Riding Under the PATH Train

We are gliding under the Witt Penn Bridge in Jersey City. There on the north side naked trestles await the next generation bridge. The thunder we hear riding under the PATH train bridge! We are clear soon enough to see the commuter train exit the bridge heading west to Harrison and Newark.

PATH commuter train travels parallel to the Passaic River in northern New Jersey.Anthony Buccino 

How many times have I been on that PATH train while we stopped as the bridges were drawn to let some tall masted ship pass by? From where we stood, sardine-like, in the tin can railcar, we could only ever guess at the holdup outside. How many times have riders looked north from those trains and guessed at the real name of Fraternity Rock rising from the swamps.
Our Hackensack Riverkeeper boat tour is heading south on the Hackensack River. We'll cross Newark Bay and head up the Passaic River to the Route 3 bridge north of our group's Nutley hometown.

Capt. Hugh Carola, just call him Captain Hughie, explains what we pass on the shores: a power plant here, a peak-power plant there, a jet-engine power plant there, an abandoned power plant yonder.

Continue Reading

This Seat Taken? Notes of a Hapless Commuter

This Seat Taken? Notes of a Hapless Commuter
By Anthony Buccino

If you ever commuted to work, you'll enjoy your ride reading Anthony Buccino's latest collection "This Seat Taken? Notes of a HaplessCommuter" about the joys and follies of getting to and from work in the city using public transit.

Buccino's bus and rail commuting tales and observations are collected in this new 224-page book which is available in print, on Amazon and Nook.

Buccino spent 12 years editing business news copy at Dow Jones & Co. for the Ticker, NewsPlus and The Wall Street Journal professional web pages in Jersey City and later at the NewsCorp building in the Times Square district of mid-town Manhattan.

For his first year working in Jersey City, Buccino actually drove the 12 miles each way to work and home. An average commute would take 20 minutes to reach the city and at least another 20 minutes to cross the city to his parking lot near the Hudson River. It wasn't long before the crosstown traffic and the monthly parking fee, nearly enough for a car payment, persuaded the author to use mass transportation to get to work for the first time ever.

For 11 of those dozen years, he rode public transportation including NJ Transit buses, Newark City Subway, Port Authority Trans Hudson's PATH trains, the occasional NYC subway and DeCamp buses.

For five years, Buccino wrote about commuting and transit in metro New York-New Jersey for NJ.com. His transit blog on NJ.com earned the New Jersey Society of Professional Journalists Excellence in Journalism award. Many of those blurbs are gathered in this collection.

Paying to park, a day earlier

Back in the day when some of these parking lots were free to park in, you could simply buy your pass and go. Now, you have to buy a parking space, too, for the month and hope it's still there when you show up.

The solution to the parking space scrim is to make the monthly passes available a day earlier so that the people who don't read these press releases will be surprised when they can't get a space. Perhaps the ticket machine knows how many parking spots it can sell?

Continue reading

***************
Copyright © 2008 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved. Photos and content may not be used for commercial purposes without written permission.

Two New Poetry Collections

VOICES ON THE BUS by Anthony Buccino, a new collection of poetry about commuting in northern New Jersey is now available in print or for download.

ONE MORNING IN JERSEY CITY by Anthony Buccino, a new collection of poetry written in and about Jersey City, the Hudson River, lower Manhattan, seagulls and pigeons is now available in print or for download.

Click here for more information on either book, and to read a preview.

Copyright © 2008 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved. Content may not be used for commercial purposes without written permission.

A Walk Through Newark, N.J.

Professor Clement Price conducted a mini-tour of the historic old downtown of Newark. The professor, who has been on the Rutgers staff since the late 1960s, provided personal insight into the changes and future of one of America's earliest cities.

Washington in Washington Park

NJIT

Tour starting point, near Paul Robison Student Center, Rutgers-Newark

Building advertising, Newark, N.J.

Professor Price points out the effect of daylight saving time on the clock at Rutgers Law School.

Copyright © 2006 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved.

Crabgrass Frontier : The Suburbanization of the United States by Kenneth T. Jackson

God Lives in the Suburbs by John Chervokas

Clement Alexander Price, Ph.D.:
The Afro-American community of Newark, 1917-1947: A social history. Photocopy

Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance (Facts on File Library of American History)

Freedom Not Far Distant: A Documentary History of Afro-Americans in New Jersey

Small Towns, Black Lives: African American Communities in Southern New Jersey

Many Voices, Many Opportunities: Cultural Pluralism & American Arts Policy

BOOKS ABOUT NEWARK, N.J.
Newark: The Golden Age (Postcard History Series) By Jean-Rae Turner, Richard T. Koles, and Charles F. Cummings

Newark, NJ (Images of America Series) By Jean-Rae Turner, Richard T. Koles May not be available through Amazon.

