Make No Small Plans

I read the International Herald Tribune over breakfast in a charming café in downtown Budapest the other day. The paper was filled with interesting stories, some looking back, reflecting on President Obama's big decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan, others looking ahead to the climate conference getting underway in Copenhagen. It was all fascinating and quite terrifying. The President's Afghan gamble is a big one. The stakes for this nation are high, the personal stakes for our Nobel Peace Prize-winning president contemplating an escalation of the war are even higher. Though this military exercise is designed to improve the security of the United States, it's a risky strategy that is as likely to fail as it is to succeed. The paper described the President's intelligent process of debate and discussion that lead up to the decision—it was impressive. For the moment I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.

Much more of the paper was devoted to a discussion of the issues facing the climate diplomats meeting in Copenhagen. The issues at hand there are the biggest ones imaginable: the health and safety of the planet. The questions are not at all clear and the answers are much less so. The potential for conflicts are enormous, interests and histories and economies and resources are deeply divided. Though the debate about global warming continues, most agree on the need for change. To highlight the perils of global warming and the associated rising sea levels to their tiny island nation, the cabinet of the Maldives recently held an underwater cabinet meeting in scuba gear! As the country with the largest economy and the world's biggest polluter, the United States has a tremendous responsibility to change course. China, India, and Brazil, with their huge populations and rapidly growing economies, are feeling the pressure to create a new development model. Smaller developing countries want economic support for the changes they must make. Oil-producing countries are suggesting they should be compensated for the loss of revenue that would result from greener living. The plans under discussion are big and wide-ranging. They all involve international cooperation and the flow of money back and forth. Emissions targets are being discussed, strategies debated.

I am a designer and I am interested in how we can help design the solutions to these problems. Far from the diplomatic chambers, designers are creating change, inventing new ways of processing waste, running cars, harnessing energy, packaging products, communicating more efficiently with less, changing behaviors and outcomes. A few of these inventive minds and smart entrepreneurs are American, many are not. Again I agree with the President, who sees green business as one of the saviors of the American economy. As the world's richest and most polluting nation, we Americans have become way too complacent and lazy, and not nearly as creative as we need to be. We have to believe in the reality and feel the importance of all of this, to understand the implications and engage in a new way of living at all levels. The big plans stimulate the small moves. All together it can make a difference.

As I waited for my plane to Warsaw I saw a very small thing, something we Americans would never do. At the waste bin in the café, the trash was going in the usual place. On top of the stand lay a pile of small sugar packets, unopened and unused. Americans would pitch them along with the mountains of other trash; apparently Hungarians think differently. Why waste perfectly good sugar? They put them back into circulation and reduce the needless sugar consumption at this small café. It's a state of mind. We think supplies of sugar and other commodities are boundless. Hungarians know otherwise, they remember the scarcities. This mindset can change behavior, stimulate new kinds of thinking, and point the way to a new respect for our planet and its resources. So let's make the biggest of plans, but not forget the small things that each of us can do to preserve the planet for those who will come after us.

Beijing Morning

The cab pulls away from the protective cocoon of the Peninsula Hotel. Another dash across this great big city. I think we are headed north, or is it south? I give up trying to figure that out as images catch my eye. When we pass Wangfujing, the main shopping street, a crowd gathers for a small ceremony. A phalanx of military guards in their crisp green uniforms with red-trimmed caps set the stage for the dignitary who will preside at this little event. The formality of the guards is contrasted with the tacky stage with its bright red balloon arch and the paper towers with levitating lanterns. The Chinese love ceremonies with dignitaries. We certainly learned that last year at the Olympics.

We go a little farther and across the street; the staff is lined up outside a restaurant, dark-suited waiters on the left, white-coated kitchen staff on the right. Their leader barks commands like a marine corps drill sergeant and they respond in unison like a bunch of new cadets during training. Will they be cooking meals in there or planning an assault on the senses? This being Beijing, clearly both will be happening.

There's a shop called Sweet Potato Workplace. Hmm, who's doing the working, the people or the potatoes? I wish I could do the eating. Farther on we head into an older neighborhood. The street is lined with lovely arching trees and hutongs, the traditional house-lined alleys of Beijing, small shops along the bigger streets, courtyard houses in the back. The austere gray-roofed homes provide a beautiful setting for the deep red, green, and yellow temples which punctuate this older urban landscape every so often. It makes a for a beautiful ensemble.

Elsewhere, massive gray stone square towers mark the portals of the old Ming city. These are the only remains of the city walls torn down in the 1960s by the Communist government in an effort to open up and modernize the city.

Soon the old city gives way to broad avenues lined with apartment blocks of gated communities, one with an Egyptian temple entry. At the driveway to another, a dwarf in a red silk jacket and black top hat directs traffic into the complex—quite surreal. Huge restaurants sit on many of the streets. They are all adorned with large gaudy signs, bands of neon, letters on top which punch the skyline. I imagine what delicacies the troops inside are preparing—Beijing Duck no doubt. Is there anything better? Bright contemporary restaurants like Do Dong with their eager young staff prepare the duck so that it is light and crispy and absolutely delectable.

As we head farther out, the buildings are taller and newer, huge blocks of them along the busy boulevards. Many are international-style buildings, business centers for the exploding capitalist enterprises here. But this is Beijing, so some of the buildings have decorative tops, temple roofs 30 or 40 stories up in the sky. In this dense urban skyline it is amusing to see these buildings with their "hats," a curious juxtaposition of the modern and the traditional city. Corporate logos and hotel names also dot the skyline; apparently there's no zoning to limit the proliferation of urban signage.

As we pass through the Central Business District, the blackened hulk of Rem Koolhaas' Mandarin Oriental Hotel building sits angrily, a ruined but shapely block next to the dramatic sculptural China Central Television tower which stands like a giant Lego construction in the sky. The hotel and cultural center burned on the last night of the Lunar New Year in February. The hotel was set ablaze by an illegal fireworks display held too close to the unfinished building. Fire equipment couldn't reach high enough to douse the flames. The massive ruin is a cautionary note on the pitfalls of instant overdevelopment. For this New Yorker it provides haunting memories of 9/11 and the ruins of my old office building at 90 West Street.

We're arrived at the conference center...well, not quite. My cab driver wants to dump me out across a busy highway across from the hotel with no apparent route to the front door. I flap my hands and point, she responds in Chinese, somehow we communicate. She understands what I want and makes the elaborate loop needed to get me across the road. It's the Beijing version of the Jersey left turn.

