Route 40 (https://rtforty.com/category/news/exploring-south-jersey/)
In the South Jersey suburbs, people are turning to gardening to relieve lockdown boredom and produce the fresh food that is in short supply in local stores. But what can you do in an impoverished city that is already classed as a food desert and that suffers from flooding, soil contamination and other gardening hazards?
“We’re gonna talk to them!” says Robert Preston, Atlantic City’s interim planning director, when I ask him how the city is going to make sure 45 young trees survive planting in Uptown Park. One of the side effects of being a city that is constantly in the cross hairs of some or other developer is that the city is a sort of mausoleum to dying and dead landscaping. The buildings go up, the trees go in, the ribbon is cut, and then everyone forgets about watering the plants. There’s probably a metaphor there somewhere.
Route 40 has its headquarters here, and though we told ourselves we weren’t going to do this kind of thing (Shopping Guides being the sisters to GENTRIFICATION) who doesn’t love a good listicle?
Cathy Burke—as in the owner of the Irish Pub Cathy Burke—was named chairperson of the board of directors of the Save Ellis Island Foundation. They put out a press release August 20.
Bert Lopez has a full-time job and is involved with more than a few chambers and charitable organizations. He isn’t sure he wants another side project. But as one of the founders of the long-dormant Hispanic Alliance of Atlantic County, he’s been under some pressure lately.
Brigantine’s city council has drafted an ordinance that would ban single-use carryout bags. The rule goes beyond the 5-cent fee on carryout bags that neighboring shore towns Ventnor and Longport recently introduced.
The long-awaited Donald Trump Museum of Atlantic City had its debut the other day in front of the moldering husk of the TRUMP Plaza Casino at Columbia Place and the Boardwalk.
Atlantic City has a musical heritage that is less well-remembered than it should be. Once, AC played host to jazz greats including Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. It was where Eunice Waymon became Nina Simone and it was the long-time host city to crooners such as Frank Sinatra. Now, the big-buck beach concerts make headlines as often as not for storm evacuations and parking-lot gouging as they do for drawing big name performers. But behind the scenes, there are efforts to revive Kentucky Avenue as a destination for jazz clubs, to keep the Chicken Bone Beach Jazz concerts going and to support new music.
New Jersey’s housing and education policy has created some of the most segregated schools in one of the most diverse states in the country, according to state education data and a lawsuit filed last week that seeks to end the practice of mandating students attend their municipal school.
Our World Famous Atlantic City Boardwalk has grown longer by at least a few hundred feet in the last couple weeks (who’s counting?) but anyone contemplating a wander on foot to the end should be advised the Boardwalk currently dead-ends rather dramatically at around Grammercy Place, with no ramps, steps or exits back to Maine Avenue as of now. To get back to street level, you have to turn around and walk back to Pacific Avenue (more than 1,000 feet by my unofficial reckoning) to find a ramp to get down to street level. The issue was raised Tuesday morning at the Boardwalk Committee Meeting where residents pointed out they’d seen people climbing over the railing to get to Maine Avenue. If you’re on a bike or otherwise mobile, that might not be a big deal but if you’re not so mobile, a two-thousand-plus foot detour is a bigger deal. When I was there I saw a 72 year old man (his estimate) who had scaled the wall with his dog.
Under overcast skies as gale-force winds blew across the bay, a group of soccer players from as near to home as Somers Point and as far afield as South America and Europe ran drills and bantered on Atlantic City turf yesterday.
