A fight grows in Kendall Park

Residents are hoping to squash a plan for a 200-unit housing complex on a 12-acre parcel off New Road – despite repeated rulings on behalf of the developer by the state Superior Court.

The property, known as the Stanton tract, is the remaining portion of a larger parcel and has been the focus of litigation and debate since the early 2000s. In 2006, the township purchased and preserved 90 acres of the property, with the remaining portion serving as a legal and political football over the last decade.

The issues at hand, according to the residents, are:

  • the potential increase in traffic on an already busy two-lane New Road. A 200-unit complex, conservatively, is going to add something in the neighborhood of 200 cars to New Road, most at rush hour. Given the back-ups that already exist at Routes 1and 27, this can’t help.
  • the shape of the property — i.e., like a flag, with a narrow sliver connecting the bulk of the tract to New Road. That means access to New will be via a single entry point.
  • the impact on schools. More housing units is likely to mean more students, they say. (This, to me, is a stretch, and something the courts have never allowed as an argument.)
  • and the potential disturbance on the adjacent Superfund site, which has been capped. Residents are worried that construction work could release “dangerous toxins and is definitely not worth the risk to health and property.”

The developer has been fighting rather tenaciously to make this happen, with several plans being floated in an effort to break through the impasse. These have included tying the project to a proposed solar farm on the adjacent landfill — a federal Superfund site — and the inclusion of affordable housing units that could be used to meet the township’s obligation, which the the courts have set at nearly 1,400 units, pending further challenges. That’s a lot of units, and the Stanton Girard plan purports to help the township meet the challenge.

I’m not buying it, but I’m also concerned that the township maybe turning away from what has been one of the more admirable records on affordable housing in the state. Thanks to failures by the state Council on Affordable Housing (its various attempts to quantify need and spread responsibility throughout the state were overly complicated, often unrealistic, and resulted in significant pushback) and multiple governors (Chris Christie’s hostility to COAH and the Mount Laurel rules is legendary), municipalities like South Brunswick were left with little direction, even as the need for housing continued to grow. The result has been a messy attempt to require towns to squeeze 20 years of new housing needs into a new plan.

I’ve spent much of the last five years reporting and writing about those at the lowest rungs of the economic ladder — those on state and federal food aid, in homeless camps and shelters, immigrants who have had their wages stolen. Some of these people work in the warehouses along the N.J. Turnpike and deserve better housing than the often subpar apartments they are forced to rent. The amount Laurel decisions and the Fair Housing Act were meant to address this.

South Brunswick must maintain its commitment to building low-income housing and should work with other communities to spread it around the New Jersey, helping to alter the landscape in what is one of the most segregated states in the country.

All of this might point toward approval of the Stanton Girard plan — except that the 12-acre parcel in question is just too small, lacks functional access (without taking property from its neighbors), and will create more problems than it will solve and should be denied. (You can add your voice to the opposition by signing the petition here.

We also need to be realistic. Save purchasing the property and preserving it via a deed restriction, something will be built there. We need to determine what makes the most sense — perhaps a smaller, all-affordable complex — and offer that alternative to the courts.

These are my initial thoughts on this, so if I’ve gotten anything wrong, or neighbors — or the township or builder — have anything to add, let me know.

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So long, mayor

The first time I met Frank Gambatese I wasn’t particularly impressed. He was running for a seat on the newly formed South Brunswick Township Council and had come to our office for an endorsement interview.

By our offices, I mean the South Brunswick Post, the paper that served the township for about 57 years before it was shuttered by its parent company — The Princeton Packet — in 2015.

First impressions rarely do anyone justice. During that first meeting, Gambatese came off as willing but not particularly knowledgeable, and we opted not to offer our endorsement — not the only time we withheld our support.

Over time, through his tireless efforts on behalf of South Brunswick, Gambatese proved himself to be a strong leader. Not that he needed to prove anything. He was sure of who he was and what he wanted to do and, in the end, he was exactly what he told us he would be: the man to steer the township through a difficult period. Gambatese was mayor when several local residents were killed in the attack on the World Trade Center. He was mayor during the several unsuccessful efforts at state tax reform that shifted the pain for bad state decisions down to local governments. He helped the township weather a recession.

While I did not agree with every decision — as the chief editorial writer for the Post, I was often critical of the council — I think it’s fair to say he deserves high marks for his overall effort, the work he did, and the things he accomplished — proving my initial judgments wrong.

In the end, I considered Gambatese,who died last night, more than just an acquaintance made during my time as a reporter and editor. He was a friend, and he’ll be missed — by me and by the 45,000 residents of my hometown, whether they knew him in person or only by name.

