| Author | Message | ||
     Stevef Citizen Username: Stevef Post Number: 194 Registered: 5-2005  |
Bingo! Another elitist primadona spending other peoples money without even asking them. Can we file a lawsuit to stop this? I'll chip in money. | ||
| Soparents Citizen Username: Soparents Post Number: 48 Registered: 5-2005 |
This truly doesn't seem to be about the art chosen. No-one is suggesting that the wrong piece of Tony Smith was selected, or that another artist should have been selected etc. I want to support this town, but why have a crowd-drawing work of art right now that is APPARENTLY going to cost the taxpayer, whatever the amount when so much more needs to be done as far as town repairs, school repairs etc. IF all that we are being told is true and our dollars are going towards it, then each time I go past it the ONLY thing in my mind is how many potholes could that money have filled, how many safer sidewalks could it have ensured... and all Maplewood are concerned with now is that they should have a dog park... | ||
| Frederick Schmid Citizen Username: Carlfrederick Post Number: 22 Registered: 3-2006 |
If people got more involved in the problems of rape and abuse, there might be less. Sometime check the stats, how many mothers have told their daughters -- that daddy was just playing --or worse that they were lying. Then you might just begin to appreciation and value for being involved. | ||
| Pdg Citizen Username: Pdg Post Number: 706 Registered: 5-2004  |
thread drift?  | ||
| Soparents Citizen Username: Soparents Post Number: 50 Registered: 5-2005 |
Absolutely.... | ||
| Dave Supporter Username: Dave Post Number: 8994 Registered: 4-1997  |
Has the bond measure passed yet? | ||
| MHD Citizen Username: Mayhewdrive Post Number: 3672 Registered: 5-2001  |
Dave -  | ||
| Just The Aunt Supporter Username: Auntof13 Post Number: 4493 Registered: 1-2004  |
Fred If you and your silly little group want this statue so much YOU pay for it and YOU maintain it. Don't force it on the rest of us. If your organization has so much support for it, why can't you raise the money? Steve- If anyone can find a way to sue this group, please let me know. I'll also throw in some money. Is there anyone for someone to contact the family? Do they even know the controversy surrounding the statue? If they did, does anyone believe they'd force us to continue with the plans? It's not as if the family went to the BOT and offered a statue. No, the family had to be talked into giving us permission to use the plans so Ms Arnets group could have a statue built, and have the town pay for it. Why is it so hard to give it back? Can we just donate it to someone else? How about Kean, they have an art program. I bet they'd be happy to have it. | ||
| Frederick Schmid Citizen Username: Carlfrederick Post Number: 23 Registered: 3-2006 |
Auntie, It is not unusual for communities to allocate tax dollars for cultural activities. The Newark Museum until recently been supported by the people of Newark which is a community that can barely afford to do so. The Met in New York City gets about 25% of its budget from the city government. What is your opinion as to what South Orange should do to support cultural activities? Maplewood didn't have a cultural center when I was growing up, but now it does and the town supports it. By having many different attractive activities going on in town, people are drawn to a town which is why most houses in South Orange keep their resale values. Even when the various pieces of the Statue of Liberty was sent to the US by France, there was great questions as to who should pay for the construction. A good long period went by while the statue was in the warehouse because people didn't want the statue. I think having the Performing Arts Center is a great idea that will add distinction to South Orange. As for contributing, I have given my whole professional life to the visual arts and I have also given quite a bit of dollars as well. My mother recently gave a million bucks to Rutgers. So my family does contribute and participates. | ||
| Spitz Supporter Username: Doublea Post Number: 1604 Registered: 3-2003 |
Frederick - My long lost brother. I'm in tears. I've finally found you. When can I see Mom? | ||
| Dave Supporter Username: Dave Post Number: 8997 Registered: 4-1997 |
Explain the lies. The sculpture is so great that the public can't know the truth of its funding until the deal is signed. It's called corruption. Innumerate and arrogant. | ||
| Lizziecat Citizen Username: Lizziecat Post Number: 1121 Registered: 5-2003 |
Frederick doesn't even live here. He lives in Ojai, California. He won't be paying for this. Ignore him. | ||
| Frederick Schmid Citizen Username: Carlfrederick Post Number: 24 Registered: 3-2006 |
