Today Jersey City Times asked that all candidates running for mayor and city council divulge their vaccination statuses and, if vaccinated, provide a copy of their vaccination cards as proof.
JCT asked any candidate who has not been vaccinated to provide their reason or reasons for not doing so.
JCT requested responses by no later than Monday night.
During a “meet and greet” on Wednesday evening, Ward F City Council Candidate Frank Educational Gilmore revealed that he had not been vaccinated. He explained that he was concerned about side effects.
The Center for Disease Control advises that those receiving inoculations may suffer “some side effects” that “should go away in a few days.” It goes on to explain that “serious side effects that could cause a long-term health problem are extremely unlikely following any vaccination, including COVID-19 vaccination.”
A Bayonne man was arrested today in connection with a March 24 hit and run in the Jersey City Heights neighborhood.
The man, Magdy Botros, 51, surrendered to members of the Hudson County Prosecutor’s Office Regional Collision Investigation Unit without incident.
He was charged with one count of Knowingly Leaving the Scene of a Motor Vehicle Collision resulting in Serious Bodily Injury.
Allegedly, Botros struck a female pedestrian crossing Palisade Avenue while driving his 2014 Toyota Camry. Botros is charged with leaving the scene.
The woman was taken to Jersey City Medical Center and treated for serious injuries.
Following his arrest, Botros was released on a Summons Complaint and his first appearance is scheduled in Central Judicial Processing Court on October 28, 2021.
Prosecutor Suarez credited the Hudson County Regional Collision Investigation Unit with the investigation and arrest and the Jersey City Police Department for assisting with the investigation.
A Hudson County Grand Jury has indicted a teacher at the Infinity Institute in Jersey City for the sexual assaults of three female students. The three students were 11 and 12 years-old at the time.
Apparao Sunkara
The accused teacher, Apparao Sunkara, age 68, of Hicksville, New York, was arrested in March in connection with the 2019 sexual assault of an 11-year-old girl at the school.
The indictment announced today upgraded those charges and added additional charges for the sexual assaults of two additional victims, both 12 years old.
Sunkara was arrested yesterday at the Hudson County Prosecutor’s Office yesterday.
Charges brought against Sunkara include Aggravated Sexual Assault, two counts of Sexual Assault by Contact, three counts of second-degree Endangering the Welfare of a Child, and thee counts of Official Misconduct.
The Hudson County Prosecutor’s Office will be filing a motion to detain Sunkara pending trial.
Ward F Councilman Jermaine Robinson is criticizing challenger Frank Educational Gilmore following Gilmore’s admission last night that he had not been vaccinated against Covid-19.
Standing on the steps of Barrow Mansion for a candidate meet and greet, Gilmore said “I’m not vaccinated. My wife is vaccinated. I’m not vaccinated because I really want to see the actual data on the vaccine.” He said he was concerned about “the different types of side effect.”
Said Councilman Robinson in a press release, “Just like nearly 90% of Jersey City residents, I got vaccinated to protect myself, my family and my constituents, and I am demanding now that Frank Gilmore either prove that he has taken the vaccine or that he immediately stop holding in-person campaign events. Interacting with residents without being vaccinated is totally irresponsible and a clear danger to public health, and Frank Gilmore has taken it even further by speaking inside our public schools without a mask and potentially without being vaccinated. That has to stop now.” Robinson’s campaign is circulating a video clip of Gilmore’s statement.
This afternoon, Gilmore tweeted that he had received his first jab.
Standing next to Gilmore last night was Ward E Councilman James Solomon who released a statement. “The Covid-19 vaccine is safe, effective and is instrumental to ending this pandemic. Before last night’s event, I was unaware of Frank Gilmore’s vaccination status. Following the event, I had an honest and private discussion with Frank where he informed me that he is getting vaccinated this morning. This moment highlights how important it is that we all continue to have these types of conversations with our friends and families until everyone gets the vaccine.”
On its website, The Center for Disease Control advises that, “You may have some side effects, which are normal signs that your body is building protection. These side effects may affect your ability to do daily activities, but they should go away in a few days. Some people have no side effects. Serious side effects that could cause a long-term health problem are extremely unlikely following any vaccination, including COVID-19 vaccination.”
