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Monday, January 15, 2007

The Changing Face Of New Jersey


NEW JERSEY / ETHNIC MIGRATION & SOCIO-ECONOMICS CHANGING THE FACE OF MANY NEW JERSEY TOWNS


Star-ledger



"New Jersey has always been an ever-changing state, but the most recent chapter of this cycle is a little different," said Clement Price, a professor of history at Rutgers-Newark with a special interest in race and race relations. "For the first time, New Jersey seems to be on a path where it will no longer be a predominantly white state."



The Changing Face Of New Jersey


The ethnic and racial makeup of towns large and small is shifting rapidly, and in some cases dramatically.



~ BY ROBERT GEBELOFF AND MARY JO PATTERSON
Star-Ledger Staff


New Jersey is changing faster than ever, in more places than ever before.

It can be seen in the faces of children crowding Chinese language classes in an affluent suburb. Or at a Colombian lunch counter in a former Morris County mining town. Or in the movement of African-American city dwellers to once segregated subdivisions.

During the last few years, the ethnic communities that make up New Jersey have been rearranging themselves so quickly that entire neighborhoods or towns have acquired a new look or language, often in less time than it takes for a generation of students to go through grammar school.

The 2000 Census, the last major survey of New Jersey's ethnic and racial makeup, is more than a half-decade old and already dated.

To get a clearer picture of the state's radically shifting demographics, The Star-Ledger analyzed recent school enrollment data and found whites declining in number in all but the wealthiest communities; Hispanics replacing African-American families in some of the poorer cities; blacks moving in large numbers into middle-class towns; and Asians establishing new enclaves all over.

Immigration, meanwhile, once confined largely to the cities, is reshaping towns across the state.

"New Jersey has always been an ever-changing state, but the most recent chapter of this cycle is a little different," said Clement Price, a professor of history at Rutgers-Newark with a special interest in race and race relations. "For the first time, New Jersey seems to be on a path where it will no longer be a predominantly white state."

The signs are often obvious. Parsippany, for example, is home to two Hindu temples (and is about to get two more). Bodegas and other Hispanic-oriented shops seem to be sprouting everywhere in Belmar. In many traditionally white towns, Protestant churches with shrinking memberships are often opting to lease space to dynamic immigrant congregations.

Now and then over the past year, demographic change has stirred conflict. In Bogota, a flap arose over a Spanish-language billboard advertising fast food. In Morristown, the rights of day laborers to congregate in the street became a live-wire issue. In Edison, tensions between the growing Asian population and the town's mainly white police force exploded into a near-riot.

In most towns though, the impact is much more subtle.

Over the next four days, The Star-Ledger will examine rapidly diversifying communities that have flown mostly below the radar: tiny Wharton Borough in Morris County, home to many new Hispanic immigrants; sprawling West Orange, in Essex County, which has experienced a surge of black and Hispanic school enrollment; booming Montgomery Township in Somerset, suddenly a dream destination for Asian families; and Union Township, a once-segregated suburb in Union County where race no longer dictates where you live.

Unlike the Census, which is taken only once a decade, the racial and ethnic backgrounds of New Jersey's 1.4 million public school students are collected each year. While those numbers may not exactly mirror a town's population as a whole, demographers believe they indicate where a town is headed, since young families with children are often at the core of community life.

And in some towns, the changes this decade have been dramatic.

Between 2000 and 2006, nearly 100 of 623 New Jersey school districts for which enrollment data was available saw the percentage of minority students rise by at least 10 percentage points, the analysis showed.

Overall, 85 percent of the state's school enrollment growth can be attributed to Hispanic and Asian students. White enrollment increased in only a handful of towns, mostly islands of wealth such as Kinnelon Borough in Morris County, or Rumson in Monmouth, where few blacks or Hispanics live.

By combing through the last six years of school enrollment data, collected by districts every fall and reported to the N.J. Department of Education, The Star-Ledger found:

Since the start of this decade, more than 300 school districts have lost white enrollment, while 28 districts, in 13 counties, have gone from white-majority to white-minority. The overall makeup of the student body is now less than half white in 96 districts, or about 1 in 6.

