2023 – You Build, I’ll Shoot (January)
(ignore April 30, 2017 publish date – this was published on February 4, 2023)
I’ve always wondered what I would do with myself in retirement. I have no interest in what most retirees wind up doing, so I was waiting for an old, energy-inefficient light bulb to go off over my head with the answer. Meanwhile, I’m still photographing everything in sight that interests me.
“A-ha”, indeed! It appears that I’ve just answered my own question. I want to do what I’ve always been doing. I love what I do, I’m fairly good at it, I can do it from home and it also gets me outside to walk all over (exercise)…………why would I NOT want to continue with it?
So I will!
As the moderator of the site of the Hackensack city historian for the last 15+ years – something I also used to do for the Bergen County Historical Society site’s forum – I’ve had a strong interest in the way this city has changed over the last century+ and now it’s changing rather drastically once again right in front of me with a plethora of new construction going on all around me, so documenting where I live is the perfect complement to documenting music history for a couple of decades (and I’ve still got a toe or two in that pool).
So this post will be about most of the construction that I photographed in January 2023. I don’t know if that means this will become a monthly thing – I kind of doubt it since I can’t stand summer heat and humidity – but let’s see where this goes.
I’ve picked out 19 shots – 6 from home, the rest not.
FROM HOME
This shows a crane in Hackensack with the World Trade Center in the slightly-hazy background. If you look just below the crane, you’ll see a car and a truck……..that’s Route 80, which goes from here to San Francisco:
These are two shots I took of work being done on the roof of a building on Main St. For you locals, that building used to house the Oritani Theater. The building with the green cupola is the Johnson Public Library:
Any idea what these two odd-looking things are?
They’re cement pumpers. The large cement mixer trucks are parked on the street and this is how they get their payload delivered to every nook-and-cranny of a very large construction site. If you look at the ends of the pumpers, you’ll see a long rubber hose that the workers can aim at specific spots. From here, it appears they’re laying a floor.
The blue pumper’s hose hangs in the air as it’s being positioned:
This pumper’s arc frames its project, old and new residential buildings, the public library’s cupola and part of the building that used to have the movie theater:
This shows a lot of what you saw in the previous pic, plus a different pumper, 2 cranes, a bird in flight (not a crane) and the hazy World Trade Center:
And I took all of these pix from the comfort of my living room.
AROUND TOWN
10 of the 13 “walking around” shots were taken on January 2, so I’ll start with those sequentially.
The project you just saw from home is bordered by 4 streets: Berry, State, Camden and Main, so let’s just call it BSCM.
This image was taken at BSCM and I purposely included the sculpture atop 210 Main – a couple of blocks away. It was previously a bank and is now a residential building:
This PANO is the block-long view of the BSCM project on the B side. Click all PANO images to enlarge and click this one TWICE to fully-enlarge and then scroll laterally. Use your back button to return:
I walked down from 324 Main to 76 Main, where a building had been torn down after a fire in 2015. They’ve finally started on whatever will replace it:
For this PANO, I’m a couple of blocks east of 76 Main and standing in the middle of the Court St Bridge over the Hackensack River, looking north. In the center is a WWII submarine – the USS Ling. It’s been there for 50 years, but will somehow be squeezed out by all the residential projects being built along the length of the river on the Hackensack side, all the way up to the next bridge, which you can see in the distance (this one will also take two clicks to fully-enlarge):
The thing I’m concerned about is illustrated in this picture, also taken from the bridge. You can see many projects in various stages of construction, including the brand new ones closest to the sub that are only up to the second floor:
As is, this is what you see as you cross the Court St Bridge from Bogota – lots of new residential buildings. When the newer ones are completed, it appears that some buildings will be surrounded by others. Who would want to pay exorbitant rents to only see other buildings?
I realize I’m asking this from looking at an incomplete, two-dimensional image, but it just makes you wonder if things are getting a bit too dense in some areas.
Coming off the bridge and making a right onto River St, I managed – despite the fencing – to take 2 PANOs of this recently-begun construction that you saw on the left in the previous PANO (two clicks):
At the first opening I came to, I walked in and took this shot looking back down River St:
The sign caught my eye because it shows an artist’s rendering of the completed project, but right below that, you can see “OPEN 24 HOURS”, “COCKTAILS” and “SALAD BAR”.
A bit incongruous, no?
This sign used to be for the long-standing and much beloved Heritage Diner, which was next to it. The Heritage’s “H” is still on top and some of its offerings are on the bottom. But in-between, the developer slapped on his future building’s image.
That’s fine, but why leave on the lower stuff? It looks idiotic.
Looking across River St in this PANO, guess what’s going to fill that big space between the Hackensack Bus Terminal on the left and the building on the right. Hint: it’s NOT an aviary for the prospective tenants who are already lining up on the wires:
So much for January 2nd.
On January 29, I thought I saw from home that more work may have been done on the BSCM project that might merit an updated PANO, so I walked over there and took 3 unusual shots.
In the first one, it looks as if a piece of equipment had been built around, trapping it. Maybe it’s an A.I. maze:
On the same corner, I backed up onto Main St (when the light was red) and took this PANO shot – unusual because it appears that I unwittingly took it when the light was red in both directions:
This shot also shows you the real distance between the roof-sculptured former bank building on the far left and the street where I took the first shot in this “Around Town” section (far right). In THAT shot, the distance was greatly compressed by the zoom lens to make that building look a lot closer.
And now for the grand finale………
The second shot in this “Around Town” section was a PANO of the entire block on January 2, so I planned to do another PANO on January 29.
As I was about to frame the left-to-right PANO shot, I saw a bicyclist in bright-colored clothing pedaling down the street, moving in the same left-to-right direction as my planned panning motion.
PERFECT!
I had maybe two seconds to make adjustments, but I knew just what to do and re-framed to accommodate him as he went past me. Here’s what I came up with:
Have you ever seen a photo like that before?
And for interrupting my work, it appears that I’ve flattened his front tire.
This was originally a wider photo that actually included a full image of the man behind (to the left of) what you see here, but this image is perfectly balanced without him (he’s actually got 3 right ears in the back end and 3 in the front end………looks pretty balanced to me!).
So I can’t really call this a construction photo in the buildings sense, but it’s definitely a constructed-by-Bob-Leafe image.
I think I like my version of retirement.
You should bring all those photos to the nj historical society and museum to document