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A poet for the ages

The great Paul Muldoon will be reading at Labyrinth Books in Princeton on Tuesday to celebrate the release of a new, career-spanning anthology of his work — Selected Poems 1968-2014.

We corresponded by email and the result is this story in today’s Time Off. But here is a question and answer that did not make the story, but is worth considering in the Age of Trump and the reaction and intolerance that is rampant. This certainly comes out in the aggressive anti-intellectualism of the Trump supporters and others on the right, but also in the boorish and blindered behavior of many on the left. There is a tendency toward certainty rather than inquiry that is deadly for art and politics and places those of us working in the arts in peril. My question to Muldoon, however, had nothing to do with the political moment. His answer, though, captures this zeitgeist and makes it clear that it is not something we can escape.

HK: Poetry, as an art, is both incredibly popular (there probably are more people writing poetry today than at almost any point in history) and something that has been thrust to the cultural margins. Why do you think that is and what impact does this seeming contradiction have on the work that is ultimately produced?
Muldoon: There are a lot of people writing poetry but, I fear, too few reading it. The fact is that anyone can hang out a shingle with the word “poet” written on it in neon. We don’t need to offer any credentials. It’s a bit like hanging out a shingle as a “psychic.” That’s not true, for the most part, of the physician or the programmer. Leaving aside that discussion for another day, I see the present moment in US history as an important one for the poet. We need to be among those willing to try to “purify the dialect of the tribe,” as Mallarme put it. There’s certainly a lot of work to be done in that vein. I think it’s only a question of time before a writer is censored in this country. Perhaps even imprisoned. Then we’ll see PEN having to go to bat not for Azerbaijani or Albanian but American poets.

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Appropriating Emmett Till (updated)

The death of Emmett Till is considered an iconic moment of the civil rights era. The 14-year-old from Chicago was kidnapped and killed in Mississippi where he was visiting family. His alleged crime? He spoke to and was said to have whistled at a married white woman. (She has since recanted her own description of the event.)

Two half-brothers were charged but acquitted by an all-white jury, and Till’s body was transported back to Chicago for his funeral. Photos of the open casket showing Till’s mutilated face were published in Jet and the Chicago Defender — two African-American publications.

Those photos, as The New York Times points out, “served as a catalyst for the civil rights movement and have remained an open wound in American society.” This is where the artist Dana Schutz comes in. She used the photos as inspiration for a painting that is now on display at the Whitney Museum, a painting that has been the subject of protests questioning her motives and the ultimate impact of the painting.

As the Times reports,

An African-American artist, Parker Bright, has conducted peaceful protests in front of the painting since Friday, positioning himself, sometimes with a few other protesters, in front of the work to partly block its view. He has engaged museum visitors in discussions about the painting while wearing a T-shirt with the words “Black Death Spectacle” on the back. Another protester, Hannah Black, a British-born black artist and writer working in Berlin, has written a letter to the biennial’s curators, Mia Locks and Christopher Y. Lew, urging that the painting be not only removed from the show but also destroyed.

This seems extreme, but it does raise legitimate questions, which I attempted to raise in what ended up being a 15-tweet Twitter essay.

Black has gone so far as to question whether a white artist should be able to use Till as subject matter — “The subject matter is not Schutz’s,” he wrote on Facebook, the Times reports.

“White free speech and white creative freedom have been founded on the constraint of others, and are not natural rights. The painting must go.” She added that “contemporary art is a fundamentally white supremacist institution despite all our nice friends.”

Others have weighed in, deriding the painting as disrespectful, as appropriation, etc. I’m sympathetic — I’ve written in the past (see Facebook debate below), when Kenneth Goldsmith turned Michael Brown’s autopsy into a bad performance piece (edited),  that white artists and writers have to be careful when working with these kinds of images and sensitive to “the meanings created by a privileged white poet/performer dwelling on the details of the body of a dead black teen.”

This debate, however, seems to go farther than the Goldsmith one —  Goldsmith was using found text, while Schutz uses the photo as the basis on which to create her own painted image. We should ask if the painting is good. We should ask what the impact of the painting is on the audience. And we should ask how the artist has handled the subject matter — is it theft or appropriation? Is it a painting that adds to our understanding, creates new ways of seeing the history it is meant to present?

My concern, as a poet and journalist, is that the tenor of this debate has moved beyond this to questions of whether a white artist has the right to focus on black subject matter. I’ll leave this introduction here and invite you to read the Twitter essay that follows, encouraging commentary, response, and advice for this white Jewish artist who is working on a long poem about race and American history. Have at it, my friends.