  • Latino enrollment is up in six out of seven districts statewide since 2000, with 50 districts having seen an increase of 10 or more percent in Latino students.

  • The growth in the number of Asian students has been most pronounced in New Jersey's wealthiest districts. At the start of the decade, 1 in 11 students in affluent towns was Asian; today, the number is 1 in 8.

  • Black enrollment has declined in the state's poorest school districts and risen in the suburbs. Many of those same suburbs are simultaneously losing whites.

  • Black enrollment has declined in the state's poorest school districts and risen in the suburbs. Many of those same suburbs are simultaneously losing whites.

"In the '50s and '60s, the suburbs were a way people saw to shield themselves from diversity," said Eric Oliver, a political scientist at the University of Chicago. "With the diversification of the suburbs, you're going to see these issues coming to the fore again."

Maria Guareno was a physical therapist who lived a comfortable married life in Colombia, with a house and pool and hired help to fix the family's meals. But when her marriage ended in divorce, she decided to seek a better economic future in the United States.

She and her two children landed in Wharton, where a cousin already lived. Maria eventually remarried; her new husband, Rafael, is a construction worker originally from the Dominican Republic.

She ended up renting a three-bedroom apartment in a massive three-family home built a century ago for railroad workers. When she first arrived in Wharton seven years ago, there weren't nearly as many immigrant families; now, just about all of her neighbors are from abroad.

Her daughter, Paola, is a senior at Morris Hills High School. A thoughtful 17-year-old, Paola plans to go to college, where she hopes to study psychology or criminology. She said she likes school, but often feels socially isolated.

"I don't fit in with the white kids because I'm Spanish, but I don't fit in with a lot of the Spanish kids because I speak English," she said.

The Guarenos said they haven't faced any overt discrimination in Wharton, where Latino school enrollment has soared 75 percent since 2000. However, like other recent immigrants, Paola said she sometimes senses the distrustful stares of store merchants and non-Latino neighbors.

Many other towns -- poor and middle-class alike -- are experiencing a huge influx of Hispanic families. They include Red Bank, Freehold, Belmar, New Brunswick, Plainfield and Belleville.

In three of these towns -- Red Bank, New Brunswick and Plainfield -- Hispanic children are actually replacing the black population in the schools, enrollment data show.

They are people like Roger Smith, whose family moved from Newark to Union Township in 2002. His daughter was 3 at the time.

"I grew up in Newark, in the Central Ward," said Smith, 54, a youth worker for a nonprofit agency in Essex County. "The education I got growing up wasn't the best. That's why we moved to Union."

Smith said he started his house search in Maplewood, and "bumped into Union by mistake." The two towns adjoin. Smith liked like the look and feel of the place.

"I wanted a multiracial community," he said. "In Union , everybody is getting along with each other. Neighbors talk to each other. You won't find neighborhoods dominated by one ethnic group any more. Them days are winding down."

His daughter, meanwhile, is a second-grader at Union's Hannah Caldwell Elementary School. Smith said he was "very pleased, at this point" with her progress.

"My daughter's class has Indians, Brazilians, Africans, African-Americans," Smith said. "It's an amazing sight to see, and the best part is, you see them all getting along with each other."

Asians, meanwhile, are transforming many towns, especially in Central Jersey. Among 30 school districts reporting a significant increase in Asians since 2000 were South Brunswick, Montgomery, Edison, Monroe, Carteret and Parsippany.

While the Asian population is increasing everywhere, it is growing fastest in the state's wealthiest towns. Affluent Montgomery in Somerset County, for example, has attracted a sizable population of Chinese and Indian families in recent years.

"A lot of Asian people live in Pike Run," a huge new development built on farmland in the northern end of town, said Cindy Cen, a Montgomery real estate agent who was born in China. "They like that the houses are new, the town has good schools, and it's a good commute. There's also a Chinese supermarket in South Brunswick. Life is very easy in Montgomery."

At the start of this decade, northern New Jersey was one of the most diverse, yet one of the most segregated, regions of the country, according to demographic studies.

As it becomes even more diverse, sociologists and others are watching to see if it becomes more integrated residentially -- or whether segregation persists.

"If you ask most Americans if they embrace the idea of racial equality, they say, 'No problem,'" said Oliver, the University of Chicago professor. "But if you look at the reality of where people live, it's still a highly segregated country."

One of the biggest unknowns is how Latino immigrants will be assimilated, he said.

"This is a real interesting question," he said. "(Some people ask) 'Why don't they participate in our parades?' They don't feel they are members of the community yet."

Douglas Massey, a Princeton University sociologist who has written extensively about race, thinks skin color will prove key.

He believes light-skinned Latinos will follow the pattern of European groups and quickly assimilate. For dark-skinned Latinos, it will be more problematic, he predicted.

"The way most groups have moved up over time is taking one step up the economic ladder, and translating that into a step up the residential ladder," Massey said.

"African-Americans have a much harder time translating income gains into residential gains that would later translate into further mobility," he said.

Hispanics who do not have legal status here will also have problems melting into the culture, according to Massey.

Mexicans, in particular, may encounter hostility because of public rhetoric that has "racially demonized them" -- including the U.S. government's plan to build a 700-mile fence between the United States and Mexico, Massey said.

For decades, many social scientists and the media have accepted the idea that, once the share of minority residents in a neighborhood reaches a certain critical mass, the neighborhood "tips" and whites leave.

The concept was introduced in 1957 by Martin Grodzins, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, who wrote that a very particular threshold of minorities precipitated white flight from a neighborhood.

"White residents, who will tolerate a few Negroes as neighbors, either willingly or unwillingly, begin to move out when the proportion of Negroes in the neighborhood or apartment building passes a certain critical point," he wrote. "This 'tip point' varies from city to city. Once it is exceeded, they will no longer stay among Negro neighbors."

In 1972, Thomas Schelling, an economist at the University of Maryland, wrote about tipping in a chapter of a book on neighborhood racial segregation. He also argued that whites flee a neighborhood in large numbers once a threshold is reached.

In recent years researchers have tested the validity of the theory, using detailed Census tract information available since 1970.

Their conclusions differ.

Neighborhoods -- and schools -- do indeed "tip" when minorities comprise a certain share of the populations, according to one recent study. Actual tipping points differ according to neighborhood, but center around 13 percent, the study said.

Still, tipping points of 25 or 30 percent are "not uncommon" and some racially tolerant neighborhoods may never tip, said Jesse Rothstein, one of the study's co-authors and an economics professor at Princeton University.

Rothstein and his colleagues found tipping took place irrespective of the socioeconomic status of minority residents. "We put in different measures of class and income, to see if they drove race out of the model. They never did," he said.

The study lumped together all nonwhites, but whites may actually react differently to different racial groups, Rothstein said.

"It's hard to get precision on that," he said, as widespread Asian and Hispanic immigration is relatively new in many parts of the country.

Another scholar came to a different conclusion.

While many urban American neighborhoods did go from mostly white to mostly minority from 1970 to 2000, the main factor was residents' desire to leave cities and old suburbs for newer suburbs, not tipping, according to William Easterly, a New York University economist.

Racially mixed neighborhoods, with a sizable white minority, can remain stable, he wrote.

History teaches that immigrants and minority groups have found a mixed reception in this country, says Price, the Rutgers professor.

"We've reacted sometimes in a democratic way, and oftentimes we have not," he said. "Blacks and browns were run out of town, and some Europeans such as Jews and Italians had to work to be seen as 'white,'" Price said.

Whether Latinos will also be perceived as whites remains to be seen, he said.

Price, who is African-American, grew up in Washington, D.C., during the 1950s. When he was 9, his family moved from a mostly black neighborhood to a mostly white area of the city, Brookland. By the time he was 16 or 17, he said, most of the whites had left.

