About This Episode

No guest this time. Nat closes Season 3 on her own with a few minutes on the nine conversations that made up the season, the thread she noticed running through all of them, and an honest account of how this show actually gets made — a one-person operation with no ads, no crew, and no studio. Plus what’s coming in Season 4.

Key Insights

• What the Season 3 guests share isn’t a medium, and it isn’t even art — it’s the decision that this city was theirs to act on

• Nobody in this season waited for permission, and nobody waited to be qualified

• The podcast isn’t documentation of what other people make — it’s the same impulse in a different shape

• Nat’s job is being an artist; the show is made alongside that work, on purpose

• No ads, no video, no crew, no studio — recorded on Zoom and edited by Nat

• One conversation this season was lost to audio failure and will be re-recorded for Season 4

• You do what you can with what you have, and when it doesn’t work, you do it again

Season 3 — All Nine Conversations

• Ep. 321 — Woolpunk, fiber work out on the street

• Ep. 322 — Lucy Rovetto, painter and curator

• Ep. 323 — Nirupa Umapathy, who came here on a one-way ticket from Madras

• Ep. 324 — Melida Rodas, poet laureate of Jersey City and founder of the Jersey City Poetry Festival

• Ep. 325 — Elizabeth Deegan, who made a gallery out of her own house and garage in Greenville

• Ep. 326 — Chris Perez, who won’t let a building go

• Ep. 327 — Ivy Huang at IMUR, running a gallery that’s more than a gallery

• Ep. 328 — Jenna Geiger and Keith “Dutch” VanPelt at Deep Space, who made a gallery out of a garage

• Ep. 329 — DISTORT, a graffiti writer whose work you’ve walked past a hundred times

Coming Up Next

Nat is taking about two months off. Season 4 begins in the fall, opening with a conversation that had to be re-recorded after the original audio didn’t survive.

Chelsea Castro is also coming back. Chelsea was Nat’s guest at the end of Season 1, and the two have been working on an exhibition together, opening in January — more on that in Season 4.

Connect with Nat

‍ ‍

• Website: natkalbach.com

• Substack: in-depth writing that follows the episodes

• Instagram: @natkalbach

• Email: podcast@natkalbach.com

Music: Our theme music is “How You Amaze Me,” composed by Jim Kalbach and performed by Jim Kalbach, Bryan Beninghove, Charlie Siegler, and Pat Van Dyke.

Share Your Story: What sidewalk stories have you discovered in your neighborhood? Share them with Nat through email or social media.

Every podcast episode ends with me asking my guest the same question: “If you could meet anyone from Jersey City’s past, who would it be, where would you meet them, and what would you ask?”

DISTORT picked a painter I had never heard of. Alphaeus Philemon Cole - yes that is quite a name. He was born in Jersey City in 1876. His father was a wood engraver who spent his career making painstaking reproductions of Old Masters for magazines and books. Alphaeus grew up to watch his father create Rembrandts and Titians and went on to study in Florence and Paris. He was most known for his portraits painted. He spent his later days at the famous Chelsea Hotel, where he died in 1988 at 112 years old, it is said as the oldest verified man in the world.

When I looked closer into Cole’s work, I realized that he lived through all the significant milestones of modern art. The Armory Show, the Modernists…and he, he kept painting in the style of the nineteenth-century salon painters until he stopped painting at all. All of his twentieth century painting was done as if it was still the nineteenth century.

Which was almost what DISTORT had told me during the podcast recording: that modern art made him feel alienated, that he’d rather build on what came before than doing something just because no one else had done it before. DISTORT picked out of every ghost of Jersey City, the one that made a similar choice many decades before him. Did he know that?

And DISTORT did not want to ask Cole about painting.

I laughed hard in the recording and then later when I was putting the podcast together I thought, wow, he asked exactly the right question.

A few years ago I got to sit with someone who had crossed one hundred. Mrs. India Nicholson Edwards. She was 104 years old when we worked with the Jersey City Landmarks Conservancy on an oral history project. She was a civil rights pioneer, she had watched the city changing for a century. In a few hours at her table I learned more about Jersey City, especially the African American history of this city, than I had in a decade of living here.

But the part I am thinking of most was that before the actual interview, my friend Chelsea and I had lunch with her and her family. Just to get to know her. There were no cameras, no questions, no plan, just a wonderful conversation while sharing a meal. And at some point Mrs. India had a small glass of wine, and she told us she hadn’t touched wine until she was 80.

