Dear Editor:
There’s a plaque on Monroe Street that identifies the place where Frank Sinatra was born. The building is long gone but, the marker on that sidewalk demonstrates the very real relationship that exists between the physical and the emotional relationship to “place.” This link isn’t confined to buildings where famous actors, writers or politicians once ate breakfast, it exists on every block, every corner and every location where someone put down roots and called the place home.
Those structures, our homes are about more than premium finishes and imported materials, private micro-grids and heated tiles. That thing that beckons us surpasses the dazzle of private micro-grids and automated resiliency features. Familiar structures are also about feelings that retain a very personal kind of nostalgia. They offer us insight, definition and focus. When an address is destroyed and rebuilt, the ground itself continues to summon its lost past structure.
The very buildings and entire blocks that make up “Hoboken’s character” are monuments to the vital force of a real community that included the people who experienced the place where they lived as a woven fabric of memory, ritual, habit and affection. This measure of place has nothing to do with money and everything to do with connection. As buildings in the heart of Hoboken are leveled by policy measures designed to ‘move Hoboken forward’ disregarding any feeling of attachment, the sense of disrespect for our history – our sense of place – is very real and tangible.
That awareness of history embodied in the heart of Hoboken’s low-rise landscape is about the things that money cannot buy. That is to say, there are elements beyond economics and architecture that make a place powerful. It is about home as an entire neighborhood and the neighbors in it, not just the real estate that someone held title to or paid rent on. It is about long-term relationships with people, institutions, traditions and locations. It’s an indefinable magic made up of memories and smells, breezes and blemishes.
The prevailing attitude that appears to be the accepted norm, almost to the exclusion of any other points of view, is that development and gentrification are laws of nature over which we have no control. Attempts to control the remnants of vanishing Hoboken are as useless as trying to reverse the earth’s rotation. Yet, the conditions currently in place, primarily a lack of historic preservation, don’t exist because of some sort of invisible hand, but rather are due to a confluence of actions, or inactions, by humans -some seemingly benign, and some vile and malignant – in which many of us are complicit.
It is time to stop complaining and start demanding that the ongoing destruction of our long-standing “places” cease. The history of Hoboken didn’t start the day that any one individual, group, or income bracket put down roots or began hammering pilings and we all have a responsibility to respect it. To ensure that any “places” in Hoboken remain, historic preservation must take priority seating alongside so-called crisis management or profit margin. It must be the driving force beyond our policy decisions, regulations and rulings and it must start now.
Cheryl Fallick