While the civil rights movement and its ripple effect have undermined the racism of that era, Price said, a form of white flight based on concerns about property values and stability remains.

"One of the privileges of whiteness has always been to move on," he said.





Robert Gebeloff may be reached at rgebeloff@starledger.com or (973) 392-1753; Mary Jo Patterson at mpatterson@starledger.com or (973) 392-4215.

©2007 New Jersey On-Line LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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Friday, January 05, 2007

Wayne Township Burglaries Frazzle Residents


WAYNE TOWNSHIP / TOWNSHIP BURGLARIES FRAZZLE RESIDENTS


CBS-TV2



Wayne Police Dectective Captain Paul Ireland said, "It's very possible whoever it was, was checking door knobs if different homes, trying to find one that was unlocked and then went into them."



Cat Burglar On The Prowl In N.J.

Police Warn Residents In Wayne To Be Careful

Image

John Slattery
Reporting

(CBS) WAYNE, N.J. Police in Wayne, NJ are urging residents to make sure their homes and parked cars are securely locked, after two homes were burglarized in the early morning hours of Wednesday.

One of the homes is on Heights Road where Tanya Kellstrom lives with her husband and children. She said, "It was quite scary." But she didn't know her home and car were entered until after it was over.

Same thing a half-mile away on Nellis Drive where Omar Sayyed lives with his family. "My mom and my sister were very scared. I'm not the kind of person who gets frazzled."

Wayne Police Dectective Captain Paul Ireland said, "It's very possible whoever it was, was checking door knobs if different homes, trying to find one that was unlocked and then went into them."

At the home on Nellis Drive, one of the garage doors was open, which police say was an invitation for someone to try the inside door. It was unlocked, and Omar Sayyed said whoever it was went right for an unoccupied, first floor bedroom.

He explained, "They really quickly went for my mom 's purse and money. They took the entire purse and some jewelry out of the drawers."

At the home on Heights Road, it was a side door that opened into an office, where Tanya Kellstrom, said the loss ranged into the thousands of dollars.

"Three computers, a cell phone, a leather jacket, a list of things ... We were asleep or we were up and just didn't hear 'em," she said.

Also a number of cars in the area were entered and valuables taken.

Police dusted for prints but came up with nothing. The houses and the cars that were hit all had the doors unlocked.

Anyone with information is asked to call the Wayne detective bureau at 973-633-3530.



(© MMVII, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)

All logos, trademarks and postings on this site are property of their respective owner(s).



Topix.net



"They really quickly went for my mom 's purse and money. They took the entire purse and some jewelry out of the drawers."



Cat Burglar On The Prowl In N.J.

wcbstv.com






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Saturday, December 23, 2006

The People In Your Neighborhood


LITTLE FALLS - PASSAIC COUNTY- WAYNE TOWNSHIP / REFLECTIONS ON LIFE IN NORTH JERSEY NOT TOO LONG AGO



AShley Richards

Ashley Richards




Growing up in Little Falls, New Jersey, just 30 minutes outside of the city (New York City - is there any other?) it felt very much like a small town at times. Everyone pretty much knew everyone else, or you at least knew of everyone else.

Summers meant spending the day at the pool, and by fall it was time for full days of school. So the weekends were spent with the more cautious older kids who never ventured into Mean-Green land.



The People in Your Neighbourhood


In Mountain View there are characters I see on a regular basis. The homeless man that dances with an invisible partner. The rotund bearded man who wears a kilt and leather wide-brimmed hat and waits for the bus to get to his high-tech job. (Yes, he’s in high-tech; I’ve seen him waiting to go home in front of a Mountain View company.) However, the characters from my childhood hold more magic for some reason.

Pete And RePete

Growing up in Little Falls, New Jersey, just 30 minutes outside of the city (New York City - is there any other?) it felt very much like a small town at times. Everyone pretty much knew everyone else, or you at least knew of everyone else.

Two characters everyone knew were the twins that we would see walking around town together all the time. We called them Pete and RePete. I have no idea if one of them was even called Pete. That is what we called them. And their names were passed from one generation of children to the next.

