2023 – One Love………Right Across The Street!

On April 30, 2017 - Uncategorized

……………………………………………….(ignore April 30, 2017 publish date – this was published on July 4, 2023)

After making two posts last Friday, I was exhausted. Double-duty researching, scanning and writing takes its toll.

“No more for a while.”

Then I read Friday’s local newspaper (click to enlarge):

“This is happening tonight?” Oy!

The good news was that Anderson Park is right across the street from where I live. Piece of cake………

I went over there at about 5:30pm to scout it out and take the “before” pix of the street signs and their covered additions:

The park was starting to fill up, so I shot a couple of quick video snippets to include some of the DJ’s music:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXNUdl-CzEw

The festivities started with some welcoming remarks by some of the representatives of various Jamaican organizations (I apologize for not knowing their names).

Here’s the scene as four of them spoke (click the first two to enlarge a bit):

Suddenly, a familiar face spotted me……….it was Hackensack Mayor John Labrosse:

He was the next speaker:

If I heard correctly, I think he was introduced as “Mayor Ambrose”.

John presents the formal declaration to Jamaican Organization of New Jersey president Nahshon Bolton:

Here is the City Council’s resolution of May 23, 2023 that commemoratively renames the one-block stretch of Anderson St – the northern border of the park – as “One Love Way”:

This is 5 minutes of a speech, an invocation and a few words from “Mayor Ambrose”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuov_igcerQ

The group shot:

There were a couple of other speakers, including someone whose name I WAS familiar with – the Reverend Gregory Jackson, the former senior pastor of the Mt. Olive Baptist Church of Hackensack:

OK – we’re done with the podium pix.

I see the Mayor has met some lovely new friends:

BTW – if you look behind the head of the woman on the right, you can see the building I live on top of……….literally across the street.

One last interesting footnote regarding the woman on the right:

This is a very wide panoramic shot – close to 180º – of almost everyone in Anderson Park (click twice to REALLY enlarge and then start scrolling side to side):

I’ve run out of things to photograph and I’ve now been waiting nearly two hours for the shot of the day: the big street-sign unveiling (actually TWO of them on the NE and NW corners).

The first one (Anderson St and Union St – my street) was the biggie. I knew that at some point, everyone would be directed to head on over to that corner.

Here’s where pre-event research comes in handy. I had combined where the best light on the signs would be with where the primary participants would be standing and facing and was already camped out on that spot when the crowd was directed there.

It paid off.

Pre-unveiling remarks by Nahshon Bolton:

The unveiling:

THE shot of the event:

If I took only this shot and no others, I’d be thrilled. Everyone’s face is visible and happy (except the photographer in the street) and all street sign names are clear.

Time for the second(ary) unveiling. I had immediately started to hustle down the street, when I suddenly turned around, noticed the crowd behind me and snapped a quickie: