Founded 1983: Liberal Mindset; Conservative Morality

March 24, 2026

The Failed City: I Wrote a Book About What We Bury

I have been staring at a patch of asphalt in Jersey City for thirteen years. That is not a figure of speech. I mean that in late September 2013, I watched a road crew roll fresh blacktop over 150-year-old granite cobblestones on Baldwin Avenue in the Heights, and the image has not released me since. The cobblestones were ballast stones, carried across the Atlantic Ocean in the holds of empty cargo ships and dumped on American docks because the ships needed the weight for the crossing and needed to shed it to load American exports for the return trip. Those stones were repurposed as paving. They became streets. They outlasted the ships, the shipping companies, the trade routes, the empires that commissioned them. And in 2013, a man in a road roller buried them under asphalt because, as he told me with the patience of someone explaining gravity, cobblestones eat up tires.

Continue reading → The Failed City: I Wrote a Book About What We Bury

September 30, 2013

Chasing Cobblestones: Underfoot and Smothered in Asphalt in the Jersey City Heights

When I was on my recent Red Squares walking tour of Jersey City, I happened upon some street construction that gave me a chance for an aesthetic and professional mulligan: Exposed cobblestones on their way to disappearing again for three decades!

I whipped out my new iPhone 5S and awkwardly began taking photographs to make up for a previously lost opportunity articulated here in a comments stream from two months ago:

I did not take photos of the cobblestones! Gah! I was always mesmerized by them and felt such sadness that the beauty would soon be covered up. I’ll have to look for another street in the area to document! …

Our cobblestones were like square granite bricks and they were put in the street end down — creating a long-lasting, and deep stone that would never wear away. …

I only know the cobblestones here are so massive because I tried to dig one out to keep! I couldn’t do it. Too massive. Too heavy. Too deeply seated in 1600 soil! …

They just covered up the old cobblestones again. They’ll be hidden for the next 30 years until they re-pave it all again.

Here we go! Caught, in situ, exposed cobblestones half-dead under hot, new, asphalt — and a burning morning sun — but now also half-alive for forever and a half-life, exposed, and memorialized here in this article!