We laughed so hard. And then we decided, that duh - obviously - the wine was the reason she’d made it past a hundred. That became the running joke. Start drinking at 80, that’s the key! I will always cherish that lunch - it is more special to me than the actual interview.

I think DISTORT understood, that when you meet someone who has outlasted nearly everyone, awe comes first. All that time, all that witnessing. But that is not what you take home. What you take home is small and ordinary and yours. It is the wine. The joke. An hour at a table with people who are still laughing.

The lived century is the headline but the lunch…that is the story.

Mrs. India passed away in her home in March of 2024, at 105. It still makes me very sad, she was such a wonderful person. I was at her memorial, and they showed the oral history film, and at end of it she says this:

So there’s the answer. You ask what the person ate, or whether they wore gloves, or which sinkhole they sipped from, and it turns out, the thing that carried them that far wasn’t in the water at all. It is in how you hold people.

Although, I have to admit…depending on the person, I may need a little bit of that wine!

This piece is inspired by a conversation with DISTORT , muralist, graffiti writer, and fine artist, about shields made from car hoods, the responsibility of painting someone a neighborhood is grieving, and the layers a place has. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

About This Episode

A wall on Communipaw Avenue changed how I see this city — and in this bonus episode, I finally get to talk to the artist who painted it. DISTORT makes murals, graffiti, paintings, engraved car hoods he calls shields, and soon, a monumental first sculpture — all of it asking questions: who was here before, and what holds a place together? This is a conversation about armor and vulnerability, old masters and spray cans, and why painting the face of someone a neighborhood is grieving might be the most important work an artist can do.

Meet DISTORT

DISTORT is a Jersey City-based muralist, graffiti writer, and fine artist who has painted in Miami, Istanbul, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and across North Jersey — including one of the largest murals in New Jersey by a single artist, just outside the Holland Tunnel. Classically trained in Philadelphia, he moves between large-scale public walls and studio work: oil paintings, and engraved “shields” and “scrolls” made from car hoods, spray cans, and fire extinguishers — Renaissance armor for the present day. His recent solo shows include “Reaching for the Steal” at Deep Space Gallery (2020) and “Ending Up” at Art House Productions (2025). He keeps his face out of photos and lets the walls speak instead.

Connect with DISTORT

Website: distoart.com

Instagram: @distoart

Key Insights

• “Make it look cool, make it mean something” — that’s the whole job description, not necessarily in that order.

• A place has layers no single person can experience — the connecting thread is human beings.

• A mural can be a preservation task: change the place as little as possible, and let it speak.

• Ask eight neighbors about their day and you get eight answers. Ask who was here before, and the answers converge.

• Memorial portraits are the highest-stakes work there is — and the only payment that matters is someone finding relief in a face they miss.

• The shields began with a truck’s wheel well carried home on a bike: half Renaissance armor, half protest gear.

• “I’m the most in my element when I’m uncomfortable” — the next format is always the point.

Distort’s Peach Wall Mural, off Communipaw Avenue.

• The Peach War (1655) is the conflict that inspired the mural; a story that lives between documented history and legend. For the history and the legend side by side: David J. Goodwin - author of Left Bank of the Hudson — “The Peach Tree War” (davidjgoodwin.com). For the documented record: “Peach War Begins in Van Dyck Orchard” at Mapping Early New York. For the Munsee Lunaape perspective: “Munsee & Colonists at War” at Philipse Manor Hall.

Radar by Distort - Distort painted his dog after he passed away. “It doesn’t bring him back, but I loved looking at him.”

Distort - Ending Up- Solo Show at Arthouse in 2025

Resources

• Jersey City Mural Arts Program — where DISTORT painted his first large-scale mural and went “from hiding to participant.”

• Deep Space Gallery — home of “Reaching for the Steal” (2020). Jenna Geiger and Keith “Dutch” VanPelt are my guests on Episode 329.

• Art House Productions — home of “Ending Up” (2025), curated by Andrea McKenna (a past guest on this show).

• Emilio Florentine (Corey) — the muralist who ushered DISTORT into the mural program.