This is my second visit to the Chinese capital and on second glance Beijing has more appeal. Then it was bitterly cold, now I'm enjoying lovely fall days. While before it was a complete mystery, now it begins to make sense. I understand more of the geography and the urban structure, where to find things, and where to look for them. I'm not afraid of it, I can connect with it. A sweet eager smile from a handsome driver in a passing truck helps to bridge the gaps of time and space and brings me right here and now.

Remembering Myself

Recently I had the chance to reflect on my life and what I have accomplished as a designer. Where do I begin? Should I say the Yale School of Art, where I finally finished a full university degree and from which I set up the business that is still my daily home and workplace? Perhaps it is further back, when I ran away to Europe and found myself as a gay man who desired the love of other men. Or should I go back even further, to the real beginning, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where I was born at mid-century? It has been a journey over time and space. I am the sum of the parts of my life, the places I have lived, the people I have known, and the experiences that I have had.

Recently I was made a Fellow of SEGD, which is the professional association of designers who do the kind of signage and wayfinding work that I am known for. With this award, my peers have recognized my career and achievements. It was a splendid moment, fellow professionals saying that I had accomplished something significant, a room full of people gathered to honor me, David Gibson. It was my moment. How to describe the journey that I have taken to arrive at that very moment?

I have always loved biographies. This comes from two interests: my baser love of gossip and stories about people, and my higher love of history, the sweep of people and places and events. My library, which is finally coming out of boxes after a year in the closet, is filled with biographies, memories of my temporary companions, Bloomsbury, gay and lesbian notables, people in the arts, any number of people who adorn the walls of London's National Portrait Gallery. I have a particular love of English history. Despite this Anglophilia, last year I had my French period. Here's how it works: Sophia Coppola's Marie Antoinette lead me to Antonia Fraser's biography of the French queen, which formed the basis of the movie. I enjoyed the texture of Fraser's acclaimed telling of the life of this notorious and fascinating woman. This book lead me to Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution, a fascinating account of Marie Antoinette's wardrobe, the clothiers who kept her supplied with gorgeous attire and her evolving image as the style icon at the center of French life headed toward the cataclysm of the Revolution. This overload of Antoinettiania left me wanting to know more about the dynamics and logistics of life at Versailles. Along came Versailles: Biography of a Palace to answer all my questions about the history of the French court, how it was built and how it was used, who lived where, all about the kitchens and toilets and salons of the huge palace. This is how my mind works, a book or movie opens the door to a world I didn't know. I find myself wanting to open other doors to learn more about other parts of the story.

Since I moved to Jersey City, I have appreciated my daily PATH train journey. I get on the train at the beginning of the line in the morning, settle into my seat, open my book, and find myself transported not only to New York City, my morning destination, but also to the court of Versailles and the minutiae of the queen's toilette or the layout of the king's apartment.

Recently my morning journeys have taken me to England—more precisely to London between the wars (World, not Iraq/Gulf). Remember I said I was an English history fan. It all started with Bright Young People, a charming account of the Bohemian aristocrats who dominated the gossip sheets of the Twenties with the outrageous costume parties and drunken country house revels, frothy stuff about a city and country clinging to many of the old values while also tossing others away amidst the social wreckage of World War I's aftermath. This naturally lead to Evelyn Waugh, a witty right-wing Anglo-Catholic novelist who wrote fictionalized accounts of his time as a bright young person. This quote from Vile Bodies captures the period:

"Oh Nina, what a lot of parties." (...Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St John's Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming baths, tea parties at school where one ate muffins and meringues and tinned crab, parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris—:all that succession and repetition of massed humanity.... Those vile bodies....)"

The trail lead me to Anthony Powell, a novelist, journalist and astute observer of the London scene from the Twenties to the Seventies, a kind of English Proust. He knew them all and wrote about all of it in a twelve-book novel series and four volumes of memoirs. I found reading back-to-back Michael Barber's biography of Powell and Powell's abridged one-volume autobiography a great inside-outside view of a rich and fascinating twentieth-century life.

By now I was hooked and headed down the rabbit hole of London literary life. With Tom Driberg I hit pay dirt. This fragment of his Times of London obituary says it all.

"Tom Driberg, who worked for some years under the name of William Hickey and died under the name of Lord Bradwell, was a journalist, an intellectual, a drinking man, a gossip, a high churchman, a liturgist, a homosexual, a friend of Lord Beaverbrook, an enemy of Lord Beaverbrook, an employee and biographer of Lord Beaverbrook, a politician of the left, a member of Parliament, a member of the Labour Party National Executive, a stylist, an unreliable man of undoubted distinction. He looked and talked like a bishop, not least in the bohemian clubs which he frequented. He was the admiration and despair of his friends and acquaintances."

That is brilliant biographic writing, an obit as only the Brits can do it, a snapshot of this man in all of his complexity and variety. Yet again I headed for the autobiography (Ruling Passions) and biography (The Soul of Indiscretion) combo on Tom Driberg. His is the great story of a public life lived in and out of the shadows in Parliament and in public washrooms where he found sex on a very regular basis when being gay was neither accepted nor fully legal.

So back to that luncheon at the conference in San Diego where I was preparing to take the podium and accept my Fellow award. I had prepared a visual presentation of my own journey, an interweaving of the highlights of my life and the work I have done. I had a moment of real panic—what the hell was I doing going on about myself in this professional context? I was not hitting just the high points. I included my sojourn in Denmark in the Seventies and the Aussie porn (soft-core Seventies literary porn) star (well, maybe a "featured actor," as they say on Broadway) that I fell hard and fast for. It was weird to see his rugged, handsome face up on the screen at an SEGD event. I don't even remember his name. But I sure remember the excitement of allowing myself to love a man. OK, it was infatuation, but it was real and it was me. My fears about the talk melted as I took the podium and began to talk abut my journey, Montreal, Cornell, Nova Scotia, Yale, Two Twelve, New York, relationships, 9/11, travel, my book, on and on. I felt it, this was MY moment, the people was there to hear about me. It was all over in about twenty-five minutes. The applause was sustained, the audience loved it.

Over the next three days of the conference, many people told me they were inspired by my talk. I was surprised and delighted. People are not used to the mix of the personal and the professional that I offered up that day. I guess other people like biographies as much as I do. And I have lived an interesting life; I have a story to tell. This blog is my story.