JCAST is an annual reminder that Jersey City is a big place. Getting from one gallery to another in a distant neighborhood is time-consuming (even on a bicycle!), and though the events and parties went on well into Friday and Saturday night, eventually, galleries do have to close. I tried to see the whole shebang and ended up, alas, with about a third of the Jersey City Artist and Studio Tour left unexamined. My itinerary largely bypassed the Heights, and that had as much to do with traffic patterns and the route of the Fire Department Parade as it did with the art on view. Luckily, there was just as much to see south of Newark Avenue as there was on the north side — and if your studio happens to be in the Heights, I promise I’ll get up there soon.
Sprawling as the modern Studio Tour is, most of the activity remains clustered around a pair of hubs: 150 Bay Street, home of the venerable advocacy organization ProArts and a warren of small studios with the vibe of a start-up company headquarters, and MANA Contemporary (888 Newark), which, regardless of the event, continues to feel like a cross between a dry goods warehouse, a top-flight museum, and a medieval fortress. The 31st edition of JCAST suggests that the major institutions in town are cooperating, if not exactly singing in perfect harmony: Art House Productions mounted a fine group show at 150 Bay, just a set of quick paces from the ProArts exhibition, and Art Fair 14C, which announced a partnership with Art House earlier this year, will hold their mid-November main event at the Glass Gallery at MANA.
For one weekend at least, The Powerhouse Arts District functioned as the activity hub it was designed to be, with shows at Nimbus, the bright, accessible, street-level Dvora Gallery, the reliably gorgeous Novado Gallery, and several other spots near those cobblestoned streets. It wasn’t quite enough to make a longtime viewer forget that the former focus of the Studio Tour — the Arts Center at 111 First Street — is long gone. Yet the healing after the broken heart continues, however slowly.
A list of exemplary pieces from an event as large and multifaceted as JCAST is going to be highly subjective. Apprehension depends on lots of random factors: mood, lighting, placement in a gallery, the relationship of the thing you’re seeing to the last thing you saw. Nevertheless, these are eleven works that made an immediate impression on me — and if you saw them, I’ll bet they made an impression on you, too. Many are still viewable and will be for a few weeks. You don’t have to wait for municipal sanction: you can string them together into a Studio Tour of your own.
Honorable mentions include the array of pandemic prayer-flags that flutter on the exterior wall of the TOPS Industrial building (926 Newark Ave.), 150 Bay Street artist Theda Sandiford’s miniaturized “emotional baggage” shopping carts, Ben Fine’s “Night View From the Fire Escape,” one of several colorful depictions of Jersey City at his show at 313 Gallery (313 3rd St.), the ceramic creatures, simultaneously twee and erotic, that populate Shamona Stokes’s MANA setup, “FeelLicks,” Paul Leibow’s clever riff on classic cartoon characters at Novado Gallery (110 Morgan St.), Barbara Seddon’s autumnal purple and orange forest print at the Majestic Theatre Condominium (222 Montgomery St.), and “A Tangle; A Swarm; A Precondition of the Plastisphere,” Amanda Thackray’s gravity-defying protest of the pollution of the ocean in paper cut-out form, viewable at the Lemmerman Gallery at NJCU (2039 Kennedy Blvd.).
Keith Garcia’s “Waiting”
11. Keith Garcia, “Waiting” (The Hive Goods, 77 Cornelison Ave.)
The Hive Goods is a shop beneath Deep Space Gallery, and in addition to clothing and an excellent selection of albums on vinyl, there’s art by Deep Space favorites hanging on the walls. “Waiting” is a radioactive pink-sky landscape rendered in acrylic, featuring a windowless big box store with a pair of security cameras perched on a sharp corner, a lonesome ATM, a chain-link fence, and a target-practice poster on the ground. Garcia’s painting suggests both the urban immediacy of Jersey City street art and the weirdly depopulated, post-industrial scenes of Ed Ruscha.
Peter Delman’s “The Wreck Of The Endurance 1915”
10. Peter Delman, “The Wreck of the Endurance — 1915” (Private residence, 5th St.)
Peter Delman is a veteran Jersey City artist and visual storyteller whose paintbrush can be a pleasingly blunt instrument, especially when he turns it against history: his brutal, devastating reanimation of the famous photograph of the Little Rock Nine was a highlight of “The Empowering: A Social Justice Exhibit,” the inaugural show at Art150 at 150 Bay Street. But I’d never seen his dramatization of Ernest Shacketon’s Endurance, with the ship’s masts like fragile white cobwebs against a starry green sky, and slabs of ice piled like the walls of a collapsed apartment tower. Delman is a great communicator and one of the deans of Jersey City painting, and this is the artist at his most illustrative.