Sorry, Lizziecat, I own a house in Maplewood. And my wife and two kids are planning to move back to Maplewood as soon as I can move my business. | ||
| Spanish Inquisitor Citizen Username: Sinq Post Number: 50 Registered: 4-2004  |
So you lied here: http://www.southorangevillage.com/cgi-bin/show.cgi?tpc=1936&post=555434#POST5554 34 Or you're lying now? | ||
| Frederick Schmid Citizen Username: Carlfrederick Post Number: 25 Registered: 3-2006 |
My wife and I purchased just this past week. So sorry. | ||
| The Mighty Tau Citizen Username: The_mighty_tau Post Number: 1 Registered: 3-2006 |
The Mighty Tau says, Bow down and except me, there is nothing to do but Kow Tau to The Mighty Tau. | ||
| Lizziecat Citizen Username: Lizziecat Post Number: 1122 Registered: 5-2003 |
Maplewood isn't South Orange. Fred isn't going to be paying for the Tau. | ||
| joel dranove Citizen Username: Jdranove Post Number: 225 Registered: 1-2006 |
It hasn't been built yet, unless bc urged a quick copy job, in view of the opposition. So, I repeat, no harm, no foul. jd | ||
| MHD Citizen Username: Mayhewdrive Post Number: 3676 Registered: 5-2001 |
Fred - How about starting with a real public discussion of priorities, followed by a TRUTHFUL discussion of how these priorities will be paid for? Both of these elements were conveniently skipped for a few vocal Tau-ers and the public was LIED to. I would think that any supporter of this project would be just at outraged that the public was lied to and excluded from the process. | ||
| Soparents Citizen Username: Soparents Post Number: 52 Registered: 5-2005 |
FS - Why did you choose Maplewood over South Orange? Did you live there before? | ||
| Dave Supporter Username: Dave Post Number: 8999 Registered: 4-1997 |
FS- There is an enormous amount of cultural activities in our towns. Most is privately funded, some supported by grants and augmented with some local tax dollars, I'm sure, which is all good. When decisions are made in Maplewood about how to spend money on the arts, there is some debate and the real numbers are used in discussions with the public. So congratulaitons, you're moving to a responsible town. | ||
| Soparents Citizen Username: Soparents Post Number: 53 Registered: 5-2005 |
It's a sad fact, but whenever friends come over with their children and we "go out" we ALWAYS drive down to South Orange, grab a Starbucks and............. get right back in the car and go to Maplewood. The kids can do paintin' plates, we can pop into the cheese shop, grab our grocery needs at Kings, get GREAT fish at Freemans, us Mums can drag the kids into the knick knack stores and look at the trinkets and pick up some great gifts, or hit the book stores, or into the pet shop to buy gallons of deer repellant, and let the kids look at the fish and hampsters, and the finally when the kids are really hating their Mothers for dragging them all over town, we load them back into car, and weather permitting, go back to SO, grab another Starbucks for added energy and let them loose in a playground. Maplewood had a plan, and made that plan work, it has a soul, right now we are searching for one. IF we have the abilility to pull ourselves up by the heels then lets start doing it, and start by using the "Spare" money that was allocated for the sculpture. Every journey starts with one small step, and that first step is going to be me stepping into the room on Monday to hear for myself what is going on. I look forward to meeting you all. | ||
| Pdg Citizen Username: Pdg Post Number: 707 Registered: 5-2004 |
 Wow, Carl Frederick Schmid, do you move FAST!!! According to your 3/7/06 post, linked above by Spanish I, you said "Lately, I have been thinking about moving back to Maplewood." And you bought a house in the past 6 days? Did you actually close already, or did you just make an offer? We've been "thinking about moving" off and on for months now - we would love more land than the .2 acre we currently live on. And we're not looking clear across country either; we want to remain in M/SO if anthing with an acre ever comes to market. You must have found a really magical house on the Maplewood market to cause you to fly here, check it out, and BUY it in less than one week! Wow, lucky you! I'm so jealous. Too bad you chose Maplewood over South Orange - it sounds like you might be a perfect fit on our BOT. Are you into politics, or do you just focus on the arts? | ||
| joel dranove Citizen Username: Jdranove Post Number: 227 Registered: 1-2006 |
Hau nau, braun tau. jd | ||
| Spitz Supporter Username: Doublea Post Number: 1608 Registered: 3-2003 |
If you google Frederick Schmid, Ojai, Calif., it says he is Director of Brown Art Gallery in Ojai, California and a licensed insurance broker for the art world. | ||