True Colors

Blue Boy is a great book about a funny kid who doesn't fit in. Written by Princeton grad book editor and sometime cabaret singer Rakesh Satyal, it depicts the challenges of an Indian boy growing up in the suburbs of Cincinnati. The main character, Kiran, is a bright young boy who always gets it wrong. His attempts at great art and theatrical flair always fall flat, reminding him that he is not quite of the world that he inhabits. The title refers not to an eighteenth-century English portrait of a young gentleman, but rather the mission of Kiran to make good on the lie he made to his mother who catches him in the master bath covering his face with her lipstick, mascara and eyeliner. When confronted by his mom, who "has four terms to describe the looks of young Indian girls: "ugly," "passable" "presentable," and "That is the type of girl you vant to marry, Kiran." he says that he was making himself up as the Hindu deity Krishna, who is usually depicted with blue skin. The book follows young Kiran through his hostile, mostly white school, his forays into the (for him) equally uncomfortable Indian community in Cincinnati, and through the daily routines at home with his stern and distant accountant father and his spendthrift, loving mother. Preparations for the school's talent competition and Kiran's plan to appear as Krishna provide the narrative thread that ties the central part of the book together.

This morning I read a few pages of the book before heading off to work, a relaxing moment before the hustle and bustle of my daily life. Out the door and up the street, I saw my morning bus pull away from the stop as I prepared to cross The Boulevard. Damn, the number 10 bus that I take to Journal Square is erratic, it's often a long wait, then three buses pull up all at once. Whew, today I am lucky, the one I missed is the first in a convoy. Another quickly pulls up and I hop on. After paying my $1.45, I grab a seat, settle in and open Blue Boy to continue reading. Before I get too absorbed in the book, my eye wanders. Across from me is a South Asian woman with her distinctive Indian attire. By chance it is blue. In the other direction is a young Filipino woman, beside her is a Latino kid. An African-American mother and daughter are further back. Once I do a full scan of the bus, I realize that I am the only white person on board. The tables have turned, and now I can imagine a bit of what young Kiran feels in his white Ohio school when he doesn't look like his peers and he doesn't fit in. Of course it's not that simple. In this society whites have privileges, whiteness has power.

I lived in the West Village of Manhattan for over twenty-five years. At one time the neighborhood was gritty and bohemian. The process of renewal and gentrification has transformed it to an expensive, upper middle class, mostly white neighborhood. Each wave of big bucks and house renovation in the neighborhood removed some of the grit and a lot of the life of the area. Multi-tenant buildings have become grand single family houses. Instead of stoop parties and street fairs, drawn shades and the hush of limousines mark street life in my old haunt. The move to Jersey City was a BIG transition for me, out of the city, across the river, into the wilds of Jersey. Once I overcame my fear of change I began to embrace the idea and the fact of my new home. Rich and I are a mixed race couple, he's Filipino and I am a white Canadian, though we are both American citizens, he by birth, I by choice. Among its other assets, the multi-racial tapestry of Jersey City appealed to us. The mix on our street is like the mix on my number 10 bus this morning, and it's engaging and interesting and reassuring to me. Our little hybrid family is going to fit in here. Jersey City is home to a huge variety of races and ethnicities, making it one of the most diverse cities in the United States.

In this life I have come a long way. I grew up in Montreal, in the English part of an overwhelmingly French city. In that context, white privilege was English privilege. One of the French-Canadian separatists of the late 1960s, called his powerful book about the French-Canadian experience in Quebec, White Niggers of America. The French-Canadians were tired of the way we Anglos controlled business in the province. As English-speaking kids, we kept apart, as Protestants, we went to different schools from our Catholic neighbors. We learned French but we never spoke it to the French-Canadians who lived and worked all around us. Things came to a boil in the mid- to late '60s. Those were trying times in Quebec, I remember standing in the playground when our school was evacuated because of a bomb threat. As we stood there in taut rows of nervous kids on a warm spring day, we all shuddered when the bomb went off, blowing up a mail box just a few streets away and maiming the policeman who was trying to defuse the bomb that had been inside the box.

Times and place have changed me. Back in the 1950s or early '60s I remember that the sister of a friend was getting married. She belonged to the United Church of Canada and her husband-to-be was Anglican. At the time I wondered, how would this work, how would they fit together, how would these different kinds of people form a family? That long ago concern seems bizarre and rather quaint to me now when I celebrate the differences that surround me and that define my own relationship and household. These days I am engaged and stimulated by this diversity. I hope that I am showing my true colors.

By the way, I haven't finished Blue Boy yet, but I have a sinking feeling that Kiran's performance as Krishna at the talent show isn't going to go well. Read the book for yourself and you'll find out what happens. I think you'll enjoy it, Rakesh Satyal is a good writer.

Life is (Bitter)Sweet!

On Monday, just before heading back to Jersey City, I grabbed my big steel knife and marched off to the rhubarb patch across the road from my farmhouse. Several years ago I discovered some rogue rhubarb growing in the field, a possible remnant from the time when our farmhouse was the residence of actual farmers, not city dwellers playing as country people. Whoosh, whoosh, the large, very sharp blade cut the abundant plants. Another whack of the knife and the leaves, which Rich tells me are poisonous, fell away from the firm green and red stalks that were the object of my foray into the fields. I got just one little nick to my finger from the blade which would have done Lizzie Borden's job very nicely. It's a scary damn thing, but that knife cuts like the dickens when I sharpen it on the whetstone. Note to cooks, steel blades are much easier to sharpen at home than stainless steel knives, just don't put 'em in the dishwasher, they will rust.

My hoard of rhubarb was dumped into a bag which was then piled into the car with the rest of the crap that travels between the city and the country each weekend. (WHY is there always so much to pack each time we go back and forth between the two houses?) After a long side road detour to avoid Memorial Day traffic on the Quickway, which was not so very quick on Monday afternoon, past pretty small towns and the most amazing black, black earth planted with rows of tender young vegetables in a small, very flat patch of Orange County, we arrived home. Rich headed to town for an appointment and I headed to the kitchen with rhubarb in hand. I like to make (and eat) pies, and rhubarb is one of the easy ones to make. Cut up the rhubarb and put it in the pan lined with crust, dust with flour for thickening, put in the sugar mixed with an egg to make it custardy, sprinkle with ground nutmeg, dot with butter, put on the top crust, and stick it in the oven. Rhubarb pie practically makes itself.

That pie, a lovely fresh salad with baby greens from the garden, and a pork roast ringed with carrots and new potatoes made for a very nice topping off to a delightful weekend in the country. Sweet! Over the long weekend, the country vegetable garden was planted, a delicious lunch was had with friends at the charming Old North Branch Inn, a restored hotel in a pretty little town not far from the farm, a dinner party offered us amusing new friends and a Saturday night dance brought together the gay Sullivan County community for the first time this season. It was a perfect mix of hard work and good social time. But best of all, I was published by the New York Times this weekend. Now that was really SWEET.