Benjamin Mortimer’s “Selector: A Dream Motif In Four Variations”
9. Benjamin Mortimer, “Selector: A Dream Motif In Four Variations” (Cool Vines, 350 Warren St.)
Tucked away in the back of a wine shop on the eastern edge of the Powerhouse Arts District is an art wall that feels a bit like a bulletin board in a college dormitory. But Benjamin Mortimer has made the most of it, bringing the spookiness to an upmarket store with a series of photos of cramped, oddly-lit interiors, and exteriors in a state of confusion: ong fluorescent bulbs reflected off of industrial tiles, pipes headed nowhere, and a too-tight diagonal wall leading the viewer across a checkerboard floor, under a single dangling light, toward whatever it is that lurks in room 13.
8. Kate Eggleston, “Please Scream Inside Your Heart” (SMUSH Gallery, 340 Summit Ave.)
At first, Kate Eggleston’s conical plushies and candy corn-shaped characters seem playful and benevolent. But the closer you inspect them, the more the anxiety and mania behind the art becomes evident. It’s reductive to call her solo show at SMUSH — which will be up until Nov. 6 — a response to pandemic conditions, even though it clearly is. It’s an expression of one woman’s struggle to find joy, connection, and articulation at a time when all of those things have been hard to locate.
“Blurring The Lines” by Bryant Small
7. Bryant Small and Diane English, “Ink Outside the Box” (Dvora Pop-Up Gallery, 160 1st St.)
Because they’re thin, and a challenge to control, alcohol inks are underutilized. Yet they produce gorgeous, intense, liquid fields of color, and when used by a master, they can evoke the sacred radiance of stained glass. The large paintings of Bryant Small and Diane English generate the illusion of a light shining behind, or inside, or hovering somewhere over the images. Their colorworks open like flowers, and sometimes like fireworks; there’s a sense of barely managed chaos, revelry, and constant excitement. The show will be on view at Dvora Pop-Up Gallery, which is something of a luminous lightbox itself, through Oct. 27.
Anybody who creates a metropolis — a great green walk-in closet of an installation — out of discarded Mountain Dew bottles is making a statement about waste and overconsumption. “llluminous City” is part of a show called “Too Much!,” where it occupies the same corner of the gallery as Maggie Ens’s scroll-like, thoroughly sincere and wildly hopeful “GAIA Calls Us To Healing.” But Thantapalit also works with Mountain Dew bottles because they’re rewarding to manipulate. He strips them of wrapping and stacks them into bamboo-like columns. He assembles shiny plastic towers that look like our own. He saws them in half and fuses them together into globes and suspends them over the skyline — a great net of polyethylene molecules threatening to drop on the town.
Dot Paolo’s miniature town from “Monkey Bars”
5. Dot Paolo, “Two Black Crows” (Fine Arts Gallery, Mac Mahon Student Center at Saint Peter’s University, 2641 Kennedy Blvd.)
There’s nothing new about assembling and photographing miniatures. But the wood, plastic, and marshmallow biosphere created by Dot Paolo for “Monkey Bars” is so peculiar and personal that it feels like a glimpse into a reticent, antique, emotionally provocative parallel world that draws on small-town American archetypes. I was struck by the sense of import generated by the summit meeting, attended by scores of plastic dignitaries, still on their golden pedestals, gathered around a banquet table. But better still was the shot of the summit’s reception area, built of Tinkertoy towers as shaky as the expression on the face of the doll-secretary, wary of visitors, poised but precarious, alone in the presence of the strange animating forces of the untamed imagination. The show closes on Oct. 15.
“Inka Mask” by Martina Nevado
4. Martina Nevado, “Inka Mask” (City Hall Rotunda Gallery, 280 Grove St.)
The “Hispanic Heritage Month Exhibition” at City Hall is full of intriguing pieces, including Elliott Appel’s June-warm portrait of Hoboken’s La Isla Cuban restaurant, and Judyanne Affronti’s birds, buttons and flowers made from zigzags of felt. Presiding over the show is a face, regal, rough, crowned, jewel-adorned and somewhat accusatory, woven in fierce tribute to the Paracas and Chimu cultures of Perú. It’s two square feet of ferocious pride, an avatar of resistance and indelible identity, and it’s only up until Oct. 15.