| joel dranove Citizen Username: Jdranove Post Number: 230 Registered: 1-2006 |
Note the following about our "little known" Tony Smith, a mid-century man with interesting comments about Nazis and Jews. art The big picture. The Order of Things Art and anarchy at midcentury. By Christopher Benfey Posted Thursday, July 23, 1998, at 3:30 AM ET "Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 1958-1968" July 9-Sept. 22, 1998 "Tony Smith: Architect, Painter, Sculptor" July 2-Sept. 22, 1998 Museum of Modern Art, New York City Click on any image or hot-linked title to see an enlargement. Click on image to view enlargement Two summer shows, side by side at the Museum of Modern Art, introduce little-known figures with close ties to the Abstract Expressionist generation. Enter Door No. 1 and you're inside the strange spider web and polka dot domain of Yayoi Kusama, a flamboyant Japanese artist who worked in New York during the '60s. Choose Door No. 2 and make yourself at home in the American sculptor Tony Smith's more austere, but equally odd, architectural spaces. These are smallish, intense shows that aim, as curator Robert Storr writes in the Smith catalog, "to whet the appetite of the general public." Viewed together, they reveal surprising affinities between two versatile and ambitious artists whose early childhood traumas inspired them to try to redesign the world. Kusama, the lesser known of the two, is the more accessible and eye-catching artist and the more in tune with our time. Born in 1929 in Tokyo, as a child Kusama suffered from hallucinations that she was being overwhelmed by proliferating dots and nets. Obsessive, repetitive patterns entered her work early on. Determined to take New York by storm, she wrote to Georgia O'Keeffe--a female artist who had succeeded in the male-dominated New York art world--for advice. O'Keeffe, initially puzzled by the young Japanese artist's ambitions, told her to show her work to anyone willing to look at it. Kusama arrived in 1958 with a couple of thousand small drawings and watercolors, mainly of O'Keeffe-like multiseeded flowers in vibrant colors. Looking down from the top of the Empire State Building at the crowds below, Kusama realized that she needed to do something more spectacular--"like a bomb," she said--if she wanted to attract notice. She extended the net patterns of the flowers across huge canvases, creating the white-on-white "Infinity Net" paintings that remain among her most beautiful creations and, along with color variants, were favorably compared at the time to the decentered, "allover" paintings of Jackson Pollock (No. Red B.C.F., 1960). By 1961, Kusama had begun covering familiar objects--an armchair, a stepladder, a rowboat--with carefully sewn phalluses (Accumulation No. 1, 1962). These monochrome "accumulations," as repetitively patterned as the infinity nets, have a deadpan wit quite different from Claes Oldenburg's squishily theatrical hamburgers and lipsticks, with which they were sometimes shown in early Pop Art exhibitions. Like the polka dots, the proliferating penises were, according to Kusama, an attempt to contain her fears by representing them. "I was scared of penises," she blandly remarked at the press opening. Kusama's 1964 affair with Joseph Cornell (documented in Utopia Parkway, Deborah Solomon's recent biography of Cornell) has a peculiar aptness: The man terrified of women--who enclosed movie goddesses and ballerinas in little fantasy boxes and nicknamed Kusama "You-you-I"--meets the woman scared of men. A kindred ambivalence marks Kusama's "Food Obsession" sculptures, inspired, she claimed, by the image of all the food a person consumes in a lifetime passing by on a conveyor belt. Kusama's pasta-encrusted clothing may have a link (as curator Lynn Zelevansky suggests) with eating disorders, which were barely discussed at the time. But such objects as the bronzed Macaroni Handbag (1965) have a mod glamour undiminished by the passage of time. By the mid-'60s, Kusama was experimenting with ways to insert her own image into her work. She had herself photographed, nude except for high heels and polka-dot stickers, then superimposed the image over one of her accumulations of phalluses. In such works she seemed to be toying with male expectations of the Asian femme fatale. By the late '60s, Kusama had turned from these ambiguous engagements with the male gaze to more attention grabbing performances. In 1968, she staged well-publicized nude-ins at MoMA's sculpture garden and at such Vietnam War-era hotspots as the Board of Elections. A 1967 film called Kusama's Self-Obliteration, on view in a side gallery at MoMA, gives a sense of what these occasions may have felt like. Kusama, clothed