Inspired by the Nutrition Facts box that appears on all food products, some design colleagues and I had a clever idea for a new kind of simple, clear credit card disclosure that should be placed on all credit card offers and statements. The Times liked it and published it as an Op-Chart in the Week in Review on Sunday, May 24, 2009. Since it appeared, I have been called brilliant, very brilliant, and really smart. What this tells me, other than the obvious about my intelligence, is that simple, strong design ideas are smart and can be effective tools to help everyday people make credit choices, buy mortgages, decide what to eat, and so on. My co-authors and I are part of a group called Design for Democracy. We are using design thinking and design ideas to improve the quality of public communications in America.

As the D for D team were making plans Tuesday to spread the word about our triumphant New York Times editorial, word arrived that the California Supreme Court had upheld the legality of Proposition 8, the ban on same sex marriages in that state. Damn, that was BITTER news. It is curious how easy it is to legalize discrimination and how hard it is to end that discrimination. My only hope is that this defeat for gay marriage will fuel the righteous anger of gays and lesbians who once again feel excluded from the mainstream with its rights and protections.

There was a demonstration yesterday evening in Sheridan Square to protest the court decision. I wanted to go, but it was cold and damp out and I was tired. Leftovers from Monday night's dinner beckoned, cold pork, fresh broccoli shoots from the city garden, more salad, and of course leftover rhubarb pie. The prospect was enough to fuel my journey back home after a long rollercoaster day at work. What greeted me as I entered my beloved Jersey City kitchen was a pile of just picked broccoli shoots and an EMPTY pie pan. Rich had loved my pie so much that he just had to eat the whole second half of the pie himself. Now that's BITTERSWEET. I gladly ate the leftover pork, the broccoli, and the fresh salad. Delicious, but I wanted a sweet. So I made some cookies...but that is another story.

Back to Basic(s)

When we are in the city, Jersey that is, I usually do our weekly shopping at the big A&P near the Holland Tunnel. I have scouted the various supermarkets in the area and this one satisfies my, as Rich would call them, "double pinkie instincts" for a quality food market where I can get a wide selection of good grub at a reasonable price in nice surroundings. I get the basics and the odd treat here and there, ice cream, some decent cheese for snacks, and so on. Frankly, the selection of cheeses at A&P could be a bit better...OK, I AM double pinkie! I am trying to lose some weight (there, I've said it) and so I resist the cookies and most sweets these days. In any case, the cookies and cakes that I bake are much better than the ones I can buy at the A&P.

Since I moved to Jersey City I have enjoyed doing a weekly shopping trip to get a house full of food. For a long time, at my old home in the West Village, I would buy food for just one day, more Euro-style I suppose, except that I did it in a supermarket, not at the high street provisioners. You could fit four or five of that West Village D'Agostino's in my Jersey City A&P, where the the quantity and variety is positively delicious. When I am at the A&P, as I head from produce to the meat section, past the bread (none of that these days!), there's an issue that weighs on my mind. It's the Chicken Question—should I buy the organic chicken, the natural chicken (whatever the hell THAT means), or, heaven forbid, the big fat Perdue Oven Stuffer Roaster? Why are are the organic chickens at A&P always so small? If I want a good-sized chicken (I got the "Make enough food for several days' leftovers" lecture this morning), the Perdue wins out. If I am feeling an impulse to eat healthy, I balance the merits of the organic and natural birds. Is it worth paying so much more for the organic bird? Sarah, one of my colleagues at work, had this advice for me: "Buy the smaller organic chicken. Eat less meat and more vegetables." My biz partner Ann is a good bargain shopper. She goes to Fairway in Brooklyn and follows the store sales to guide her weekly food choices. She says the markdowns help her decide what to buy in any given week when confronted with a giant Big Box full of food. If organic chicken is not on sale that week, her family won't eat chicken.

I was a bit overwhelmed by my first visit to the huge new Fairway in Paramus on the way back from the country last weekend. The range of produce and the scale and quality of the meat was dazzling. Lots of organics here, and cheaper, too. Until I know the lay of the land in a supermarket I am always a bit disoriented and discombobulated. It's rather like visiting a new city or country while you're trying to figure out the local conditions in the first couple of days. Wayfinding happens in countries, cities and yes, in supermarkets. Last week I got a cart full of well priced groceries at Fairway but I didn't enjoy the experience. After a few visits I'll figure out the Fairway drill and get in the groove.

The choices we make each week at the supermarket have so many implications for our health. Eating healthy is obviously important but not always so easy to figure out—think of the Chicken Question. The shopping cart is full of items and decisions to be made. It can be tough making the right healthy choices every week, balancing appetites, budgets, availability, time, and pleasure. Is there time to make a good, healthy, delicious meal each night? Will my budget allow for the organic chicken? Will I really enjoy the whole wheat pasta? These considerations can sometimes override the healthiest choices. If I shop when I am hungry, I can end up buying things I regret, things I don't need. Food activist Michael Pollan had good advice the other week on NPR: buy food that can spoil. In other words, buy fresh, unprocessed foods, not packaged ones filled with chemicals and preservatives.

On Sunday afternoon, when I go and buy the basics in Jersey City and I have some time, I stop at Basic, one of my favorite spots in my new hometown. It's a great cafe-restaurant in the lovely neighborhood near Hamilton Park. The sign in the window at Basic advertises "The Best Coffee in Jersey City." The thoroughly adorable staff serve breakfast, and throughout the day, sandwiches and wraps, salads and sweets, tea and coffee, of course, and a nice selection of gelati. My current Sunday favorite is the bul-go-gi sandwich, slices of Korean-style marinated rib eye steak with greens, basil mayonnaise on a nice focaccia roll. It makes for a very satisfying lunch. Check out Basic, and tell me what your favorites are there. I wish there was a place like Basic up the hill in my section of Jersey City. And now back to basics, I have to get myself over to the A&P. Fortunately, I have some chicken in the fridge so I don't have to make THAT decision this week.

Sign and Accept

I was shopping at my local hardware store in Jersey City last weekend and the line at the register was long. As she rang up the totals, the cashier chanted, "Sign and accept," while the customers were swiping their credit cards, signing in the little box on the card reader and pressing accept to send their signatures to the electronic file. This mantra, sign and accept, repeated over and over again, made me think of how Congress is working right now to protect the interests of ordinary credit card holders like me. Recently the House of Representatives passed a bill designed to make credit card companies act more responsibly towards their customers, regarding terms, interest rates and so on. The President weighed in during his weekly address on Saturday. He stated, "Americans know that they have a responsibility to live within their means and pay what they owe. But they also have a right to not get ripped off by the sudden rate hikes, unfair penalties, and hidden fees that have become all-too common in our credit card industry." This week the Senate is considering a similar bill.

