did I worry about a stepdog. But in trying to find my place within my new instant family, Eddie was the one I couldn’t win over. He barked at the sight of me. He stood guard and tried to intercept me whenever I moved in Jim’s direction. He jumped between us when Jim and I tried to kiss or dance. He behaved like a jealous mistress – one capable of biting — who knew who had come first. Jim got him from a rescue place exactly four months before we started dating. I was the intruder.

When several years into our marriage we moved to New Jersey, I thought I had found my opening. I tried to leave Eddie behind.

“He’s a California dog,” I told my husband. “He’s used to perfect weather and sunbathing. He’ll be miserable on the East Coast.”
“He’s family,” Jim said.

BLOG: RIP Latrena May: Working to Prevent Future Loss in the Wake of Tragedy

BY Kristin Wald | Monday, May 11, 2015 9:00am

The following is a blog post by Kristin Wald, an Advisory Board Member of Start Out Fresh Intervention Advocates (S.O.F.I.A.)

Latrena May was a mother, a daughter, a sister, a friend, a teacher, a neighbor, a woman, a person. Latrena May was all those things and more when the father of her child shot and killed her in front of her East Orange home as she flagged down a police officer.

At a Friday night vigil for Latrena in front of East Orange City Hall, a lot of people said a lot of things about her death being a terrible loss, a horrible act, a tragedy. And that is all too true. It is true every time. And that’s why we must do more than lament losses; we must work to interrupt the cycle of domestic violence that allows situations like Latrena’s to become deadly.
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My Mother’s Madness Was My Secret

BY Anne-Marie Nolin | Sunday, May 10, 2015 3:30pm

About a year after I was married, I went into therapy. I was afraid that having children would make me turn into my mother. I know. That is a common worry, but I feared that becoming a mother would make me mentally ill, like my mother.

We were a Catholic family. Five kids born over six years. Not a lot of money. I was the oldest, but not the firstborn. I came along just ten months after my parents’ first child died shortly after her birth. My parents took a lot of pictures of me as a baby. I can imagine their joy that I had survived. I grew up in the days of Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best, before the words “dysfunctional family” would be used to describe a category of memoir.

We lived with my maternal grandparents until I was about six. Then we moved into a house my parents built from a kit, on a lot they bought in a suburban neighborhood. We had less than many of my friends and our neighbors had, but I thought we were pretty much like everybody else. We ate dinner every night at six, knelt beside our beds to say our prayers, and went to church on Sunday.

I didn’t think my mother was unusual. She was a good cook. She sewed and she had a lovely flower garden. She was active in the PTA and was a den mother for the Cub Scout troop. She worked as a nurse in the pediatric ward of the local hospital on weekends. As kids we often made cards for her patients. I thought she was beautiful, and I told her so as she got dressed up and put on makeup on the rare occasions that she and my dad went out. Continue Reading

Blog: A Declaration of Peace, So We Can Have Some Progress

BY Helen Mazarakis | Thursday, May 07, 2015 10:30am | COMMENTS (87)

In a few short weeks, impossibly, my youngest child will graduate from Montclair High School following the footsteps of his brother and sister and closing a seventeen year journey with the Montclair school district for our family.

My sister once said, jokingly, that she wouldn’t have any more children because she wouldn’t want to do PTA again. Many of us can appreciate that sentiment, but I cannot regret any of the hours I have spent reading with kindergarteners, cooking for class projects, hosting Toasts for Teachers, running book fairs or participating in the endless fundraisers to buy books for the library or send kids on field trips.

Perhaps most significant were several years I spent on the School Action Team at MHS, where I found I could be actively involved, make my voice heard and hear others’ voices. We effected real change. Partnering with Principle James Earle, a school administrator committed to working for excellence and to hearing about what works and what doesn’t, we were able to start slowly turning the tanker in a better direction, and I believe the students at MHS are getting a better deal than they did five or six years ago.

But oh, how far we still have to go. And oh, how unlikely it is that we will get there, unless the teachers, administrators and parents work together.
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Matthew Frankel: Our Children Deserve Better, Our Community Deserves Better

BY Matthew Frankel | Monday, Mar 02, 2015 10:30am | COMMENTS (46)

Each of us needs to be aware that over the last few years Montclair’s public servants, who want only the best for our children, are being bullied and attacked.

Come to a Board of Education meeting. Go on social media. Attack is the tactic of choice by a small group of people in our community.

They use buzzwords like “McCarthyism,” and “corporatization.” They cite easy to understand, political driven and poll tested reasons for the state of our District. They disrupt meetings like the AGAP group, where good people are trying to come together to build consensus. They create lawsuits against Board members. They issue OPRA, after OPRA request to the our school’s headquarters. They publicly question the integrity of long serving, beloved District staff. Most of all, they assume the worst in anyone who may disagree with their point of view. This is the playbook we now have grown accustomed in Montclair. If you look at these actions, solutions or ideas are not offered, only blame and criticism.

Blog: Protect Historic Status Of Upper Montclair Train Station

BY Scott Kevelson | Monday, Feb 16, 2015 10:30am | COMMENTS (4)

The following blog post is from Scott Kevelson, President of the group, Friends of Anderson Park:

Because Anderson Park is directly south of the Upper Montclair Railroad Station, Friends of Anderson Park has deep concerns about New Jersey Transit’s efforts to remove the station from the State and National Registers of Historic Places.

Once federal preservation regulations are removed from the train station, the genie is out of the bottle: NJ Transit would have more freedom to develop and Anderson Park could be adversely affected by inappropriate construction across the street. Building on or beside the station could alter the park’s viewshed and destroy the historic feel not just of the park but of the Upper Montclair Village.

A fire significantly damaged the station in 2006, but fortunately its historically significant porte-cochere — now the restaurant entrance — survived. The entire station was carefully rebuilt under preservation guidelines to ensure that it evoked the feel of the original 19th-century station and that it meshed with historic Upper Montclair. For more than 120 years, the station has been tightly interwoven into the architectural, historical and cultural fabric of Upper Montclair, and the train shaped our town into the suburban commuter community it is today.
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Blog: Montclair Historic Preservation Protections Dismantled

BY Linda Cranston | Thursday, Jan 22, 2015 12:30pm | COMMENTS (46)

Linda Cranston is co-founder of the Save Upper Montclair Facebook group:

Montclair’s historic preservation protections dismantled ….protection process has been eliminated, undermined or ignored by this administration…and NJ Transit starts effort to eliminate protection for the one Montclair train station.

The Montclair Historic Preservation Commission meets tonight, Thursday, January 22 at 7:30 pm, and this NJ Transit request has been requested to be on the agenda. The public is encouraged to attend and comment if possible.

Bill Hurlock, 1st ward councilor received letter from the State of NJ, as per a request from NJ Transit requesting the removal of the Upper Montclair RR station from both the NJ and National Registry of Historic Places. This would leave the station with no protection from demolition in the future. Bill is organizing a working group to oppose this. Contact Bill here.

In 2006, a fire took most of this Bellevue Ave station. Great pains were taken to rebuild it, replicating the original 1892 station, incorporating the only piece salvaged from the fire, the station’s covered carriage-way. A restaurant currently resides in the station on the tracks and adjacent to a parking lot, still zoned for 3 stories in the new master plan.

Historic towns attract visitors, higher income residents and consequent businesses all over the world. Visitors come and support Montclair’s local businesses now only because of Montclair’s small town historic ambiance. Common sense historic preservation is an economic no brainer.
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Essay: The Boomers’ Third Act

BY Debbie Galant | Tuesday, Jan 06, 2015 3:15pm | COMMENTS (20)

It was always about the numbers. Whatever we did, we did in a crowd. There were 3.4 million babies born in 1946 — a record — and by the time those last two digits had reversed, 1964, we were 76 million. We marched through our lives like an army laying siege: filling schools to the bursting, stomping through the muddy fields of Bethel Farm, rushing into cities in a land grab of gentrification, then boomeranging back to the suburbs and issuing a baby boom echo of our own. Our sheer numbers turned toys — Frisbees, skateboards, hula hoops, Slinkys, Silly Putty — into phenomena. Television was our twin, coming of age alongside us. Together — the boob tube and us — we put the mass in mass media, grabbing the attention of demographers, sociologists and marketers of every kind.

We believed first and foremost in our youth, in the power of so many young people on the planet at one time. Ian Dury’s 1977 song, “Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll” became our anthem. We were never going to trust anyone over 30. We got smoked pot, giggled through screenings of “Reefer Madness” and thought we had invented irony. Continue Reading

Blog: Why Central Park is Montclair

BY Alex Abarbanel-Grossman | Friday, Dec 05, 2014 12:00pm | COMMENTS (15)

This past October at “Why Montclair is Montclair: the Role of Art and Architecture in the Early 20th Century” a panel discussion presentation held at the Montclair Art Museum, Panelist Diane Lewis, Rome Prize recipient and professor at the Cooper Union School of Architecture, brought to light how Olmsted’s Central Park is conceived as a three dimensional Hudson River Valley School painting. The Montclair Municipal Arts Society engaged John Nolen, a student of the Olmsteds, to plan a town conceived to preserve the natural beauty emblematic of George Inness’ and the other Montclair Artist Colony, Hudson River Valley painter’s works. Back then, visionary architect George Maher, a Frank Lloyd Wright colleague who in 1904 designed Montclair’s Gates Mansion stated, “peculiarity or originality in design arises from local reasons; the exactions of an educated public are essential for any improvement in art. Thus it was in Athens in the time of Pericles and also in Florence in the fifteenth century”

Lewis stated during her portion of the panel discussion, “This site of Montclair, is architecture before the buildings. In the most ancient sense, like a Greek or Roman site. Montclair is a geographical god- or gods-given place. This distinguishes it from a lot of other kinds of settlements.”

In other words, Montclair’s physical location at the base of the First Watchung Mountain, with a series of views either west towards the bluff or east towards New York City, a cameo on the horizon, makes it a perfect and wholly unique setting for a picturesque town.
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