3. Susan Evans Grove, “Beaux Reves” (The artist’s studio, 150 Bay St.)
It looks like a cityscape, with lights receding into the distance, and a network of roads and electrical wires, all under a glowering twilight sky. Really, it isn’t anything of the sort. It’s the hull of a boat, battered by encounters with the open sea, and strategically photographed by Susan Evans Grove to accentuate its dignity and accidental artistry. Every scrape, pockmark, and rust-stain represents a handshake with something real: the ocean, grand and powerful, and always ready to make an impression. “Beaux Reves” was the most eye-catching of Grove’s hull photographs on view, but they’re all triumphs of humility, testaments to a natural world we’re still struggling to tame.
“One Over Deal Lake” by Dorie Dahlberg
2. Dorie Dahlberg, “One Over Deal Lake” (ART150 Gallery, 150 Bay St.)
Dorie Dahlberg is the best photographer to come to prominence in the Garden State since the great Ed Fausty. Fausty presented the vanishing post-industrial landscape of Jersey City as an interface with the extraterrestrial; Dahlberg seems to view the Jersey Shore as the leading edge of a slow-fade apocalypse. Maybe they’re both right. Dahlberg’s “Man in White Hat Walks Into the Fog That’s Become Our Lives,” who dissolves into the thick, muffling mist of the Boardwalk, is self-explanatory. But I root for “One Over Deal Lake,” a single black bird clinging, defiantly, to her dimensions as the world around her fades to white noise.
1. RUBICON, a briefcase (The Hive Goods, 77 Cornelison Ave.)
There’s a painting by the accomplished muralist RUBICON on the wall at The Hive Goods, and it bears all the characteristics of his work: sensitivity to the nuances of the urban landscape, the velocity of life on the street, the peculiar manner in which the city defines the emotions and the rhythms of the people who live here, and his remarkable ability to inscribe immense melancholy in the faces he paints. All of that is refined to its absolute essence in a piece that, as far as I could tell, wasn’t even on display. RUBICON painted crowd scenes on both sides of an old briefcase, and they’re utterly fantastic — crackling with humanity at its noblest and most beleaguered. The people are crowded together, but they’re distinct. Captured on the side of an instrument associated with the world of commerce, they say: here is the lifeblood of the city, not the dollars and goods exchanged, or papers shuffled, but the human beings who make their lives here. I wouldn’t even have discovered the piece if I hadn’t been poking around in a part of The Hive Goods that I probably wasn’t supposed to be — and that’s a metaphor for JCAST itself, which is a sale, and a conference, and a party, but above all, an invitation to explore.
Featured image: “Beaux Reves” by Susan Evans Grove
City workers are on edge today after bullets ripped into windows at their Bergen-Lafayette offices last night. The building, Four Jackson Square, is part of the Jackson Square Municipal Complex located on Martin Luther King Drive, also known as “the Annex.”
A visit to the building this afternoon revealed bullet holes in the frames and glass of three street level windows. One window was completely shattered and appears to now be backed by wood or cardboard.
A source who did not wish to be identified confirmed that nine shell casings were recovered by the police. Evidence markers were affixed to the glass in several locations.
Annex employees have been concerned about security since a mass shooting at a nearby kosher market on December 10, 2019. At a meeting of immediately after the incident, employees asked for the installation of bullet proof glass, a better locking mechanism on the main entrance, and active shooter training.
The mayor’s spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
The temporary restraining order a Hudson County official filed against a group of anti-ICE activists who protested outside his Jersey City home violates the constitutional rights of protestors, the American Civil Liberties Union’s New Jersey chapter said in a brief filed Friday.
The ACLU-NJ argues the restraining order should be dissolved because it limits the protestors’ rights of free speech, of assembly, and to petition the government. At the same time, Hudson County officials are requesting the protection be made permanent.
The protests in question targeted Hudson County Executive Tom DeGise over his decision to support renewal of a controversial contract the county had had with ICE in December 2020. After DeGise’s move, dozens of protestors rallied outside the Democrat’s home.
A judge granted DeGise a temporary restraining order against the protestors, who included Amy Torres, executive director at New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice; former congressional candidate Hector Oseguera; and 20 others. At the time, five county commissioners were plaintiffs in the case, but they have since dropped out.
Under the restraining order, protests are limited from 7 to 8 p.m. once every two weeks, protestors must provide 24-hour notice to local law enforcement, and the rallies must take place 200 feet away from officials’ homes. In DeGise’s case, demonstrations are capped at 10 people and must take place on a street corner that’s out of his view.
“The rights to speak and to protest are protected by the Constitution, and dissent has been foundational to our democracy,” Jeanne LoCicero, legal director of ACLU-NJ, said in a statement. “In this case, County Executive DeGise misused his access to public resources and law enforcement to obtain a court order against his own constituents with the intent to silence opposing viewpoints. This misuse of power cannot go unchecked.”
DeGise did not respond to request for comment.
The ACLU said DeGise’s objections to the demonstrations are based on the protestors’ political views, pointing out that he took no issue with firefighters picketing outside his home over a contract dispute while he served as president of Jersey City’s City Council.
Hudson County’s commissioners renewed their contract with ICE in December 2020 for up to 10 years, but they severed it in September. The ACLU argued there’s no need for the restraining order to be permanent since there’s no longer a contract.
Group Also Set to Open Two “Drop-in” Centers in City’s Public Schools
Haven Adolescent Community Respite Center, which offers individual and family counseling and other services for teens in conflict with their parents, just received a $600,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to fund overnight stays at its three-bedroom home on Roosevelt Avenue. The group also hopes to open two drop-in centers in Jersey City public schools on a pilot basis beginning January.
“These developments represent major milestones for us, and we could not be more thrilled,” said Amy Albert, founder and chair of Haven. We are so grateful to Hudson County for helping fund the purchase of our house to begin with. Without that early support, this new HHS award would not have been possible. Now, we can open the residential portion of the house and provide up to four young people at a time with respite for 21 days … the drop-in centers, which will offer counseling and case management around homelessness and other issues, will let us reach dozens more kids in the city than we otherwise would be able to do.”
Haven, which Albert founded in 2016 with the dream of offering overnight shelter for at-risk kids, has provided counseling and meals to roughly 450 kids and their families in four years. The nonprofit opened its 3,000-square-foot home in 2018. But it has not had the money to staff a residential program until now.
“What is so exciting about the federal grant is that it’s renewable,” said Albert. Should all go well, that means that, for the foreseeable future, Haven could offer room and board to 68 kids per year who might otherwise wind up living on the streets or getting incarcerated.
Albert is equally as excited about the drop-in centers. While funding for the program still needs be authorized by the Board of Education, on Friday, Oct. 1, schools Superintendent Franklin Walker signaled his approval of the $170,000 pilot project. The program would run for six months starting January 2022, with one location in a high school and the other in a middle school. Current Haven social workers and “youth advocates” would staff the centers, and buses would be available after school to take students to Haven itself should they wish to hang out there for several hours or grab a meal.
The Board will render its verdict on the project when it meets on Thursday, Oct. 28.
Those interested in applying to become the project manager at either of Haven’s new initiatives should email Amy Albert at AAlbert@havenrespite.org.
Your third-quarter tax bill is due October 6, and I want to warn all taxpayers to remit your payments on time, and not even a day late, unless you want to be charged with an unfair amount of interest charges that quite frankly are not of your fault. Taxpayers have drawn the short end of the stick, and here’s why.
Your third and fourth quarter tax bills are due less than a month apart.
On or around September 17, most Jersey City property tax payers received the third quarter tax bill in the mail. While your third quarter tax bill is due October 6, it would normally have been due on August 1, but the [Fulop] administration withheld your tax bills citing budget approvals and state authorization of the tax rate. In the past, the city would have issued estimated tax bills if the city’s budget had not been adopted, but the administration purposely withheld your tax bill for two months. With your fourth quarter tax bills due on November, the administration somehow sees no problem nor does it care that your third and fourth quarter tax bills are due just less than a month apart.
There is no grace period.
On the back of your bill, under the “PAYMENT OF TAXES” section, it reads:
There is a 10 day grace period, which means that we must receive your payment in our office by the 10th of February, May, August and November…
Jersey City taxpayers would normally be granted a 10-day grace period to pay their tax bill, meaning you could pay your taxes until August 10th, if it was issued on August 1st, without being hit with interest charges for the late payment. The administration did not issue estimated tax bills in 2021, as what has been done in the past; rather, the issuance of bills was delayed pending Council adoption of the budget and state approvals.