In my memory they’re walking down Main Street wearing dark grey work pants and dark grey jackets (always pressed), carrying lunch pails or a book (it was something), brown short-cropped hair, and horn rimmed glasses. They were completely synchronous - walked in step, swaying their arms at the same pace. They seemed to have the same internal beat - their hearts probably had beat at the same rate since they were in utero and everything else just fell into place. Seemingly, they were inseparable and one-in-the-same.

Riding through town in the backseat of my parent’s sky blue Chevy Caprice, I’d do some Pete/RePete spotting. It was a little treat to watch them in their little world. It meant my world was as it should be with the reassuring consistency of Pete and RePete walking to and from work together. (I had no idea where they were going, but as they were adults they must have been on their way to work or back home from it. That’s what adults do.) And yet, I always found myself asking what would it be like to always have another person with you - never being alone? If one died, how would the other survive if he’s never been alone in his entire life?

Over the years, white streaks appeared on the sides of their heads. They seemed to do aging synchronously too. Slowly I saw less and less of them. Did they retire? Or was it as I grew older my daily route changed and theirs didn’t? I don’t know what happened to them. Did they ever know we called them Pete and Re-Pete? They must have.

Mr. Mean-Green

Another character lived on my street. We called him Mr. Mean-Green. He was probably more a neighbourhood character, rather than a town character. He was obsessed with his lawn and garden, and would stand guard over it while sitting on his front porch. If we got an inch too close to his front lawn, he would glare. God forbid we ever stepped on that lawn. Boy, would we get yelled at, or worse yet he’d talk to our parents. We wouldn’t even dare bring a dog anywhere near that lawn. They had small terriers, but they never pooped on that lawn. That’s what the neighbours’ lawns were for. So even though there was a sidewalk there, I would cross the street just to avoid going anywhere near Mean-Green land.

The formidable Mr. Mean-Green was no match for my curiosity though. I don’t know if he ever knew about my explorations of his backyard. I can only imagine that he didn’t, because I don’t remember my mom giving me a talking-to about them. You see there was an unfortified entry point into his backyard. I lived on the side of the street that had fairly level properties. On the other side of the street, where he lived, the backyards dropped off into a gully that had a brook running through it. This brook was the highway to adventure. On the weekends I would follow the older kids through tunnels to areas yet unexplored by me. During the week while they were in school, I would go back to the brook to the places we had been.

One of the places the older kids always by-passed was Mr. Mean-Green’s portion of the gully. They always stayed in the brook there where it decided to dig deeper into the ground, so that we would have had to climb up vertical walls to get out. But I would peak over the edge of the brook while my older sister begged me to keep up. To me it looked like something out of Alice in Wonderland. Vast areas of perfectly even, soft, green grass, with a bridge over the brook that led to a secluded garden area rimmed with flowers. It was too much temptation for a little girl to resist. So one Spring weekday, I climbed out of the brook to the garden. I didn’t stay too long. But it was so exciting to be in the forbidden territory where there was a table set surrounded by flowers that was just dying to be used for tea parties. Oh Alice would have loved this place, and a little girl could play tea party for hours.

Mrs. Mean-Green must have spotted me perched up on her look-out, the back porch. She started coming down the hill with her terriers. I was terrified of dogs, even small ones that I could have crushed just by sitting on them. My memory gets hazy here. I can’t remember if she talked to me or if I got away. I do remember clambering down the side of the brook and jumping from rock to rock to reach the safety of the Freeland’s portion of the brook, where I could run back home undetected. But silly little me returned a few more times that Spring to play. After that Spring I never got out of the brook there again. Summers meant spending the day at the pool, and by fall it was time for full days of school. So the weekends were spent with the more cautious older kids who never ventured into Mean-Green land.

There are more characters like the man that supposedly chased kids out of his yard with a shot gun and the purple house lady. But this post is getting too long and travelling down memory lane is probably boring for anyone other than me.





