Summer Interludes
Startling sidewalk-bound images are defining my clock-slowed summer days as I walk around and across Jersey City’s densely-populated, construction-frenzied McGinley Square, Bergen Square, Journal Square, West Side, Marion, Hilltop, Five Corners, Jersey City Heights, The Junction, Bergen Hill, Lafayette, Greenville, West Bergen, Dogpatch and Downtown residential, commercial and industrial districts.
Most local landmarks and environmental landscape elements are intimately close and deeply meaningful to me — I’ve met them at every climb and turn of my youth, adulthood and middle-age, having lived in Jersey City for well over 50 years — and some are entirely new, as if they’ve instantly appeared without forewarning and without asking.
These architectural apparitions are, increasingly, suddenly there and suddenly actual — sometimes under the effects of lingering heat domes, sometimes in the rapture of quick-passing, humidity-diminishing rain storms — and the days going into August defy my own chronic invisibilities.
- John Gomez, Summer 2024, Jersey City