• Alphaeus Philemon Cole (1876–1988) — DISTORT’s signature-question pick: born in Jersey City, son of wood-engraver Timothy Cole, taught portrait and still-life painting at Cooper Union, lived his last 35 years at the Chelsea Hotel, painted until age 103, and died at 112 as the world’s oldest verified living man. Magical sinkhole unconfirmed.

• John Bachmann — the 19th-century bird’s-eye-view lithographer DISTORT mentions — the same artist Kati Vilim and I marveled at in Episode 328. My essay on him is on the Substack.

• Kota Onouchi at IMUR Gallery — the Jersey City painter devoted to old-master techniques who gets a shout-out in this episode. IMUR is Ivy Huang’s gallery — hear her in Episode 327.

Music: Our theme music is “How You Amaze Me,” composed by Jim Kalbach and performed by Jim Kalbach, Bryan Beninghove, Charlie Siegler, and Pat Van Dyke.

Support the Show: Subscribe to the podcast and sign up for Nat’s Substack to receive additional stories and visuals that complement each conversation.

Share Your Story: What sidewalk stories have you discovered in your neighborhood? Share them with Nat through email or social media.

I love this man a little bit. Not for what he did, but for what he confirms: something was happening in Lafayette worth sabotaging.

What was happening was Erminnie Smith. Scientist, linguist, the first woman elected a fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences. The Tuscarora, who adopted her while she compiled dictionaries of the Iroquois languages, named her Beautiful Flower. And from her “Gothic” cottage on Pacific Avenue, she ran the Aesthetic Society of Jersey City. A salon where Thomas Edison demonstrated his phonograph, where Matthew Arnold lectured, where five hundred people might show up on a Saturday afternoon. When a local paper sneered that a Jersey City woman had won a prize at the New Orleans Exposition for a “crazy quilt”: “we don’t know what impression the New Orleans people must have of us if even our quilts are crazy.” Erminnie noted that the prettiest quilt of a thousand on display came from 203 Pacific Avenue. Her own address. She was defending her weirdos by name.

I learned all of this because of a basement at 77 Cornelison Avenue, the home of Deep Space Gallery.

When I sat down with Jenna Geiger and Dutch to talk about ten years of Deep Space Gallery, Jenna told me that Jersey City has always drawn what she called the weirdo moths, people who feel a little different and are looking for somewhere to congregate. Then she mentioned a book she’d found years ago in the deepest downstairs of the gallery itself: Echoes of the Aesthetic Society of Jersey City, 1882. The building handed her the history. It had been sitting on the evidence all along.

And then the echoes started rolling toward me. Reading through the Society's rosters, I found Rev. Phebe Hanaford, yes, that Phebe, the minister whose census listing called Ellen her "Partner." She read her poems in Erminnie's parlor. And a few lines later: Mrs. John W. Herbert. Etta, daughter of the man who built my house, the house whose walls I've been interviewing for my book. Etta owned it for decades. She was one of the moths too.

Crazy quilts were once an embarrassment; now they hang in museums. Graffiti was vandalism; in 2024 Deep Space co-curated at the Venice Biennale. Graffiti artist curates fine art now. The line between crazy and art has always just been a matter of waiting.

And the organ grinder? These days, Dutch spins records on the gallery roof. Same neighborhood, same gathering instinct, but the music switched sides. No one is trying to drown anyone out. The sound is the invitation now- it’s the light!

Erminnie’s house still stands on Pacific Avenue, renumbered from 203 to 322-324, hidden behind stores built over her front garden. The cover of her Society’s book carried a line from Tennyson: Our echoes roll from soul to soul, and grow forever and forever.

They're still rolling. One of them just came through my front door.

Somewhere near you, I promise, the moths are gathering. Go find the light.

This piece was inspired by my conversation with Jenna Geiger and Keith “Dutch” vanPelt on Nat’s Sidewalk Stories. You can listen to the full episode here.

About This Episode

Deep Space Gallery has been called the spiritual heir to 111 First Street — the legendary warehouse artist community that was demolished in 2007 and never stopped being mourned. What makes that comparison remarkable is that Dutch, one of Deep Space’s co-founders, never once set foot inside 111. He didn’t inherit that legacy consciously. He just built something that carried its spirit anyway.