in a kimono, dabs paint on her nude models, who begin to dance in comic self-consciousness, then escalate, to a loud acid rock soundtrack, into orgy. Kusama's performance pieces always ended the same way, with the arrival of the cops. They got her on the cover of the New York tabloids, but they didn't pay the rent. Her paintings and sculptures, with their use of body parts and food, anticipate the work of such current artists as Cindy Sherman and Kiki Smith (Tony Smith's daughter), but they failed to attract the financial and institutional backing Kusama needed. She remained desperately poor during her New York sojourn--another reason, perhaps, for her obsession with food--and returned to Japan in 1973, where she lives, by her own choice, in a Tokyo mental hospital that has a special emphasis on art therapy. Today, Kusama is a cult figure in the Japanese avant-garde, recognized not only for her art but for her novels as well--gothic fables of sexual violence set in New York, with titles like The Hustler's Grotto of Christopher Street (which ends with a suicidal leap from the Empire State Building) and The Burning of St. Mark's Church. Tony Smith, less well-known than his drinking buddies Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, is nonetheless hardly obscure. His sculptures of the last two decades of his life--he died of a heart attack in 1980, at the age of 68--look perfectly at home in MoMA's sculpture garden. Maillol's nude, Picasso's goat, and the other sculptures that Kusama's nude minions cavorted among have been put into storage. Smith's Moondog (1964), a black, steel monster two stories high, reigns in their place. Smith liked to joke that his career--architect, painter, sculptor--followed the initials of his name: Anthony Peter Smith. He came to sculpture late, but the ambition to reshape the world was there from the start, reaching back--as in Kusama's case--to childhood trauma. Born in New Jersey in 1912, Smith was the grandson of the designer of the standard fire hydrant and grew up among engineers such as his father. He contracted tuberculosis at about age 4 and for several years lived alone in a little prefabricated house in the backyard, so the rest of the family would be protected from contagion. The previous year, during a family trip to the world's fair in San Francisco, Smith had seen an installation of Pueblo Indian cliff dwellings. Back home in his quarantine shack, he spent long hours fashioning "pueblos" out of medicine boxes and covering them with papier-mâché "adobe." Such primitivizing fantasies made him particularly well suited, when he was groping for a profession, to the "organic" architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, with whom Smith studied and worked during the late '30s. Smith's 15 or so completed buildings, mostly houses, are obviously indebted to Wright in their light-filled eaves and open, geometrical forms. The three interlocked buildings of the Olsen House (circa 1951) are daringly deployed in a pentagonal form across the rocky hillside of Connecticut coastal bluffs. Architecture didn't give Smith the control he wanted; changes to the Olsen compound, in particular, depressed him. An ambitious plan for a hexagonally based church, raised above the ground on stilts and with stained-glass windows by Pollock, came to nothing. When his wife's opera career took her to Europe in 1953, Smith went along and took his sketchbooks. There he hit on a pattern based on circles in a grid which he called, after a geological formation near Bayreuth, Germany, the Louisenberg series. Storr makes large claims for these paintings, seeing them as the first successful attempt to "systematize the 'allover' painting" invented by Pollock and Rothko. The art critic Lucy Lippard discerned a different impetus in these buoyant pictures, labeling the peanut shaped forms as "testicular"--a sign, Storr adds, of "the 'ballsy' ethos of [Smith's] generation of male artists." Back in the States, Smith--as interested in nets and grids as Kusama--worked up his geometrical patterns into three dimensions, thus returning, in a sense, to his architectural roots. Cigarette (1961), currently placed as a sort of triumphal entryway to the southeast corner of Central Park, demonstrates the unsettling possibilities of tetrahedral shapes, where the triangular faces have a dynamic lightness lacking in rectangularly based structures. (The New York City Department of Parks and Recreation has helpfully added a note that the work "is not intended to promote cigarette smoking.") A polymath and an autodidact with no degree beyond high school, Smith had too many ideas. The sexual pulse of a lot of his objects--"There is something erotic in all my work," Smith admitted--is