As you know I am a graphic designer and it seems to me that there is an opportunity to make good design standards a part of this new legislation. What if the Federal Government mandated a Credit Card Facts box similar to the Nutrition Facts box that appears on most food products? This box could appear on all credit card offers and statements. Simple, clear writing and good information design could make much clearer, the tangle of rates and fees that confuses and often blind sides most consumers as they sign and accept each day with their credit cards and then look at their monthly statements with disbelief. And imagine if our national government was mandating good communications policies that really benefit all Americans. I'd sign on for that and I think many Americans would accept it too.

The PATH Not Taken

Yesterday morning I was sitting on the PATH train headed to work, scanning the arts section of The New York Times. I read with interest Nicholas Ouroussoff's report about the unveiling this weekend of a new design for Santiago Calatrava's World Trade Center site PATH and subway station. He spoke of the budget challenges to the project and the architect's attempt to maintain the integrity of his glorious design, surely one of the boldest conceptions for a transportation center in New York since Grand Central Station opened in 1913. Calatrava is a great architect and this is clearly a beautiful building, but all is not well with this new PATH station. Ouroussoff points to the secrecy of the recent design process and some of the compromises that have been struck to preserve the experience of Calatrava's soaring winged roof structure. It seems that the experience of us daily PATH riders has been neglected, ". . . in a particularly perverse decision PATH riders won’t be able to get from the train platforms directly to the street. Instead they will have to walk halfway along the hall’s upper balcony and past dozens of shops before exiting into one of the flanking towers — a suffocating experience no matter how beautiful the spaces turn out to be." In fact this grand and very expensive building has a limited function, direct links to two transit stations under the building, the World Trade Center PATH stop and the Cortlandt Street stop on the N/R subway lines, and a secondary connection to the Fulton Street subway station several blocks away. To shortchange us PATH riders seems an odd and unfortunate decision by the planners.

What struck me about the failings of the building, as Ouroussoff described them, was the unwillingness of the designer to accommodate the experience of actual people in his building. As wayfinding designers who often work on large public facilities, we have a people-focused process that we use to create signage and wayfinding systems for buildings like this. We call this process user-centered design, whereby we focus on the needs of the users of a public space, anticipating what information they require and how they will navigate a place and find the destinations and pathways they need. It seems that on this project, there was no advocate for the user guiding or challenging the architect as the building's elements were being designed and arranged. If a user focus was the goal of this public design project, the building would not have become what Ouroussoff described as,"a monument to the creative ego that celebrates Mr. Calatrava’s engineering prowess but little else."

Ouroussoff's review is surprisingly harsh. As a citizen and a PATH user, one wonders, where do we go from here? Perhaps the Port Authority has some explaining to do. Was this routing of PATH traffic designed to enhance the viability of the commercial element of the building? These days, most transportation centers are a mix of transport uses and retail, dining, and entertainment venues. Is there more we haven't seen in the way of public art, exhibits, and environmental graphics that might engage people on the circuitous journey that Ouroussoff complains about? I am an optimist, let's hope that the design evolves and the PATH experience is designed holistically and thoughtfully so us Jersey folks will celebrate our arrival each day in the Big Apple and not curse the moment we left our lovely Garden State. 

Don't Forget to Vote on May 12th

May 12th is voting day for the Jersey City municipal election. There's a big roster of candidates for mayor and city council. You have just a few more hours to do your research before you cast your vote. Polls open at 6:00 AM and close at 8:00 PM. Check out the sample ballot sent to you by the Jersey City Commissioner of Registration, it's a helpful guide to casting your vote tomorrow, describing the categories where you can vote and the choices you have in each category.

I am still new to Jersey City and I am embarrassed to confess that I didn't do enough homework to have a fully informed opinion about how to vote in this election. Check out the editorial from Saturday's Jersey Journal, our hometown newspaper which presents their endorsements for the election. I found it a useful discussion of some of the local issues. Read it and decide for yourself how you want to vote. Just make sure to vote. I'll see you at the polls.

Miami on the Hudson - Jersey City Deco

At some point in my travels through the neighborhood, I started to notice a set of small apartment buildings on the side streets off of JFK Boulevard, between Montgomery and Communipaw Avenues. I found these buildings tucked in between the houses and larger apartment blocks and they reminded me of the great Art Deco buildings in Miami Beach, minus the stucco and the bright colors. They're smallish, four or five stories, mostly light yellow brick, with stylish Deco details. This being Jersey City, they're in various states of repair, the bones are good, but the in some cases the details have been knocked about. The doorways are mostly charming, with nice brick details and some fancy ironwork. The cornices have some great details as well, terra cotta I suppose. I rode around on my bike and took these pictures - I thought you might enjoy this taste of JC Art Deco.

Where Are You on the Journey?

It is sometimes useful to describe as journeys the projects that we business people undertake together. Though it sounds kind of touchy-feely, I think this reflects the emotional process that we go through on long, hard assignments that require a lot of back and forth, give and take. A complex project can be a life event: new friends are made, fresh experiences gained, and a couple of enemies collected in the process. It sounds rather like life itself, which as we know is one very long (hopefully) journey, from innocence to deep understanding, from diapers to bikinis, and then, alas, back to diapers.

I was reminded of this idea of journeys last Saturday. Rich and I had a party, or should I say salon, at our house in Jersey City. The evening began with drinks, proceeded to dinner, and then on to performances by theater artists trying out new material. Among the first to arrive were Judi and her husband Allan, people we had met during the run up to the fall election when we hosted phone banking and debate watching parties. Allan and Judi are lively, engaging people. I don't know them well, but they seemed to have arrived at an OK place in their life's journey. Judi took us back a few years when she returned from a tour of our back yard garden and proudly announced that she had once had a Victory Garden. Was she thinking about her time in Boston and the popular PBS show created by WGBH that extols the virtues of home gardening? Or was she thinking further back to World War II when citizens were encouraged to grow food at home? Hmm, she has some gray hair and is of a certain age.

As we reminisced, I learned more about Judi and her work as a textbook designer. It turns out we have industry friends in common. While I was probing her resume and the reorganization of the book industry, Guillermo, one of the other guests, piped up and steered the questions to wardrobe. "What did you wear wear to work in the 'seventies?" he asked Judi. Of course, that's what a gay man would ask. These days Judy wears nice jeans, a sweater and comfortable shoes. Back then it was knee-high white vinyl go-go boots and mini-skirts. Hard to imagine that outfit in the staid offices of a Boston book publisher.

