Posts in category: Amusement Parks

COOKSTOWN, NEW JERSEY, UNITED STATES, January 27, … fact, that’s what his new book is all about: … the reader in a refreshingly new and hilarious light that makes … is bursting with joy and amusement.

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Some cities around the world are pulling back from shorelines, as rising seas from climate change increase flooding. But so far, retreat appears out of the question for Atlantic City, New Jersey.

The breezy getaway town is on the water on a barrier, which was once reachable only by boat but in modern times via a causeway. The city fully occupies a small piece of land, water on either side, just above sea level.

“We love our residents,” said Barbara Woolley-Dillon, former Atlantic City Planning and Development Director. “We have one of the most diverse populations. it’s a great place to be, and we have such a thriving community that we want to do everything we can to keep it intact.”

The city, popular with vacation goers in the Eastern U.S., particularly in the summer, brings in billions of dollars in revenue, another incentive to keep it intact as long as possible.

“Atlantic City is a seven billion dollar a year economic engine” that benefits all of southern New Jersey and must be maintained, said Jim Rutala, an Atlantic City planning contractor.

Still, the flooding is getting deeper and more frequent. In 1910, researchers installed a tide gauge at the end of Steel Pier Amusement Park. The gauge shows the sea has risen a foot and a half since then, more than double the global mean sea level rise.

City leaders have no plans to take state offers to buy and demolish homes in flood-prone areas, according to Rutala.

Instead, officials are spending $100 million, from 2016 through next year, to “fortify and armor” the city from rising sea levels by installing sea walls, pump stations and bulkheads, according to Rutala. Unseen by most tourists, a newly built pump station in Fisherman’s Park pushes ocean water that has come ashore back into the bay. It is common to hear construction crews at work building structures with entrances elevated to strict new height requirements.

Other cities in New Jersey have taken a different route to confront flooding. In Woodbridge, about 100 miles north of Atlantic City, in recent years the state has bought and torn down more than 150 homes to remove people and property from the danger of future floods.

In Atlantic City, tourists and residents walk along street names that inspired the Monopoly board game, such as Baltic Avenue and Park Place. Casinos pull in people hoping to win big at the poker table or slot machines. And outside are wide-open beaches and boardwalk amusement park rides.

Twenty-seven million people visit the resort town annually. For some, it’s a place to escape from their daily lives. For others, it’s a way to live a simple life by the ocean.

For many residents, it’s unbearable to contemplate a future without the city.

“This part of Atlantic City is just very tightly knit and we are a nice little neighborhood,” said elementary school teacher Abby Moul, 47, as she played with her dog in the north part of the island. “It is kind off the beaten path and that’s what I love about it.”

Under current projections for global emissions, Rutgers University estimates that New Jersey is likely to experience another one to three feet of sea level rise between now and 2070, according to Robert Kopp, Rutgers climate scientist. And the land here is sinking from what scientists call the “see-saw” effect of melting glaciers much further north.

It’s unclear if the city’s new fortification projects will be enough to confront the projected sea level rise. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers estimates that New Jersey’s 950 square miles of beaches and back bays will sustain more than a billion dollars in annual flooding damage in a few years.

Atlantic City is the one of the poorest and most densely populated part of the New Jersey coastline. More than two dozen different languages are spoken in city schools.

Many people here have what locals call “back-of-the-house” jobs at one of the nine casinos, preparing food, cleaning rooms and other work.

It can cost $150,000 in the denser, older parts of the city to raise up an $80,000 home to protect it from “nuisance” flooding, periodic flooding, sometimes from high tides or backed up drainage systems. That cost is simply out of reach for many.

On a recent afternoon, lifelong Atlantic City resident Zakiy Abdullah, 45, a forklift operator, did his best to keep his three-year-old daughter Jamaarah Wells from riding her tricycle through flood waters in the street.

“Flooding it is a constant problem,” said Abdullah. “As you can see, the water has not evaporated from the other night.”

Kimberly McKenna, of the Stockton University Coastal Research Center, says most of the increased flooding in Atlantic City happens in the part of the island that faces the mainland, called the back bay. That also happens to be where many people live in poverty.

Residents often move their cars to higher ground during high tides and full moons.

“Those floods, what we may now call nuisance flooding, will turn into regular flooding,” said McKenna. “And that’s going to be persistent flooding. People won’t be moving their cars. They will be moving their homes.”

Local coastal governments like Atlantic City will have to decide whether to manage a retreat from the coastline over several years, or to stay and only leave when and if the flood waters become unlivable.

“You don’t need to give up a community right now because of the risk of three or five feet of sea level rise,” said Kopp, the Rutgers climate scientist. “But you need to think about how redevelopment plans you are making today will fare in the future. There is no simple solution.”

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Despite some serious incidents at New Jersey amusement parks that drew significant attention, the overall number of accidents reported by ride operators to the state this year plummeted like the first drop on Kingda Ka. But there’s a catch.

The state Department of Community Affairs, which inspects rides and collects incident reports, changed the definition of what is considered a “serious injury” that must be reported to the state agency in 2022.

“The intent of the code change was to improve data accuracy by excluding certain injuries (previously designated as serious and thus requiring immediate reporting) that only require same-day treatment, or injuries initially reported to DCA as a ‘transport’ by the park owner when, in fact, the injured party was not transported by ambulance to a hospital but rather stated their intent to self-transport to a medical office for further treatment,” state DCA spokeswoman Lisa Ryan said in an email to NJ Advance Media.

One of the stars of the 2022 Whitney Biennial, the late Denyse Thomasos, has symbolically returned to Toronto, where she moved with her family as a youngster after being born in Trinidad and Tobago in 1964. Though she died a decade ago at just 47, she lives on at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), where she has taken over the museum’s spacious fifth floor. The exhibition, Denyse Thomasos: just beyond (until 20 February 2023), features more than 70 paintings and works on paper, many of them sizeable, others rarely seen.

It’s a bit of a twist that her work is being shown in such a cavernous spot, as much of her work, described as “semi-abstract”, is concerned with confinement. As she wrote in one of the sketchbooks included in the show, “My work is about cages, about enclosures, being enveloped.” Black culture, history and politics were other areas Thomasos explored.

She wasn’t holding back with brush in hand, as she liked to work very large, many of her canvasses being 11ft by 20ft, the size of her studio wall in New York’s East Village, where she later resided. “She was obsessed with scale,” co-curator Renée van der Avoird explains. “We needed the fifth floor to show [the works] because you need that space to back up and look at them.”

Others who played a big part in making the Thomasos exhibition happen were the Art Gallery of Guelph’s Sally Frater, and Michelle Jacques, who is chief curator at Saskatoon’s Remai Modern, where the show will travel next spring. Jacques, who like Thomasos has Caribbean roots, previously worked at the AGO and got to know the artist, who created a large wall mural for the gallery during renovations in 2005. “She wanted the world to be a better place for herself and her daughter,” Jacques says. “She could just see beyond the world as it is.”

Staff were still in the process of stretching some of the large works during the exhibition’s press preview on 4 October, and it looked like they were going to be at it for some time. One even had a few tears and so needed mending.

Thomasos travelled widely, too, to Peru, Southeast Asia, India, China, Mali, Senegal and South Africa, all the while snapping photographs that she would refer to in her work. There are several of her photo albums on display at the AGO, as well as her paint-spattered shoes.

Amazingly, if you were lucky enough to have visited the Canada’s Wonderland amusement park, which is just north of Toronto, or the entertainment venue Ontario Place, in 1983 or 1984, you could have sat for the artist and had your portrait done by her for a small fee. Two years later she was commissioned to paint murals for the University of Toronto, where she was studying art. She later attended Yale University, where she first made work addressing slavery. After another five years in Philadelphia it was on to Rutgers University in New Jersey, where she was an associate professor of art.

Thomasos’s early influences included Theodore Gericault, Anselm Kiefer and Eric Fischl. But as she matured she began to move on from doing figurative works. There were other factors. “The immediate experience of urban collapse had a psychological effect on my work,” she said in 2012.

“My whole life has been about this idea of developing a language out of line,” she is quoted in the AGO catalogue as saying. “There was something very tedious about the technical aspect of figuration that I was not interested in. The moment I actually had to make a hand look like a hand, I was not connected to my concept. […] Whereas line, this sort of constant line, was like the recording of time.”

She added: “I could not be disconnected from my canvas emotionally, not even for one minute, and line allowed me that.”

• Denyse Thomasos: just beyond, until 20 February 2023, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.

New Jersey Democrats say they are going to take a shot at passing new gun legislation similar to New York’s even thought that state’s law is facing a court challenge.

Assembly Speaker Craig J. Coughlin and Senate President Nick Scutari, both Democrats, have unveiled legislation that they contend would establish New Jersey as the “toughest in the nation” when it comes to concealed-carry laws.

New Jersey legislative leaders said they expect there will be legal challenges if New Jersey enacts a new gun-carry law. A June ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated certain restrictions on state gun-carry laws like those New Jersey has had including requiring citizens to show a justifiable need for carrying a gun in public. New York revised its similar law following that high court ruling and now that revised law is under review by courts.

The New Jersey Democrats’ latest proposal seeks to require more comprehensive background checks before a permit is issued; prohibit permit holders from carrying handguns in certain public areas; and impose a new insurance requirement, among other measures.

Supreme Court Voids New York Gun Law, Establishes Right to Carry Outside Home

The New Jersey proposal would prohibit permit holders from carrying handguns in schools, government buildings, polling places, bars and restaurants, theaters, sporting arenas, parks, airports, casinos and childcare facilities.

“Previously, application of the justifiable need standard minimized the serious dangers of misuse and accidental use inherent in the carrying of handguns in a public place. Given the likelihood that a much greater number of individuals will now qualify to carry handguns in public, it is now both necessary and appropriate to clearly identify in the law those sensitive places where, due to heightened public safety concerns, carrying a weapon of any kind, including a handgun, is not permissible. These prohibitions are based on common sense principles and historical analogues,” the bill says in its introduction acknowledging the changed gun control landscape following the Supreme Court ruling.

Assemblyman Joe Danielsen, an author of the proposed legislation, believes the new measure strikes a balance between public safety and protecting constitutional rights. He said the state should be able to promote “responsible gun ownership, gun safety, gun education, and gun training while upholding the Second Amendment.”