evident in loud titles for sculptures like She Who Must Be Obeyed and Jim's Piece. He constructed almost as many phallic shapes as Kusama and filled his notebooks with erotic doodlings comparing the sex organs of humans and flowers, or depicting Christ--Smith was a Catholic--with breasts. Smith's political ideas are more elusive. He adopted an upbeat American organicism derived from Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman. There's nothing on record, as far as I know, to link him to his mentor Wright's notorious sympathy for Hitler and fascism. But some of Smith's doodles and offhand remarks give one pause. One of the drawings on view at MoMA is a diagram of the races, with the Jews identified as "circumscised [sic] cut off from Earth." In another drawing, from 1943, Smith develops his personal symbol, the "spiral cross," which is really nothing but a relaxed swastika. Traveling in Germany after the war he felt an uneasy admiration for Hitler's Haus der Kunst exhibition hall in Munich--"As you may have guessed," he wrote to the painter Barnett Newman, "the thing as a whole was very like the church [design] I sent you"--and for Albert Speer's gigantic stadium at Nuremberg. Such remarks inspire Storr's rather defensive observation that "unlike fascist art and architecture, Smith's sculptures and buildings were insistently built to human rather than superhuman scale." It may be that grandiose schemes for redesigning society inevitably flirt with repressive politics. | ||
| Soparents Citizen Username: Soparents Post Number: 54 Registered: 5-2005 |
Then he must know of someone who can take the Tau off our hands... | ||
| MHD Citizen Username: Mayhewdrive Post Number: 3677 Registered: 5-2001 |
http://www.slate.com/id/2928 WOW - If Smith was remotely anti-semitic THAT should immediately put an end to this project?!! | ||
| Soda Supporter Username: Soda Post Number: 3676 Registered: 5-2001  |
Wow. I attended a showing of Kusama's Self Obliteration while attending NYU. It was Far Ucking Fout! | ||
| Frederick Schmid Citizen Username: Carlfrederick Post Number: 26 Registered: 3-2006 |
Enjoyed the personal attacks. Thank you. I think public sculpture is good for a community. So shoot me if you disagree. I was in Maplewood last week and asked quite a few people what they thought about the Performing Arts Center and the Sculpture. I found that the majority are in favor and a few have their reservations mostly because of the economic times. I spoke up on behalf of the sculpture because all I read in the various threads was negative remarks. You have driven off anyone who has a different opinion -- subquently, what you have achieved in the process is just talking to yourself. One of your participants addressed the need to get involved and attend the BOT meetings, etc. She was right. In fact, I was encouraged by her words. To those who attacked me, do you attend the BOT meetings and participate in the political process of Maplewood or South Orange? Or do you just sit on the sidelines and carp? Do you work to get more people involved in your dialogues? Based on what I see, the answer is probably no. When I started to count the number of different participants in the various threads on MOL concerning the sculpture, I counted 150 or so individuals. Lets say there are another 150 I missed. So you have 300 people out of 37,000 -- that is less than 1%. I have been thinking and planning a move back to Maplewood for two years. Nothing was just decided in just a few weeks. Believe me. I am glad I made the decision to return. Again, I think the sculpture looks great and the idea of a Performing Arts Center is vital to the community. Many different factors keep up the property and resale values of a town. You need all of those factors to make a town click. Sorry, if I upset you all. That wasn't my intention. How about becoming more tolerate of different views. Your dialogues will be stronger for it. And as I say, public sculpture projects are about public debate. Based on what has happened, I would say the sculpture has been successful. Thank you. | ||
| Soparents Citizen Username: Soparents Post Number: 55 Registered: 5-2005 |
FS - I think the sculpture is the catalyst. I think it would be a souless person who would say that art, in any form, has no place in our lives... This all comes down to quality of life. In a nutshell, if I tried to hammer a nail into my wall to hang a painting I had just bought and the wall crumbled, i would realise that the beautiful painting took the money I needed to repair that wall.... Discussion is always good, and if the comments being raised here encourage even a few new people to attend the meetings, then its a good start. | ||
| MHD Citizen Username: Mayhewdrive Post Number: 3678 Registered: 5-2001 |
