Uptown Crew @ Jersey City Festival SATURDAY, MAY 7!!!

Uptown Crew has collaborated with
JC Landmarks Conservancy to test you on your knowledge of Jersey City. If you answer correctly, you can walk away with a special prize from Uptown merchant, Lee Sims Chocolates!

The NEIGHBORHOOD GUESSING GAME is scheduled from 1:45p - 2:15p.

And check out all the other fun activities tomorrow.

It all happens in front of City Hall, Grove Street at Montgomery.

It's a BIG CITY, folks!

Here's the Facebook invitation, should you do the Facebook :)

THE RAVEN: The Works of Edgar Allen Poe + Darren Deicide.Saturday, October 30

Are you ready to be chilled to the bone and scared to your heart's content?!

Uptown Crew's Dramatic Reading Series continues with readings of works by Edgar Allen Poe. Live actors deliver the best of Poe's 19th-century gothic gems, including poetry, essay and full readings of works including The Telltale Heart, Annabel Lee and, of course, THE RAVEN.

Enjoy our silent screening of horror claymation film shorts.

We are transporting back in time, and we would love for you to dress as you would have, were we sharing a drink in
Mr. Poe's salon. Be creative!

There will be lovely refreshments available, and a special pouring of E.A. Poe's favorite poison!

And, to top it off, a fittingly dark acoustic set by the demon of Journal Square, Darren Deicide!

$5 admission. Ages 16+. Doors open 7:30pm

WE DARE YOU!

264 Fairmount Avenue
(between Bergen Ave. and Monticello Ave.)

Illustration by Arthur Rackham.

A Communipaw Story Marathon

Dramatic readings of short stories by Washington Irving, one of the first writers to capture a distinctly "American" literary voice.

Special Musical Guest
Nathan Carpenter

Friday, June 4
FREE ADMISSION
264 Fairmount Space
McGinley Square, Jersey City
7:30pm - 10:00pm


Sit back, have a bite and a sip, and enjoy a ride back in time.

Washington Irving was born in 1783 on Williams Street in lower Manhattan. The son of Scottish immigrant merchants, Irving was fascinated from a young age by stories of the Dutch settlement of the New York area before British rule. Many of his works reflect the influence of the New Netherland period (1609-1665) and the Dutch culture on the area. Irving set three of the stories you'll hear this evening in what is today called Jersey City; back then, it was known as Communipaw.

Enjoy excerpts from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Communipaw, A Conspiracy of Cocked Hats and A Tale of Communipaw / Guests From Gibbet Island, plus a couple of surprises.

The Actors:

Mary Lois Adshead is an actor.director/producer living in Hoboken NJ. Trained at Lee Strasberg Studios and in England, she founded the Little Theater of Geneva, Switzerland and the Jubilee Fish Theater, an Equity company in Mobile, Alabama. Adshead has acted in television and stage across the U.S. and internationally.

Trish Szymanski is an actor, writer, singer/songwriter, community advocate/activist and arts promoter. She trained with Christine Goodman and Judith Sloan (acting) and with June Foley and Barry Goldsmith (writing). She has a particular interest in the New Netherland period and its legacy in the American ethos. Trish is the founder of the Uptown Crew.

Sharon Zaslaw received her BFA in Musical Theatre Boston Conservatory of Music. She is a graduate of Weist Barron School of Television. Zaslaw has had roles in numerous New York City and regional theater productions, film and industrial productions.

Singer-songwriter Nathan Carpenter calls his music style punk roots. Who are we to argue? It's familiar and strange, sounds old and new, all at the same time. A newcomer to Jersey City, Nathan lives in Journal Square.

Refreshments available.
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264 Fairmount Space has street parking and is clean and green. Smoking outside, please.


View 264 Fairmount Space in a larger map

Communipaw Story Marathon is a JC Fridays event.

In the Old Bergen Cemetery

Recognize any of these names?

That first yellow peg

View Uptown JC, Historically in a larger map

That first yellow peg on the Uptown Crew map represents Bergen Square, today the intersection of Bergen Avenue and Academy Street. Located a couple of blocks south of Journal Square, Bergen Square is the very spot where the first Dutch fort was built in 1650 by order of the Director General of the New Netherland colony, Peter Stuyvesant.

(Stuyvesant had his own peg, in place of the leg he lost in an attack on St. Martin while serving as governor of Curaçao. Hence, his common nickname, Peg Leg Pete.)

This date and person and event do not represent the first activity in this area. When the Dutch ship Halve Maen sailed into the nearby harbor in 1609, this area was home to peoples whose agriculture, beliefs, rites and rituals, customs, clothing, food, lives - whose culture had been the human legacy of this rich land for thousands of years.

What we know today as Jersey City is founded on the elimination of that way of life. Stuyvesant's predecessor, Willem Kieft, had mismanaged the colony to the point of allowing a full scale massacre of the native camp at Pavonia on the eastern riverfront in the early 1640s, igniting a Dutch-Native war that lasted more than two years. Stuyvesant's establishment of the stockade and fort at Bergen Square was a direct response to the untenable situation he inherited in the colony.

To learn more about the New Netherland period (1609-1665),

- visit The New Netherland Project website at www.nnp.org

- read Island at the Center of the World, by Russell Shorto, Shorto's analysis of troves of documents from the New Netherland period discloses the earliest history of the European invasion and the impact of the Dutch culture on our own.

(A bronze statue of Peter Stuyvesant stood on the northeast corner of Bergen Square for one hundred years when, earlier in 2010, it was removed by agreement between the Jersey City Board of Education - it is the site of the Martin Luther King Jr. School - and Hudson Community College. According to local press coverage, it sits, covered by a tarp, its foundation demolished, on a flatbed truck somewhere on Tonnelle Avenue, awaiting removal to somewhere on Sip Avenue, which, we note, is not in Bergen Square.)