Traversing Newark Avenue (Guest Post by Tyson Thorne and Josef Reyes)

On a windy Sunday this past October, we walked the entire length of Newark Avenue in Jersey City, New Jersey, starting from one end of the avenue and finishing at its other end on the other side of the city. This avenue cuts westward through Jersey City from the downtown section in the east, slipping underneath the New Jersey Turnpike, and terminating at the city's outskirts near the Hackensack River. As we walked down this avenue, which takes a little over an hour to fully traverse, we shot photographs of its surroundings and recorded the avenue's sounds and noises.

In documenting Newark Avenue block by block, the resulting photographs and sound recordings reveal the shifting temperament of this city street. From the densely modest dimensions of the downtown area to the barreling vehicular traffic at the leg heading up to Dickinson High School to the richly polychromatic/polyphonic environs of India Square, Newark Avenue continuously mutates in scale, in typology, in demographics and in meaning as it maneuvers its way around Jersey City. These mutations are made perceptible when Newark Avenue is documented in a linear fashion and the visual and aural textures of the street is organized and collated in their real-time order.

The following photographs and sound recording of Newark Avenue, specially edited for Where, is a condensed version of our visual/aural documentation of the avenue. This Newark Avenue document is part of a street recording project that we will be conducting at various streets in different cities and locales.

Click this image to launch the
Newark Avenue photo essay/sound recording:


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Big thanks to today's guest bloggers! Tyson Thorne is a graphic designer and photographer based in Jersey City (Website). and Josef Reyes is the editor of Conveyer, a zine about Jersey City.