Fred - First, there are around 17,000 people in South Orange. Second, the "300 people" you suggest are opposed to this project are still far greater than the handful of vocal supporters. But, we can't accurately say because there has been ZERO public discussion on whether tax dollars should pay for this. If YOU support this, that's great...I hope YOU pay for it. Just don't force the rest of us to do so, until there has been a public and truthful discussion of the costs. BTW - as an art "expert", what do you know about Smith's alleged anti-semitic ties as quoted above? | ||
| Dave Supporter Username: Dave Post Number: 9001 Registered: 4-1997 |
Frederick, as someone who created the first online petition FOR the Tony Smith sculpture, you should understand this isn't about how we value the arts. I do. We do. This sculpture has become a symbol of an arrogant government that lies and lies repeatedly. It has become pathological. The village president lies about downtown redevelopment, he lies about personal and secretive business relations with developers. We just got rid of a trustee who even allowed herself to be quoted in the Philadelphia Inquirer defending nepotism. | ||
| Crazy_quilter Citizen Username: Crazy_quilter Post Number: 235 Registered: 2-2005 |
i'm an artist. i wanted to buy some paintings i love from a friend who is an artist. i asked him to send me some jpegs of paintings he has available. then our furnance cracked. we had to remove asbestos, and buy a new furnance. i had to tell my friend i have to wait to buy some art from him. This is a true story. | ||
| Pdg Citizen Username: Pdg Post Number: 709 Registered: 5-2004 |
Fred, you seem a bit overly sensitive. There were no "personal attacks." Myself, I was incredulous that a family would move so quickly, although I admit I was just going on your 3/7 post which made it seem as if Maplewood was something you were newly considering rather than you being a new homeowner. SOPAC and the proposed "Tau" sculpture will affect South Orange taxpayers, and thus the discussions are in the South Orange thread. What Maplewood residents think and feel about it is mildly interesting, but they have the pleasure of considering it only as it benefits them, while they live in a beautiful, vibrant downtown and impressive redeveloping Springfield Ave. Every town has its issues, but Maplewood’s seems to be too many nail salons. We, on top of numerous beauty salons, have many, many more critical issues. Did you chance to enter the S.Orange library during your visit? If you do happen to after a rain, you will witness buckets about the floor (newish carpet, btw) filling with rain water. Did you check out our Town Hall? It appears to be crumbling from the outside! Did you check out our historic firehouse that has been in a slow state of renovation and has been uninhabitable for years (I think 5?) - our firefighters have been housed in tiny RENTED trailers for years now! Why? Not enough money to finish - for years! Have you checked out any old thread having to do with the falling down ruins of the town-owned "Old Stone House" that there are WAY-too-late plans to try to save? For over 8 years we have been told a new market would be "coming soon" to the Shop Rite location near the train that the Village condemned. One of our best-loved assets, enjoyed by a real "majority" of S.Orange residents, our town pools, are also in need of basic maintenance and updating. The list of basic needs just goes on and on and on. So, forgive the anger you perceived - it surely is not directed toward YOU specifically. But as a newcomer you have a lot more to learn before you preach to those of us paying S.Orange's high taxes for years with little to no results and HUGE additional debt, plus interest, accruing due to SOPAC. This sculpture should be way, way down the list our Trustees' priorities and it is beyond offensive that it is being fast-tracked with inaccurate information arrogantly tossed to the public and only when it is demanded at BOT meetings. With all due respect, you simply do not know what you are talking about when it comes to South Orange. | ||
| Spitz Supporter Username: Doublea Post Number: 1609 Registered: 3-2003 |
Frederick - Dave's position has a tremendous impact. He was one of the strongest supporters of the sculpture until the deception on the part of the BOT was revealed. Our family has been deeply involved in the visual arts and has a passion for it. One of my sons was the curator of the Judith Rothschild Foundation's Russian Avant Garde Book Collection, which he was instrumental in collecting and which was donated to MOMA. As much as we all love art, and some of the members of my family are extremely knowledgable about it, we share the feelings of those who are deeply troubled by the arrogance of the BOT and the repeated inability on the part of some of its members to tell the truth. | ||