Guillermo probed, "what kind of stockings went with the mini-skirt - fishnets, perhaps?" Judi couldn't recall.

Emily, another guest piped in, "Pantyhose, no doubt."

Judi replied, "In those days I wore a girdle, but when the mini came along we ditched that."

Imagine putting a mini skirt over a girdle, the image is ludicrous. These discussions of girdles, mini-skirts and go-go boots triggered more memories from Judi. Apparently those days at the book designer's desk with brushes, pens, type galleys and T-squares weren't enough for our swinging Judi. Boston's Combat Zone beckoned and she set off after work one night appropriately clad in tall boots and short skirt to begin an impromptu career as a go-go dancer. In those years, the Combat Zone was appropriately named. Boston's entertainment district was a heady mix of decaying theaters, seedy bars and sex clubs. The confidence provided to Judi by a nice figure, a great pair of boots, and a flirty little mini-skirt melted at the door of the dance club, and she froze with terror. This new dance career was not to be. Oh well, back to the day job.

Speaking of which, the three performers at our Jersey City salon all have day jobs, vocal coaching, massage therapy and so on. But their real passion is creative work, in this case, both writing and performance. Our salon was a chance for them to try out some new material. James kicked off with several short pieces probing the travails of the modern gay black man, the sometimes weird and occasionally wonderful journey of a man searching for love and sex in the urban combat zone. The first piece was a touching quest for companionship "spoken" by his body parts, each looking for new friends in the old bed. His leg spoke of its desire to brush up against an unfamiliar leg, his arm wanted to caress something other than its matching limb on the other side. James worked his way around his body and spirit and the search for new companions, it was a remarkable way to give voice to a man's longing for sex and affection, quite touching and powerful. Other pieces explored actual encounters with other guys in and out of bed. I was struck by his story of Sir Laugh a Lot, the tickle master he found on the Tickle website, who led him to heights of ecstasy unimaginable to those of us who can take or lose a little tickle here or there. His pieces were raw, at times explicit. I squirmed a bit thinking of the audience. Then I remembered Judi and her own adventures in that other Combat Zone and relaxed, eagerly awaiting performer number two.

Deb is a tall stunner, with long brown tresses and the deep rich voice of a jazz singer. She gave us a painful brief moment in the life of a woman struggling to balance housework, a relationship, her day job, and the desire to bust out and become a rock singer. She captured the crackling energy of this working class woman trapped at home with a guy who didn't really care for her. Wow, I was captivated by her edgy vignette. And I loved the leggings and heels.

And then to Rich.This was a bit scary for me, I didn't really know what he was going to do and I understand that I, the man who shares his bed, his kitchen, his life, can be an easy target for his biting humor. Though this man I know and love was right there beside me at home all through late February and March, in fact I lost him - completely. He was consumed by an online competition to get a slot on a cable TV comedy show. Rich is an Internet networking demon. His skills propelled him through the competition and the process haunted me. His quest for votes became relentless and consumed every waking (and a few sleeping) moments of his life in late winter. Rich's performance last Saturday put that time in perspective for me. He brilliantly depicted the crazed performer looking for validation and support. I now understood where he went in those dark weeks of winter when I felt so cold and alone. On Saturday night I laughed and I cried as he acted out his desperate search for votes. And, thank God, there was only a passing reference to me. Sometimes I feel like Fang, comedienne Phyllis Diller's phantom husband who was the butt of so many of her jokes on TV back in the mini-skirt era.

Thus the journey ended on Saturday night. The police were never called to our quiet Jersey City street, even though the background music was sometimes very loud and the windows were wide open. I was dazzled that my honey has so much talent, that his mind and spirit had created this great new work while going about the daily routines of life. I was thrilled to bring some edgy culture to our block, to host artists sharing their work with people eager to absorb and enjoy.

Where are you on the journey? Perhaps you have something to share at our next Jersey City salon.

How Was Your Trip To Mexico?

I had dinner with Barbara the other night. It's been a while since I've seen her and we had lots to catch up on. She's a journalist and so I appreciate her take on things, she's a thoughtful observer of current events, the world at large, and even of the space that we might inhabit at any given moment. (cough) We had picked the spot, Café Loup on 13th Street in Manhattan, a reliable restaurant that neither of us had visited in a while. (cough) I had a moment of anxiety as I approached the restaurant. Where was the entrance? I was having trouble spotting the familiar awning and I had a thought that is all too common these days: is the place still open? Has it succumbed to the turbulent economy and shut down like more than a few familiar places around town? (cough) Whew, the front door beckoned and I entered the still very much alive restaurant. In fact, the place was jammed! It was busier than I had ever seen it in all the years I have been eating there.

As we settled into our seats, (cough) we both remarked on the buzz in the restaurant, wondering about the shrinking economy and the large crowd in the restaurant, which seemed out of sync. We wondered if this busy restaurant was a sign of people's search for comfort in the face of an uneasy and uncertain world. There's no place cozier than Café Loup with its old fashioned bistro decor, dark lighting, dense seating, and warm, rich, French food. (cough) She had the skirt steak with mashed potatoes and I, the duck with mango. When it comes to duck I'm old fashioned, I like that crispy skin that comes with duck a l'orange, but is often not found on elegant duck confit entrees at the best restaurants these days. The waiter assured me that it would be crispy just as I liked, and he was right.

But back to those feelings of anxiety and surprise. (cough) These days it is so hard to know how to feel about the world. Barbara and her colleagues in the news business are keeping us abreast of the latest ups (not many) and downs (lots) of the economy. The daily dose of foreclosures, layoffs, bankruptcies and business closures can be overwhelming. I have a life to live and a business to run. How do I keep the faith in the face of so much bad news. To keep a small business thriving these days requires tenacity, smarts, creativity, and a heavy dash of optimism. I have been traveling the world promoting my newly published book, and in the process have been collecting impressions, ideas, and new contacts that I hope will refresh our work in the office. That gives me hope and the courage to carry on in the face of all of the bad news out there. Perhaps it's because I am a glass half full kind of guy. (cough) There are opportunities in the midst of this global recession. Café Loup is onto something and would seem to be doing just fine. We're doing our best to keep the machine humming at my business, too. There are, however, those good days and those bad days; good days when we get a new assignment or the hint of a project opportunity out there and the market goes up, bad days when I sit with a friend over lunch and hear about layoffs and pay cuts at their office, and I look at my 401(k) statement. (cough)