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Here is Hannah Black’s tumblr letter/petition.

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A Facebook string tied to the current debate:

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Here is the earlier Facebook  debate I mentioned.

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John Brown’s Body in the 21st Century

I’ve been working on a long poem that attempts to connect America’s original sin, its ending and re-emergence in new forms, to the pathologies we live with today, including the systemic racism that remains in place and the creation of whiteness as an identity designed to reinforce historical and systemic differences. Whiteness often is a stand-in for American, with “non-whites” — who at various times have included African Americans, African and Caribbean immigrants, Latinos, Muslims, Jews, Greeks, Italians, Poles and other Eastern Europeans, and even the Irish — being somehow less American

In the United States, whiteness has been a fungible concept — sort of an invitation-only category that is employed when political and economic hierarchies are threatened. (I am basing this idea on the writings of people like Nell Irvin Painter, Grace Elizabeth Hale and Eric L. Goldstein and others who have studied the concept of whiteness.)

While reading and writing for the project, I was listening to some Civil War-era music and the John Brown-Michael Brown rhyme hit me. That caused me to rewrite the first verse of “John Brown’s Body,” the spiritual cum march, for our times. I’m sharing it here.

JOHN BROWN’S BODY IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Old John Brown’s body lies moldering in the grave,
While weep the sons of bondage whom he ventured all to save;
But tho he lost his life while struggling for the slave,
His soul is marching on.

Glory, Glory Hallelujah
Glory, Glory Hallelujah
Glory, Glory Hallelujah
His soul is marching on.

Michael Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the sun
His mother weeps in disbelief, he died by a copper’s gun
Lost his life but not his soul, because he wouldn’t run
His memory marches on.

Glory, Glory Hallelujah
Glory, Glory Hallelujah
Glory, Glory Hallelujah
His memory marches on.

Lincoln ended slavery to help him win the war
The black man now had rights and who could ask for more
But freedom was a falsehood, as Jim Crow had shut the door
Our sin keeps marching on

Jim Crow was a hero to too many in the South,
A system of oppression meant to keep the negro down
Up North we were no better, saying “keep those niggers out”
Our sin keeps marching on.

Glory, Glory Hallelujah
Glory, Glory Hallelujah
Glory, Glory Hallelujah
Our sin keeps marching on.

Martin called for justice and was felled by sniper shot
Malcolm met his ending as he fought the racist rot
Both of them had tried in vain to rewrite the novel’s plot
Our sin keeps marching on

Evers, Chaney, Goodman, Schwerner, Till and Rev. Lee
Jimmie Jackson, Herbert Lee and Rev. Jimmie Reebe
Cpl. Roman Duckworth killed while he was home on leave
Our sin keeps marching on

Glory, Glory Hallelujah
Glory, Glory Hallelujah
Glory, Glory Hallelujah
Our sin keeps marching on.

In Birmingham, four young girls died in a church bomb blast,
Then a little while later, another young black kid was cast
From this life by a racist’s bullet and into the eternal past
Our sin keeps marching on

In Cleveland decades later young Tamir Rice was slain
By a copper’s bullet in a park in which he went to play
For black kids in America it was just another day
Our sin keeps marching on

Glory, Glory Hallelujah
Glory, Glory Hallelujah
Glory, Glory Hallelujah
Our sin keeps marching on.

Trayvon Martin shot to death when he was just a teen
Followed by George Zimmerman, a man he’d never seen
Who saw a threat in Trayvon and the color of his skin
Our sin keeps marching on

Walter Scott’s another who was killed by a copper’s gun
They chased him and they shot him in the back as he did run
A taser planted on his body to hide just what they’d done
Our sin keeps marching on

Glory, Glory Hallelujah
Glory, Glory Hallelujah
Glory, Glory Hallelujah
Our sin keeps marching on.

Eric Garner choked by cops on streets of Staten Isle
Sandra Bland was hanged in Texas as she waited for a trial
Black bodies shot and broken and tossed upon a pile
Our sin keeps marching on

The sin is not just slavery, or hate or greed or war
It’s carried in our DNA from East to Western shore
Race hate’s an infection and we’re rotten to the core
Our sin keeps marching on

Glory, Glory Hallelujah
Glory, Glory Hallelujah
Glory, Glory Hallelujah
Our sin keeps marching on.

Old John Brown’s body lies moldering in the grave,
While weep the sons of bondage whom he ventured all to save;
But tho he lost his life while struggling for the slave,
His soul is marching on.

Glory, Glory Hallelujah
Glory, Glory Hallelujah
Glory, Glory Hallelujah
His soul is marching on.

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Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.