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Saturday, December 16, 2006

N.J. Bears Smarter Than Government Leaders


WEST MILFORD / NEW JERSEY BEARS SMARTER THAN GOVERNMENT LEADERS



Black Bear Blog



One town in New Jersey has been trying to do something about nuisance bears for so long, I’m not sure they can remember when the process started. West Milford was supposed to purchase bear-proof garbage cans with money from a grant issued by the DEP. It’s been an embarrassment to the town and to the DEP because they can’t get it done.



I Think Bears In New Jersey May Be Smarter Than Government Leaders


Tom Remington

~ By Tom Remington


New Jersery’s commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection, called off the 2006 bear hunt. One of the reasons Lisa Jackson gave in cancelling the hunt was because she didn’t think the newly approved Bear Management Plan included enough non-lethal ways of dealing with bear problems and complaints from residents. Of course a simple bear hunt would have reduced numbers, reduced complaints, provided for a healthier bear population and wouldn’t have cost the state anything as the cost would be absorbed through hunter license and permit fees. But that’s not the New Jersey way!

At least one town in New Jersey has been trying to do something about nuisance bears for so long, I’m not sure they can remember when the process started. West Milford was supposed to purchase bear-proof garbage cans with money from a grant issued by the DEP. It’s been an embarrassment to the town and to the DEP because they can’t get it done.

This was all part of a plan to see if bear-proof garbage cans would reduce the number of complaints from residents. The plan was to purchase 3,075 cans and distribute them to 1,525 homes in selected areas most affected by bears. When the proposal was announced, the garbage haulers wanted to renegotiate their contract with the town because of increased labor costs of having to unscrew the lids of all the garbage cans before emptying them. (Of course it wouldn’t be all of them because we know that many people won’t bother to take the time to screw the lids on anyway. Heck, they won’t buckle a seat belt, why would they take the time to screw on a lid to a stinking old garbage can?)

Then the town council couldn’t make up its mind whether to buy a cheaper version of the screw-of lids or a more expensive kind of spring-loaded lid. Finally, the bids went out but within a couple of months they had to rebid the process all over again because they failed to provide detailed information necessary for contractors to make accurate bids.

Believe it or not, it does get worse. The company that won the bid, Compliant Solutions, secured a contract to manufacture 3,075 screw-off lid garbage cans for a price of $176,000. Yes, folks that’s $57.24 a can ... and oh, by the way, you expected handles to come for that price?

Compliant Solutions said they would be happy to drill the holes and put handles on the cans but that would be another negotiated price.

“That’s four holes per handle, and four handles per can,” Township Manager Richard Kunze said Thursday. “That’s a lot of holes.”

Representatives of the winning bidder, Compliant Solutions of Elmwood Park, were at the council meeting to demonstrate the rubberized critter cans with the screw-off lids. The company offered to drill the holes, but said it would have to pass the labor costs on to the township.

But the town couldn’t just pay Compliant to put the handles on because it might create some real legal messes when complaints from the losing bidders began pouring in.

Now the town still doesn’t have bear-proof cans. I wonder if the New Jersey Supreme Court would have ruled differently about the bear hunt if they had known that the same DEP that stopped the bear hunt was the same DEP that couldn’t get a town to “find more non-lethal ways” of dealing with bears.

Just think how simple and cost effective one simple little 5-day bear hunt could have been. No problem!

Tom Remington




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Friday, December 15, 2006

State Assembly Passes Civil Union Bill


NEW JERSEY / STATE ASSEMBLY PASSES CIVIL UNION BILL


Citizen Link



Under orders from the New Jersey Supreme Court to give equal benefits to same-sex couples, members of the Assembly chose civil unions instead of gay "marriage" as the means to comply with the court's order.



New Jersey Assembly Passes Civil Union Bill


Lawmakers in the Garden State this afternoon voted 56-19 in favor of creating civil unions, The Associated Press reported.

Under orders from the New Jersey Supreme Court to give equal benefits to same-sex couples, members of the Assembly chose civil unions instead of gay "marriage" as the means to comply with the court's order.

Last month the justices ruled that the state must either allow same-sex couples to marry or create civil unions that provide the same legal rights and benefits.