And then, just when I thought I could handle this muddle of facts and feelings, along comes swine flu! (Damn it, I love pork.) What the hell am I supposed to think about it? Should I really be worried or is it just a distant problem out there somewhere that I should be aware of but not really think too much about? I find it fascinating to read the reports in my morning New York Times (the print edition, but how much longer is that going to last?) and see how the various agencies and government organizations talk about the flu. It is a bit scary when I read about alert level five and the possibility of a global flu pandemic. I am having trouble finding my half full glass right now. The best that the experts can come up with is that we should wash and cleanse our hands. And so we handed out bottles of instant waterless antimicrobial hand sanitizer at our monthly staff meeting on Friday, the $1.79 generics from Duane Reade. It is a way of taking action, warning our staff to be aware of the dangers, and to do what we can in the face of trouble out there. (cough)

Our dinner at Café Loup was a lively, satisfying meal. We mused on our respective careers: Barbara, balancing the mix of teaching and reporting, I, excited about issuing a new book and my resulting a global book tour. The one problem that nagged throughout our delightful dinner was this guy who spent the whole meal coughing heavily at his table right next to us. His date was doing a pretty good job of staying cheerful in the face of his incessant coughing. Barbara was having more trouble with it. We couldn't help ourselves. Was this guy swine flu Sam? Were we witnessing first hand the spread of swine flu in a crowded Village restaurant? Finally, we had had enough of it and beat a hasty retreat from the restaurant. On the way out, I muttered to the guy, "How was your trip to Mexico?"

We headed out into the street. We made a quick—shocking, as it turned out—stop at Jefferson Market on Sixth Avenue. My once favorite food market had been transformed into a Gristede's. Arghh, another victim of the economy and the march of big retailers across the urban landscape. I jumped on the PATH train and headed home to Jersey City for the night. You know, next time I see Barbara we're going to eat over on the west side of the Hudson. We've got some good restaurants in Jersey City that I have to tell you about soon. And, so far, we don't have any swine flu cases in Jersey City, unlike NYC which seems to be crawling with them.

I Killed a Tree Today (for Elizabeth)

Ever since we saw that yellow magnolia last year, Rich has been obsessed. Unlike our neighbors across the street with a big, gorgeous, flowering tree, we had a honey locust in front of the house (until today). It was a spindly, sad little tree. Some of the branches were broken, giving it a funny odd shape and it didn't provide much shade to the street. I suppose some accident or disease had killed off the earlier tree that would have been an equal companion to the other big trees that give our block its special old-time small-town quality.

So you-know-who couldn't resist picking up a yellow magnolia at Manza Family Farm in Middletown, New York, a few miles from the sprawling malls and fast food joints along Route 17. They've got everything you need, all the basics and then some. The place is huge and the selection is irresistible. We just had to have that yellow magnolia for the front yard.

Our spindly little honey locust turned out not to be so small once we started digging. It had a dense, tough root system, part of what makes it a good street tree, I suppose. We dug and we clipped the roots and we dug some more. The damn thing wouldn't budge. Rich had the bright idea of using the car to push the tree over. He had some crazy Rube Goldberg contraption of old logs and bits of styrofoam that he insisted would not harm the front fender of our hybrid SUV as we would give the tree that final push needed to break the roots. I was able to drag him from the car just in time to prevent this potentially expensive bit of fender bending. So we used the logs to create a giant lever to pop the tree roots free. That didn't work and my seesaw, not the tree, popped from the ground and I went flying. Two bruised wrists and a scraped butt later and the ugly little tree was still standing. We found a bigger log lever and pushed and grunted some more. Our neighbor was on her porch cheering us on. Others walking down the street to work gave us dirty looks when mudballs and branches went flying. A perfectly good tree was breathing its last; they didn't get it. Finally I got the idea of twisting the tree and breaking the roots that way. We started pulling and turning and, yes, our maneuver was finally working. The tree was tipping over and breaking loose. But that, of course, happened just as a police car drove by. The tree crashed to the ground just inches from the passing patrol car. It swerved and continued on down the street, in search of crimes more serious than arborcide.

We dragged the root ball up the driveway and trimmed and collected the branches. Where once was a homely little tree just coming into spring bud was now a six-foot-wide hole and a huge mound of dirt. What were we thinking??? What's the expression, you can't make an omelette without breaking an egg? So we had to kill a tree to make a home for our new yellow magnolia. I have to say that the newcomer is sweet. Rich tells me it's a Magnolia Elizabeth, named for Elizabeth Scholz, the former director of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden where it was developed in the late '70s. The yellow buds are just breaking into bloom and it makes you smile just to look at our new tree. The hole has been filled in and Rich will plant around it so our little corner of Jersey City will get a bit more special. Thanks for the tree, Elizabeth. And don't forget this weekend is Sakura Matsuri, the cherry blossom festival at the Garden, where over 220 cherry trees will be in bloom. The sight of the massed pink cherry blossoms is unforgettable. I'd kill to be there but can't make it this year.

It is Better to Give and Receive

The lots on our side of the street are quite large, with good-sized front yards and nice, deep backyards. I have never understood the disparity, why ours are so much bigger than those across the street. Was it a slip of the draftsman's pen when the street was being laid out, a toss of the dice to decide who gets the big lots, or a bit of graft that gave us the property advantage? In any case we have a big city garden to fill.
The owners of our house for the past 34 years were great gardeners and bequeathed to us a formal garden in the backyard. But in our case it's not boxwood and gravel paths; hey it's Jersey City. We've got a garden grid that is laid out with anodized aluminum frames and old bluestone sidewalk pavers. The side beds are trimmed with cobblestones, probably saved from some of the old city streets that now lie beneath the paved Gold Coast development along the Hudson River. Our formal garden is therefore a curious mix of '70s mod and historic urban fabric. (The previous owners had a metalwork company, hence the slightly weird in-ground aluminum frames) The neglected gardens we acquired were a tangle of irises with huge patches of hostas of various colors. Spiderwort, an invasive plant to say the least, was poking up everywhere. The irises needed thinning so they would bloom again and, in my book, a little hosta goes a long way. So how to rework the garden and not spend too much money?

The answer lay to the south of us in Monmouth County at the annual spring plant swap. It's a quirky local event held each spring and fall at Deep Cut, a historic garden located in Middletown, New Jersey. The 54-acre garden is a lovely spot now dedicated to the home gardener. In the 1930s it was briefly owned by mob boss Vito Genovese. At Deep Cut, Genovese created an elaborate garden reminiscent of Naples, his Italian birthplace. Work suddenly stopped when Genovese had to leave the country...hmm...Italy beckoned. A suspicious...hmm...fire burned down the mansion the next year.