What’s important to know is that this delay was a choice, not a requirement. By delaying the issuance of the third quarter tax bill, the due date for the payment of the bill is pushed back to October 6th; but THERE IS NO GRACE PERIOD. State law does not allow for the grace period when the bill has been delayed in the manner that the administration did. If you are accustomed to having that grace period, you should know that you have no margin for error. You must pay your taxes on time before October 6.
Larger interest charges may await you.
But the loss of the grace period isn’t the only thing you should know. On the back of your tax bill under the “INTEREST CHARGES” heading, the instructions are as follows:
Interest in the amount of 8% per annum is charged on the first $1,500 of delinquency and 18% per annum on the amount over $1,500. Your account will remain at the 18% threshold until it is brought current. Interest accrues daily.
Because of the late issuance of the bill, you may get hit harder than you think if your payment is late. If you received your bill on September 16 and pay your bill a day late, you may reasonably expect to be assessed 20 to 25 days of interest charges — interest from around the time you received your bill (September 16) until the day you paid your taxes (one day after October 6). That would seem like a reasonable assumption. But that is not the case. If you are late in paying your bill, you will be assessed daily interest charges accruing since August 1 , even if you didn’t have your bill in hand or electronically.
Seniors and the most vulnerable could be hurt the most.
In 2019 and 2020, anticipating that the budget would not be adopted prior to the New Jersey statutory deadline for the third quarter tax bills, the administration issued estimated tax bills with the approval of the council, which meant that the third quarter tax bills for those years were issued on August 1 with a grace period until August 10.
With the late third quarter tax bill, taxpayers also received a letter from the mayor proclaiming that “we are delivering a budget that will CUT TAXES for every Jersey City resident”. Some taxpayers have reached out to me and asked if the bills were delayed just so that propaganda could be inserted, since such claim can’t be made with “estimated taxes”. Others have gone even further asking me facetiously if it was permitted to have a “taxpayer funded campaign ad.”
Whatever the administration’s motives may be, what I am concerned about are the impacts. At the September 20 council caucus, I noted that I, like many homeowners, have automated the payment of property taxes electronically via the mortgage company or bank. We are not likely to be adversely impacted by the loss of a grace period or the unfair interest charges accruing daily from August 1. However, there are some who rely on paper bills, especially the most vulnerable in our community. Many senior homeowners have paid off their mortgages. They may not have a bank or mortgage company automatically paying their bill. Our seniors on fixed incomes could potentially be hurt by the decision to delay taxes if they end up getting hammered with the daily accrual of interest charges for late payment.
Taxpayers deserve better.
At the recent council caucus, I questioned the forethought and fairness that went into the decision to issue late third quarter tax bills. At the same caucus, Ward E Councilman James Solomon suggested that the administration seek a waiver from the State’s Division of Local Government Services on the interest charges for the period in question. I support such a waiver and will continue to press the administration, City Council, and the state to do whatever is in our power to minimize any harmful impacts resulting from the ill-conceived decision to issue late third quarter tax bills.
The bottom line.
Jersey City taxpayers should know there is no grace period. If you are late, you will be assessed an unfair amount of interest going back to August 1. This isn’t stated in your bill or in the mayor’s letter, but you deserve to know. Please let others know, and let’s continue to look out for one another. We are all in this together.,
Jersey City has made a relatively strong showing in a rating of “Best Foodie Cities,” placing 53 out of 182 cities surveyed.
Compiled by financial website WalletHub, known for such groundbreaking studies as “Best Cities for Bocce Ball,” the analysis ranked cities by blending scores for “affordability” and “diversity, accessibility and quality.” The two categories were given a weighting of 30 percent and 70 percent, respectively.
Unsurprisingly, Portland, Oregon, home of such delicacies as bone marrow clam chowder and Burmese tea leaf salad, landed in first place.
Chilltown placed just behind Providence, Rhode Island and in front of Cleveland, Ohio. Weighed down, no doubt, by its high “PPP” ratio (pizzerias per person), Jersey City garnered only a 53 for diversity, accessibility, and quality.
New York City, on the other hand did better, coming in at 25 overall with a 6th-place finish for diversity, accessibility, and quality.
The big surprise is Orlando, Florida at number two, ostensibly owing to the authentic international food offerings at Disney World’s Epcot.
One should take this study with a large grain of salt. But in an effort to raise our ranking, let’s make that sea salt.
You can delve into the actual WalletHub study here.
