The Square Outlived the Paper

I live in a tower named for a square named for a newspaper. My building is called Journal Squared, three glass sections rising beside the Journal Square PATH station in Jersey City, one of the busiest stations in the system. The square below is Journal Square, which the city created in 1923. The newspaper was the Jersey Journal, which ceased publication on February 1, 2025, at the age of 157. Two of those three things still exist. The paper is not one of them.

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Recovering from Hurricane Sandy in Jersey City

Monday night, at 11:00 pm sharp in Jersey City, New Jersey, the lights went out and stayed off until last night at 7:43pm.  That’s three days without power or heat.  Hurricane Sandy was a massively nasty beast, and we’re just now starting the recovery process.  We are hungry and scavenging for food.  Supermarkets are closed.  Few places have power.

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Did I Almost Blow Off My Left Arm in the Journal Square PATH Station?

There I was last week, all fresh and pressed and ready to teach my ASL course at CUNY when I stepped onto the 33rd Street PATH train at Journal Square and found a red, nylon, lunch bag — with a bottle of water hanging onto it from a mesh pouch on the outside — hiding under the train seat.

I immediately had a flashback to my childhood and wanting to help someone — and not to the unassailable advertising posted all over the PATH stations and television warning us that if you see an unattended bag, you need to immediately report it to the PATH authorities.  Since I had entered the first car, the engineer exited her locked control booth for a shift change, and I told her I found a bag on the floor.

She ignored me and walked off the train.

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Ten Eighty-Six

Here is a gift.

Let us know if it explodes.

Are Port Authority Trinkets Actually Disguised Terror Alerts?

Call me suspicious, but when I ride the PATH train system between New Jersey and New York and I see Port Authority workers handing out free trinkets again — I begin to wonder if these “Stay Alert!” free gifts are really a new terror threat warning system in disguise.  Last week was a trinkets bounty.

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PATH Behavior Semiotics

When the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey — PATH — are forced to create cartoon posters inside their trains to train riders how to behave in public, we begin to wonder how and why we became such a debased society in need of such basic correction.

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Memeing a Copper Moon

We experienced a total lunar eclipse last night — and this morning at 6:50am Eastern — Janna took this image with her iPhone of a dying moon, still shining in its ghostly, copper, glory, as it falls into the horizon at the Journal Square PATH train station in Jersey City, New Jersey. The moon, if you can’t see it, is dipping right below the traffic lights in the lower center of the image.

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