Newark New Jersey (The Making of America Series) By Jean-Rae Turner, Richard T. Koles

Newark's Little Italy: The Vanished First Ward By Michael Immerso

No Easy Walk: Newark, 1980-1993 (Visual Studies) By Helen M. Stummer

Swing City: Newark Nightlife, 1925-50 By Barbara J. Kukla

The Ballantine House and the Decorative Arts Galleries at the Newark Museum By Ulysses G. Dietz

A real history of Newark and Newarkers (Unknown Binding) By Thomas Fleming

Baseball in Newark (Images of Baseball) By Robert Cvornyek

Book list compiled by Uncle Tonoose.

PATH Car Away From Ninevah III

Bare Naked Beach

Some people get upset riding backwards while traveling, say on the lightrail, the train, or a streetcar to St. Charles.

It seems that things move away - probably evokes the feeling of falling off a high cliff and not landing until the next stop.

It's odd to see the sun set in the east. But we're so grateful to be on the lightrail heading home, many of us scurried en masse down three flights of stairs to get on this car.

Facing backwards, looking out the window, see the brown leaves of the dying weeds, the buzz cut of the tree limbs that dog the catinery lines.

This subway car is full of people with tales to tell. They chatter away with different accents, speaking in pairs about who knows what.

The closer this car gets to the next bus departure time, the slower this car percolates.

This would be the night I sit next to the middle linebacker who spent the day riding a horse.



At Branch Brook Station, we see the tall building a half block away to the north. A huge chunk of the brick siding has fallen away.

Our bus driver, #31600 on the 93H points out the building, so we'll have something to talk about when we get home to our families.

Copyright © 2005 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved. Content may not be used for commercial purposes without written permission. Updated May 2008

Support this web site, shop at Amazon through this link, thanks

74 Bus - 6:38 to Paterson

Here I am, a mild mannered reporter for an obscure web log named after a TV character half the people reading blogs never heard of since the show aired about 40 years ago. A week like this one makes you wish you had a larger audience, no?Three times in one September week, the 6:38 NJ Transit 74 Paterson bus pulled out on me after I'd exited the Newark City Subway and crossed the platform.

That's 3 of 5 times in one week the driver of the 6:38 bus took off when I was close enough to the door to spit on him … If I had any spit left.

The first time I was within spitting distance of the bus door when it closed and pulled away.

The second time I had crossed the station and was within ten feet when he closed the door and pulled away.

And the third time I saw the empty bus pull up as I was crossing the platform, the doors opened and no one got on or off. As I got closer, the doors closed and the driver pulled off.

This occurrence seems to have stepped up in the past few weeks. I noticed three specific times in one week, but I began to wonder how many other times, and believe me, there were other times this happened.

You can't complain to the station manager - there's only a guy in the booth between the light rail ramps and he says he has nothing to do with the buses. He said you have to go to Grove Street to find a supervisor.

Nobody's in charge and nobody cares. That's the perception. The bus drivers want to drive empty buses.

While Tom Cruise's Maverick character had a better shot at TOP GUN than I'll have of being a roving reporter for a large national newspaper based near Wall Street, I can have my say right here in this obscure little blog.

NJ Transit - News Item: Hiring Spies

I'm thinking of going into the spy business. Oh, what tales I'd tell!


Copyright © 2005 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved. Content may not be used for commercial purposes without written permission. Updated May 2008

Support this web site, shop at Amazon through this link, thanks

Platform H (Wednesday PM Commute I )

Going home I got the CD player to work. Sort of. It only played one song over & over. And only in one ear. If I tilted my head like I was thinking real hard, I could hear El Paso in stereo.

But El Paso was like the flashback music cue …
In 1961 I was the fastest gun in Belleville, N.J.
It ain't boasting if it's true.

Back in the day who would have challenged me and my two six guns?

My cousins Tommy & Bobby next door? They wore six guns over their PJs!

My cousin Billy Boy, that fan of Yancy Derringer? Not a chance. (I thought he lived near Montana in Rutana States and went to Styretowne to shop, but that's a local joke.)

