Newark: Good-bye to the Bayonne Box
By Peggy McGlone
The Star-Ledger (New Jersey)
December 4, 2008
Newark's on-going effort to rid its neighborhoods of the so-called "Bayonne box" has attracted the attention of the National Endowment for the Arts, which announced Thursday it will give $25,000 to support the city's effort to find a new, more artistically appealing, design for its low-rise housing.
The $25,000 award is one 1,951 grants totaling $23.2 million made by the federal arts agency in the first round of 2009 grants. Nineteen grants worth $385,000 were awarded to New Jersey.
Called an eye-sore by some and unimaginative by others, the "Bayonne boxes" have accounted for most of the 11,000 new homes constructed in Newark in the last decade. Mayor Cory Booker is on record as detesting the typically narrow buildings that rise three stories and feature garages jutting out toward the street.
The NEA grant will support the effort of city planner Toni Griffin and the "Beyond the Box: New Houses for Newark" program. Newark plans to bring together local and international architects, city planners and the public to discuss and establish alternatives.
Poet and New Jersey native John Bargowski won a $25,000 creative writing fellowship for a collection of his narrative pieces. A resident of Harmony Township, Bargowski said the grant will help him complete his current book of poems and "put everything together and present it to some publishers."
"It's really great honor to receive a fellowship from the NEA because it is a panel of your peers, who review the manuscripts and and select the poets," said the 56-year-old poet, who works as an enrollment counselor at East Stroudsburg University. "Nothing is more affirming than your peers ... saying they like it and appreciate it."
Bargowski is the winner of the Theodore Roethke Prize and a fellowship from New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Read his poem "Nearly Wild" by clicking here
The other New Jersey grants announced yesterday by the NEA are:
$75,000 to the Newark Museum, $40,000 to Montclair State University's Peak Performance series, $30,000 to McCarter Theatre Center, Princeton, $25,000 to the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, Newark, $20,000 to the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, $20,000 to the International Sculpture Center, Hamilton, $20,000 to Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center, Millville,$15,000 to the Thomas A. Edison Media Arts Consortium, Jersey City.
The following received $10,000 grants: Aljira, Inc., Newark, Burlington County College, Pemberton, the Chamber Music Conference and Composers' Forum of the East, Leonia, Opera New Jersey, Princeton, People and Stories Gente y Cuentos, Inc., Trenton, Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company, Fort Lee, Two River Theater Company, Red Bank, Rutgers University's Mason Gross School of the Arts Galleries, New Brunswick, and Playwrights Theatre of New Jersey, Madison.
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