Video Christmas Card from Newark. Newark, NJ, has been my chosen hometown since June 2000 (I was born in December 1944) and is a wonderful place, esp. as against its absurdly undeserved reputation as urban hellhole. In actuality, Newark is very cultured. It is the largest city, in terms of population, in the State of New Jersey, the 11th most populous state of the Union. NJ would be higher in the population rankings except that it is tiny. You can drive from one end to the other in little more than 2 hours, without exceeding the speed limit. But more people per square mile choose to live in NJ than in any other state.
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In any case, slanders by late-nite talk-show hosts like Jay Leno can do grievous harm to a perfectly good city like Newark. I thus feel that I need to try to correct the massive misperception of Newark online. I have a fotoblog about Newark (and, but only on occasion, about its environs) that has shown, thru the course of 1,632 posts over the last 7½ years, that Newark is not at all what most people have been led to believe it is.
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This blog is ordinarily devoted to matters of national and international import. But the anti-city bias of the present U.S. culture is a national matter, at the least. The video linked to below may correct some of the slanderous misinformation about Newark. Hopefully, it will also make people think again of what they have been told about other American cities.

I have a link to more information about St. Lucy's Church at my Newark fotoblog. If the video as embedded above does not work (and I have had trouble with it, perhaps because it has been online for years), please try the link in this paragraph. The video is magnificent, and a little extra effort to see it is, in my estimation, well worth the tiny bit of trouble.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 12:54 PM