I could act out the entire El Paso song by Marty Robbins. We got the 45 at Prosperi's Market on Bloomfield Avenue in Newark. It had that famous picture of Marty in mid-draw.

The famous Robbins

I’d start out as a hardened cowboy sitting there as “Felina would whirl.”

Then I’d be the angry cowboy who shot the “dashing and daring” young cowboy to prove my feelings for the “Mexican maiden.”

Then I’d hop on the arm of a big fat armchair and gallop off “to the badlands of New Mexico.”

But I’d be weak, like the cowboy in the song, pining away for Rosa’s cantina and Felina. I’d ride hard back to “the hill overlooking El Paso.”

I’d whup that chair to a froth, the hooves to the quick and head for Felina until I was surprised by “five mounted cowboys” and then “a dozen or more.”

I made a lot of noise firing my six-guns over the back of the couch into the big mirror at the men keeping me from Felina.

Some times I was reloading when I felt that “deep burning pain in my side.” I clutched myself and tried to stay on the arm of the armchair.

I could feel myself getting weaker, like all the TV cowboys did.

A wince and I struggled against the bullet “deep in my chest.”

Off the davenport now, the room getting dark, my pistols out of reach, “from out of nowhere Felina has found me…”

Then, that mushy part, “One little kiss, then Felina, good-bye.”

And with that I slumped back spread eagle on the rug, in front of our Motorola TV. Some times I was half-slumped in the toy box.

The song played over and over. In one ear mostly.

The blond and her mother, or maybe a best-friend, stood in front of me. The blond would have won ‘best looking on the crowded PATH car’ if there were a contest.

Her dirty-blond hair straight as an arrow & held in place by a wispy strand. Not a hair was out of place. She looked like she could have been a cheerleader not too long ago.

And when she carelessly ran her fingers through her hair it seemed like a Clairol commercial with Farah Fawcett or one of Charlie’s other angels.

Her pink top was as lightly colored as her rich deep ruby lips were dark. Her bling-bling and baubles were in all the right places, as far as I could see.

If she saw me writing she acted coy. If she saw how I wrote this she tried to act like she didn’t care.

I clung to the upright post and scribbled this, of course, in the hope I’d be able to read it later.

If the blond even looked at me, I probably looked like a drunk man scribbling nasty things to his ex-wife.

There, in the distance, the lights of Bears stadium and good old Platform H.

For me, anyway, H is halfway home "for one little kiss ..."

Copyright © 2005 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved. Content may not be used for commercial purposes without written permission. Updated May 2008

Support this web site, shop at Amazon through this link, thanks
Ballads & Trail Songs

Gunfighter Ballads & Trail Songs

Twin-Music Lyrics - El Paso

Bob Dylan - Desire

Romance In Durango

Walkman

Busy as Bamberger's on a Saturday Morning

When she was at wit's end with a million things to do, Mom said she was, "Busier than Bamberger's on Saturday morning!" and I knew to go away for a while.

The best part of going to Bamberger's for my back-to-school clothes was when Mom would buy me a hot dog and an orangeade at the stand next to the escalator in the basement. There was a sign that said: We don't boil the flavor out of our hot dogs

I can still remember the giant miniature circus displays they had and you got to look through a glass to see them. Awesome. I think it alternated with a giant train set up (sort of like the set Gomez Addams would blow up on the TV show.)

All I Want For Christmas ...


I'm sure all my Santa pictures were taken with the Bam's Santa. The lines were well recreated in Jean Shepherd's "Christmas Story." We kids wanted to tell the big scary Santa what we wanted for Christmas without forgetting anything or crying and our Moms just wanted to get the picture to send to the relatives.

Alas, Newark has changed in the past 40-plus years. So have I. And even my beloved Bamberger's is gone.

DISCLOSURE
Coincidence alert: I worked in the advertising department at the Newark Bamberger's store in 1984. I wanted to know if they still had the circus and train displays set up on a hidden floor - like in an episode of the Twilight Zone. I heard about Mahogany Row where the big shots worked, but I never got to see the circus set up or the train display.

See Also:
A Father's Place - An Eclectic Collection: Seventh Floor

Copyright © 2005 by Anthony Buccino, all rights reserved. Content may not be used for commercial purposes without written permission. Updated May 2008

Support this web site, shop at Amazon through this link, thanks