In this conversation, Nat sits down with Jenna Geiger and Keith VanPelt, who goes by Dutch, to mark ten years of Deep Space Gallery at 77 Cornelison Avenue, built into the side of Bergen Hill. They talk about graffiti and lineage, the doula parallel for gallery work, the strange gravitational pull Jersey City exerts on outsider-y people, and a woman named Erminnie Smith who was doing something remarkably similar on Pacific Avenue in 1882 - with Oscar Wilde.

Meet Jenna Geiger and Dutch from Deep Space Gallery

Jenna Geiger and Keith Van Pelt aka Dutch - Deep Space Gallery -photo credit Megan Maloy

Jenna Geiger

Jenna Geiger is the lead curator, co-founder, and co-owner of Deep Space Gallery in Jersey City. She has curated monthly solo and group exhibitions since the gallery opened in 2016. Her curatorial roots grew from an academic background in anthropology, where she developed a deep appreciation for art as a system of meaning, a way communities understand themselves and translate values across time. Before Deep Space, she worked as a family nurse practitioner and spent years as a doula. She brings all of that into how she holds space for artists.

Keith “Dutch” VanPelt

Keith VanPelt - Dutch - is the founder, director, and co-curator of Deep Space Gallery. He studied at the duCret School of Art in Plainfield, NJ, where he learned stained glass, and his work as a painter and muralist is informed by deep roots in graffiti culture. He built the gallery walls himself. He is currently working on a new mural, alongside ongoing stained glass commissions. He describes himself as someone who needs a prompt - and then delivers.

Connect with Jenna & Dutch

• Deep Space Gallery Website

• Location: 77 Cornelison Avenue, Jersey City, NJ (Bergen-Lafayette / Bergen Hill)

• Deep Space Gallery Instagram

• Deep Space Gallery Artsy

• Dutch’ Instagram

Key Insights

• You don’t have to consciously inherit a legacy to carry it. Dutch never made it inside 111 First Street — and still built something Tris McCall called its spiritual heir.

• Their gallery philosophy was never a mission statement. It evolved from showing graffiti artists who were incredibly talented with some not formally trained, and the ethos grew from there.

• Jenna describes her role as a gallerist the way she describes her work as a doula: reading what the person needs, holding the space, not imposing a framework. Asking, “What is driving you to make art now, at this particular juncture in your life?”

• Jersey City has a force field. Jenna calls it the ley lines of this latitude and longitude, something that draws outsider-y people who are looking for places to congregate and express themselves.

• In the 1880s, a woman named Erminnie Smith was running a salon on Pacific Avenue where Oscar Wilde read, Thomas Edison demonstrated the phonograph, and five hundred people showed up on a Saturday afternoon. Her house still stands.

• Selling art is not just revenue. It’s an act of endorsement: the collector is almost voting for an expression and sending it out into the world to live a life the artist will never fully know.

Places & People Mentioned

• Deep Space Gallery, 77 Cornelison Avenue, Bergen-Lafayette. Built into Bergen Hill. Gallery upstairs, The Hive flex space downstairs. deepspacejc.com

• 111 First Street: The legendary warehouse artist community in what is now the Powerhouse Arts District. Demolished 2007. Tris McCall called Deep Space its spiritual heir.

• 58 Gallery at 58 Cole Street, run by Orlando Reyes. Described as Dutch’s introduction to the Jersey City art scene; ran approximately 2002–2012.

• Pro Arts Jersey City: Grew directly out of JCAST and the 111 First Street community. Continues the lineage.

• Art House Productions: Founded by Christine Goodman; described as the theater branch of the same creative ecosystem as 111 First Street.

• Elevator Studios: Run by Shimonna Stokes, near Hamilton Park. Collaborating partner in Wandering Lights Projects.

• Majestic Theater lobby: One of the off-site curation spaces for the Wandering Lights Projects collaboration.

• Dickinson High School: Where Jenna’s grandfather, Saul Geiger, taught phys ed for 42 years and taught generations of Jersey City kids to swim.

• 150 Bay Street: Where Jenna hung Dutch’s stained glass for JCAST in the early days.

• Caven Point: Wildlife and birding spot in Jersey City where Wandering Lights Projects hosted a bird watching field trip tied to an exhibition of wildlife artists.