Last Saturday at Deep Cut this turbulent past was not immediately evident. Here's how the plant swap works: Gardeners pull up with their surplus plant stock, carefully potted in quart, one-gallon, or two-gallon containers. This is a great way to reuse those plastic garden pots that collect in the backyard or down in the basement. The plants are labeled and plant providers are handed colored-coded tickets, one for each one of each size plant they bring. We had a fistful of tickets because our home sellers had bequeathed us the aforementioned overgrown irises and hostas, and that pesky spiderwort. Here's where it can get just a little bit ugly (remember the place is called Deep Cut and it was owned by a mob boss)! Many of the arriving plants are common stuff, yes, lots of irises and hostas, but some gems appear as well. But the unusual plants go fast and there's a bit of pushing and elbowing to get the rare gems. A few frowns appear on those who lost out and wide grins form on those who snagged a choice echinacea or an unusual ground cover. All in all the mood is jolly and the people leave with carloads of plants. And not a penny is exchanged for the goods in question. This a nice retail model for the new recession economy where money is in such short supply these days.

I confess that we were feeling so proud of ourselves for getting a carload of free plants that we couldn't resist a quick stop at nearby RareFind Nursery in Jackson, NJ. Inspired by a beautiful specimen we saw last week in the botanical garden in Copenhagen, Rich and I were on the hunt for a fragrant white rhododendron with a pink blush in the center. (If I hadn't told you already, there are two gay men in charge of this Jersey City garden, that's us.) Right on the edge of the Pine Barrens, Princeton business man Henry "Hank" Shannen has created a monument to his passion for rhododendrons. Set on eleven acres, it has rows of greenhouses and a display garden with over 2,000 hardy rhododendron hybrids and species, one of the largest such collections in the United States. Hank gave us a special tour of the gardens and also a brief history of Rhododendron Fortunei, the beautiful and sweetly fragrant plant that we didn't know we were looking for. They don't call this the Garden State for nothing. Hank told us that the RareFind gardens are spectacular in mid May when the rhododendrons are all in bloom. Plan a visit and get a rare find for your garden.

The Easter Parade

It's a gorgeous sunny Easter Sunday, and I want to get some vegetables started in the backyard garden. I just heard about a great stock of lettuce seedlings at a nearby store, so I jumped in the car and ran down to 440 Farms, a fruit and vegetable market nearby on Route 440 in Jersey City. Friends had told me about the nice fresh fruits and vegetables you can find there, and about the fish they have on Fridays. (More on that in a later post.)

I parked in the gravel lot and headed toward the large plastic greenhouse. Near the entrance were flats of violas, sunny yellow alongside deep purple, a dazzling Easter display. Farther in I found the Easter flower pots filled with tulips and hyacinths and other seasonal blooms. Plastic markers in each pot shouted Happy Easter!

But inside, in the heart of the greenhouse, I hit pay dirt. There I surveyed the vegetables, row upon row of bright green seedlings, beautifully arranged to make a sea of greens, a feast for the eyes, some light, some dark, some with a purple cast, others almost yellow. I scanned the rows and found what I wanted to get my garden started—lettuce, beets, arugula, onions, broccoli raab, and Swiss chard. These would give me an early start. I can follow up later and direct sow more vegetables so I can have fresh produce throughout the season. The triple packs of good big seedlings were $1.89, not a bad price considering there were 6 to 10 plants in each pack.

The plants are in the ground and the Easter Parade is now marching through my backyard. I can almost taste the fresh greens and vegetables that I'll start to harvest in late May.

By the way, I looked over the other plants at 440 Farms and found some great azaleas, white or salmon. At $12.50 for a nice big plant, I couldn't resist. I got one to put in a shady corner at the entrance to the garden.

The season is just getting started and there's still loads of time to get that backyard vegetable garden going. Michelle Obama is gardening at the White House and you can do the same at your place—eat healthy, save money, and go green(s). Start small, just get started. And remember that 440 Farms is your partner in this endeavor. By the way, the vegetable seedlings are local, Jersey born and bred.

440 Farms Inc.
Route 440 and Clarke Avenue
Jersey City, NJ 07304
201 451-6207

Observing the Jersey City Streetscape

It has been a little over a year since we moved to Jersey City from the West Village in Manhattan. The move across the Hudson was a remarkable shift for me, a twenty-five year resident of the same gorgeous Greek Revival townhouse on a beautiful block in one of New York's most desirable neighborhoods. As my partner Rich and I scanned the metro New York real estate landscape, our attention was quickly drawn to Jersey City. The so-called sixth borough offered a convenient location, not far from our respective workplaces in New York City and an easy no-bridge-and-tunnel connection to our upstate farmhouse. As we searched the listings and toured available houses in Jersey City, the McGinley Square area along Kennedy Boulevard and adjacent to Lincoln Park presented some great options. The home search ended at a lovely Colonial Revival house on a pretty tree-lined block.

Fifteen months, several renovations, a lot of plastering and painting, and some serious gardening later, it's now time for me to know Jersey City better. The queries of New Yorker friends looking to cross the Hudson in search of good, affordable housing and my own search for good, convenient, interesting shopping has prompted me to begin this observation of Jersey City.

This blog will contain my observations of life in Jersey City. This is a maddening and fascinating city. It sprawls in all directions with no easily discernible overall street grid. It took me a while to figure out the lay of the land. The layout is remarkable enough that Kevin Lynch in his landmark book, The Image of the City, used Jersey City as a case study for his ideas about a process he named way-finding. I just wrote a book on the topic called The Wayfinding Handbook: Information Design for Public Places, published by Princeton Architectural Press.

The different neighborhoods of this city vary in scale and character and are home to diverse ethnic communities from all over the world. The mix is rich, the images, tastes, and textures make for a lavish buffet of experiences. Jersey City's location along the Hudson River and near New York City makes it a great place to live and also a good base for exploring the region.

I travel a lot these days, so I may occasionally share my thoughts about some other places I have visited. Perhaps these reflections on people and places abroad will inform my view of Jersey City, its assets, and its liabilities and help me dream about how my hometown can grow and develop.

The words and pictures that I post here will be the notebook of my observations. In the process, I hope to get to know Jersey City better. Likewise I hope readers will share their own observations and together we can build a scrapbook of the great, the interesting, the quirky, the unusual, and the desirable aspects of life in Jersey City.

Gotta go, time to walk the streets, make notes, and snap some pix. Welcome to the Jersey City Observer.