Civil unions are legal partnerships that allow gay couples all the protections and benefits of marriage, but which stop short of being called "marriage." Both Vermont and Connecticut have similar civil-union laws and California has a similar domestic-partnership law.

The New Jersey Senate is expected to vote on the bill soon. If it passes, the legislation would be sent to Gov. Jon Corzine for signature. If he signs the bill, which he has promised to do, it would take effect 60 days later.




© 2006 Focus on the Family. CitizenLink is a registered trademark of Focus on the Family.
All rights reserved. International copyright secured. (800) A-FAMILY (232-6459).




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Thursday, December 14, 2006

Senior Citizen Christmas Dinner Planned


PASSAIC COUNTY / SENIOR CITIZEN CHRISTMAS DINNER PLANNED


PRESS RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

December 13, 2006



Passaic County Board of Chosen Freeholders and Department of Senior Services have planned a Christmas dinner on December 25.

Passaic County seniors will feel the love of the season at this special Christmas Day celebration.



Christmas Dinner Planned For Passaic County Seniors


The Event:

Passaic County Board of Chosen Freeholders and Department of Senior Services have planned a Christmas dinner on December 25.

Passaic County seniors will feel the love of the season at this special Christmas Day celebration.

While most will enjoy the Christmas Holiday surrounded by family and friends, there are many of our elderly neighbors who might otherwise not have that joy.

When:

Monday, December 25, 2006
12:00 – 3:00 p.m.

Where:

Passaic County Department of Senior Services
Suite 200

930 Riverview Drive (at the Totowa Business Center)

Totowa, New Jersey 07512

Transportation is available.

Sponsors:

Passaic County Board of Chosen Freeholders

Reservations:

Call 973-569-4060

Recognition:

Sincere appreciation is extended to our volunteers for their compassion and willingness to change their Christmas Day tradition in rder to share it with others.





This event is funded through private donations.
Contributions are being accepted and are greatly appreciated.




Contact:

Mary Kuzinski, Director,
Passaic County Senior Services
973-569-4060

Dolores Choteborsky,
Passaic County Public Information Officer
973-569-5050

www.passaiccountynj.org




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Virgin Mary Tree Stump Moves To New Location


PASSAIC CITY / VIRGIN MARY TREE STUMP SHRINE TO BE MOVED TO PERMANENT LOCATION


WJRZ-13



The stump was to be moved to a nearby church, but a group of business owners of Mexican heritage from New Jersey and New York raised money for a permanent shrine, which has a devoted following of Mexican and Polish immigrants.



Virgin Mary Tree-Stump Shrine On The Move



The Virgin Mary tree-stump shrine in Passaic, N.J..
CBS


(CBS) PASSAIC, N.J. -- Now, the site is getting a permanent shelter to replace the plywood lean-to that the city dismantled two months ago.

Passaic cited safety concerns after the makeshift roof collapsed amid prayer candles, flowers and rosary beads.

The stump was to be moved to a nearby church, but a group of business owners of Mexican heritage from New Jersey and New York raised money for a permanent shrine, which has a devoted following of Mexican and Polish immigrants, the Herald News of West Paterson reported in Tuesday's newspapers.

"It was just time that the Mexican community came together as one to focus on helping the community," Maria DeDios, treasurer of the newly formed United Mexican Chamber of Commerce, told the newspaper. "The shrine has brought us together and it shows what unity can do."

One volunteer worker, Laurencio Barrios, a native of Mexico who lives in Passaic, smoothed mortar on bricks at the site on Monday.

"I'm taking extra care, because it's for the Virgin," he said.

Work is to be done by Dec. 12, the holy day of the Virgin of Guadalupe, a manifestation of the Virgin Mary who is the patron saint of Mexico.

Landscaper Jaime Delgado, who is overseeing construction, said he has secured permits for work on the state-owned land from the city and the state Department of Transportation.

The DOT had no immediate comment Tuesday.


(The Associated Press contributed to this report.)





© 2006 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.





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