| Dave Supporter Username: Dave Post Number: 9004 Registered: 4-1997 |
And I'm still open to the sculpture, but there needs to be public input that's based on the facts. If public art is for the public good, it can't also be a source of deception and closed deliberations. | ||
| Frederick Schmid Citizen Username: Carlfrederick Post Number: 27 Registered: 3-2006 |
Pdg, Thank you for a good response. And, I recognize your points as valid. You have presented the type of discussion I would like to see on any topic. As for being sensitive - well being called a liar and having it suggested that I be ignored because I have a different point of view is out of line. I have to admit, that I am not up on the very latest details, but I spent my first 22 years living in Maplewood. And my mother lived in the town in Maplewood til 1994 -- more than 50 years, so it is fair to say my family knows something about the area and we feel vested. I went to Clinton, South Orange Jr, and Columbia. I didn't decide to move back without lots of information. The economic problems are every where in NJ and I can tell you we have a good share in California. Very few governments, local, state, and Federal are in good shape. Most, but not all problems can be attributed to wanting services but not wanting to pay for them. It has been known for decades that New Jersey relies too heavily on property taxes placing the burden upon a specific segment of the community. Well, we can't do anything about that now. I agree with your comments about Maplewood -- the village and Springfield Avenue areas. I like what has happened to Maplewood a lot. When I was living there, it was a white, pure bred town. That has changed which is great and attracted me. While I realize there are differences between SO and Maplewood, but these two towns are joined at the hip in many different ways. If something happens in SO it effects Maplewood. I asked last week why wasn't the Performing Arts Center not done by both towns. Both communities benefit. I agree the Performing Arts Center could have been financed differently. All of the projects, I have consulted on I always recommend private funding. And in the case of purchasing artwork, I always say private money so you don't get into the debates you have. Most artwork purchased by public museums are accomplished with private dollars. City governments usually provide the land and then pay the utilities when the building is completed. In a few other situations, the city provides maintenance. So lets get more people involved and head the conversation in a more positive direction. Stop attacking the BOT. Work with them. The community can accomplish a lot. In California, the people organized and passed Prop 13 which stopped the property taxes from going through the roof. All I am saying is make sure you are not just talking to yourself. | ||
| joel dranove Citizen Username: Jdranove Post Number: 231 Registered: 1-2006 |
The BOT has its collective head in the sand, and attacks anyone who differs from the party line. Oh, they also spend our money on needless diversions, and with Guillermo in charge have destroyed downtown, and left it to rot for nearly a decade. Trust them not. jd | ||
| susan1014 Supporter Username: Susan1014 Post Number: 1447 Registered: 3-2002 |
Frederick, are you really a supporter of Prop 13 and the gutting of services that it has led to in California? It only stopped property tax increases for existing homeowners, and led to amazing inequities on the same street (I spent my years in CA too). I'm willing to be a supporter of this sculpture, but not the project in its current form, which was snuck onto our taxes while we were told it wouldn't cost us, and is being badly oversold for its ability to draw tourist/student dollars into our downtown. My apologies to Tony Smith's memory, but this work has indeed become a symbol of much that is wrong in South Orange. You grew up in Maplewood many years ago, so you know what is right for South Orange now? You've spoken to people in Maplewood, and you've counted posters against the project and decided that they are a tiny minority of South Orange residents? That's a lot of certainty for someone from way out of town. Welcome back to the area, I think. Best of luck learning the current day politics, opinions and strengths of the area. You are ahead of most new arrivals, but may still have good bit to learn. You might not want to assume that you know better than the actual residents/taxpayers, unless you want a reputation before you even take possession of your new home. |
