Dear Editor:
A tide that came in some four decades ago is rushing out and pulling with it the last bit of Hoboken’s middle-class soul. Those that haven’t been pushed out still call their neighborhood home, but know that it’s no longer intended for them. Surrounded by shallow and narrowly focused ideas for change that target others, there is a distinct loss of place, or outright displacement, for many of Hoboken’s citizens. There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home.
The past is stigmatized, the present ignored while everyone hums to the tune of ‘change is inevitable,’ ‘change is working,’ ‘change is good.’
Would it really be so terrible if we took a moment and just stood still?
Is all change good? Or is it simply the refrain in someone else’s agenda, someone else’s song. The chorus maintains it is reasonable for us to have to leave our homes in order to make room for others simply because the town grew wealthy around us. That other agenda insists that there is no profit in the remnants of our history beyond the land that it sits on. It’s time to package anything that remains in picture book and to be done with it.
Growing, pushing, smashing, crushing, it’s time to make room for more; the inevitable more. Attracting, redesigning, removing, erasing – down the block, across the street or even next door. The bell continues to toll as one by one another socio-economic rung vanishes from the place that is Hoboken. Blink, and another house, shop or friend is gone. The tide rushes out and all that remains is a lump in our throat.
Cheryl Fallick