Category: Status

NJ.com: Newark residents hope to replace demolished housing project with park, gardens

NJ.com: Newark residents hope to replace demolished housing project with park, gardens

On Monday, the infamous housing project, once a sign of economic growth and Newark’s burgeoning prosperity, will be demolished, ending decades of blight, political struggles and legal challenges.

“Today we are casting out the shadows which once darkened this neighborhood,” Newark Mayor Cory Booker said Friday, at a news conference officially announcing the demolition of the nearly 80-year-old complex. “Brick by brick we will let the light shine down on a new and improved green space,” Mayor Booker said.

Good news.

NJ.com: Newark hopes city attractions lure more visitors

NJ.com: Newark hopes city attractions lure more visitors

So where are the tourists on the streets below? To hear “insiders” at a forum titled “Greater Newark as a Destination” tell it, New Jersey’s largest city is on the cusp of becoming something of a mecca.

Cites growing interest in the Newark Museum, Prudential Center, and Harrison’s Red Bull Soccer Arena. It would be nice to see stories about the growing tax income as a result of these success stories. I don’t see any other way the city is going to sustainably plug the budget gap apart from more businesses moving to the city and paying their due.

Local Talk Newark: Verizon Opens New FiOS Store in Newark’s Central Ward

Local Talk Newark: Verizon Opens New FiOS Store in Newark’s Central Ward

“We have about close to 100,000 households in Newark who will ultimately be served by our FiOS products but are served today by our phone and our high speed Internet products,” said Mary Yarbrough, Verizon vice president of marketing and sales for the Mid-Atlantic region.

She said Verizon plans to build FiOS out to all 93,000 households in the Newark area over the next five to six years.

Wow, Verizon, what’s the hurry?

NJ.com: Cory Booker is re-elected as Newark mayor for second term

NJ.com: Cory Booker is re-elected as Newark mayor for second term

Newark Mayor Cory Booker easily won a second term Tuesday night, but with a tighter margin of victory than in 2006, and with only seven of his nine council candidates winning re-election, according to incomplete election results.

Booker received 59 percent of the vote, beating out three challengers — Clifford Minor, Yvonne Garrett Moore and Mirna L. White. Minor, a subdued former prosecutor and municipal judge, received just 35 percent of the vote.

At the time of publication, Charles Bell wasn’t the clear election winner in the Central Ward. According to the city’s Newark Election 2010 website, it looks like he has, indeed, won.

New York Times: Newark Project With Schools and Housing for Teachers

New York Times: Newark Project With Schools and Housing for Teachers

But the Newark development, a complex for middle- and lower-income tenants to be known as Teachers Village, takes Mr. Meier, 75, back to his roots, to a time more than 40 years ago when he devoted as much energy to subsidized housing as to beach houses.

Despite the project’s modest budget of $120 million, its tautly composed and thoughtfully laid out forms reflect the same intelligence and care found in most of Mr. Meier’s work. City officials are hoping its design – along with its location, a dilapidated neighborhood between City Hall and a cluster of college campuses – will help contribute to a much wider urban revival.

Teachers Village is not only the most impressive of several new initiatives in Newark, but also the most dramatic example yet of what is shaping up to be a significant and hopeful trend in architecture.

Star Ledger: Newark police director files defamation suit against three ‘Newark Choice’ candidates

Star Ledger: Newark police director files defamation suit against three ‘Newark Choice’ candidates

Newark Police director Garry McCarthy is suing the Newark’s Choice ticket for defamation of character, according to a lawsuit filed last week at Essex County Superior Court.

The suit, filed on Friday, alleges that mayoral candidate Clifford Minor, council candidates John Sharpe James and Ras Baraka, along with their election campaigns, issued disparaging fliers and made slanderous public statements about the police director, claiming that he had a history of domestic violence, that he was involved in a DWI violation, and that he “impregnated a number of Newark females” — charges which the suit claims are “outrageous.”

That Newark’s Choice ticket is running a real classy operation.

Wally Edge: If Booker gets less than 60%, is his star quality tarnished?

Wally Edge: If Booker gets less than 60%, is his star quality tarnished?

Newark Mayor Cory Booker has two opponents in the May 11 election: 67-year-old former judge and prosecutor Clifford Minor, and the expectations game.

The charismatic Booker, with a 17-1 fundraising advantage, is likely to win re-election to as second term against the quiet and reserved Minor, who has the backing of what is left of Sharpe James’ old machine. The problem for Booker is that he won with 75% of the vote four years ago (against a formidable opponent, State Sen. Ronald Rice) and then went on to become a national media sensation.

The defeat of Gov. Jon Corzine last fall makes Booker a leading candidate for the 2013 Democratic nomination for governor, if he wants it. But a lackluster victory against a bland, relatively unknown, underfinanced opponent – perhaps anything under 60% — might create the impression that local voters don’t think Booker is as good as his friends in Washington, Chicago and Hollywood think he is. That might make his front runner status in the next gubernatorial primary less automatic.

New York Times: First Trial in 2007 Triple Murder in Newark Opens

New York Times: First Trial in 2007 Triple Murder in Newark Opens

Nearly three years later, this city on Tuesday began to relive one of the most notorious crimes in its recent history, as the first of six defendants went on trial in the execution-style murders of three students in a schoolyard on a summer night.

Thomas McTigue, an assistant county prosecutor, called the defendant, 26-year-old Rodolfo Godinez, a recruiter for a violent street gang who actively participated in the crime — laying the groundwork for a charge that he committed murder whether or not he fired the gun.