Visuals

Dutch and Jenna

Deep Space Gallery - She’s Like the Wind Exhibition Space - artists shown Sarah Grace, Shimonna Stokes

Deep Space Gallery- She’s Like the Wind - artists shown Amelia Shields, Jodi Gerbi

Deep Space Gallery- Distort Exhibition in 2020

In the Hive at Deep Space Gallery in 2020

Stained Glass window that Dutch made for us inspired by pattern that were in our fireplaces - 2020

Cross Episode Connections

• Tris McCall (NSSP #105, Season 1) — Called Deep Space “extremely 111 First Street” in his episode. That quote is delivered directly to Jenna and Dutch here, and their response is one of the best moments in the episode. Worth going back to #105 if you haven’t heard it.

• Distort: Mentioned here as an early founding partner and supporter of Deep Space Gallery, and the inspiration for the gallery’s name. Distort is the subject of one of the upcoming episodes.

Connect with Nat

• Website: natkalbach.com

• Substack:

Nat’s Sidewalk Stories

I'm an artist-historian uncovering the stories hidden in Jersey City's buildings, one painting, podcast, and preserved memory at a time.

By Nat Kalbach

• Instagram: @natkalbach

• Email: podcast@natkalbach.com

Music: Our theme music is “How You Amaze Me,” composed by Jim Kalbach and performed by Jim Kalbach, Bryan Beninghove, Charlie Siegler, and Pat Van Dyke.

Support the Show: Subscribe to the podcast and sign up for my Substack to receive additional stories and visuals that complement each conversation.

Share Your Story: What sidewalk stories have you discovered in your neighborhood? Share them with me through email or social media.

Nat’s Sidewalk Stories explores the intersection of place, community, and storytelling through conversations with practitioners, community leaders, and local changemakers.

The first time a curator came to my studio, I was a bit panicked. Not visibly, I think, but internally. I’m a self-taught artist, and my studio is in my home, which means there is no neutral territory removed from my private life. There’s the work and there’s everything else: the life that surrounds me and my work.

When Lucy Rovetto walked in, wonderfully warm and friendly, I was ready to show her my paintings. Well, kind of ready. I was deep in imposter syndrome. It would be the moment she would find me out. The online work she had seen was all just clouds and mirrors. She would see the paintings in person and be appalled. But instead, she walked kind of past them and went straight for my ledger books and art journals I had tucked into a corner.

I hadn’t decided that those were to be seen. They were the rawest thing, the stuff that comes unfiltered out of my brain. Pages of mark-making and color tests and notes to myself that weren’t meant to be anything yet, or actually ever. Lucy picked them up and started turning pages, and liked them. Later they ended up alongside my paintings in my solo exhibition at the Museum of Jersey City History.

I was thinking about that moment when I was talking with Ivy Huang from IMUR Gallery in the latest podcast episode. You prepare for one version of your art and someone sees another. If you are lucky, the one they see is more honest than the one you prepared.

This is what Ivy talks about when she describes her studio visits — all 160 of them. She goes into a visit without evaluating. She is going there to see if there is mutual recognition, whether the artist and the gallery understand each other well enough to build something together. Not transactionally. Together. She uses the word partnership, and means that when an exhibition or project ends, it doesn’t mean the relationship ends.

Ivy says she goes in without evaluating. And I believe her. But as the artist standing there, you are being evaluated: your work is, your space is, the version of yourself you present is. Both things are true at the same time. The generosity is in how that evaluation is held.

As an artist I think about what that partnership actually requires. It asks something of both people. For a gallerist it means coming without an agenda that forecloses what they might find. For an artist it may mean letting the ledger books be in the room. There is a power imbalance built into the dynamic. Someone is being visited, someone is doing the visiting. The only thing that corrects it is respect and genuine curiosity on both sides.

And that, I think, is true every time you meet anyone.

When I think back to that very first studio visit I cringe a little. The not-knowing, the bracing for judgment that never came. What I understand now, having a few more under my invisible belt, is that the best visits aren’t inspections. They are conversations between people who both want the work to find its place in the world. That is where the magic happens. That’s the collaboration. And I would invite that into my studio any day. I also just really want to show my work.

And to everyone who visited my studio so far. Thank you! You showed up with curiosity and that made all the difference.

This piece accompanies Episode 27 of Nat’s Sidewalk Stories - I Am You Are with Ivy Huang, gallerist and curator. Listen here.

About This Episode

What does a gallery actually owe to the artists it represents? Ivy Huang has a clear answer — and it goes well beyond hanging work on a wall. In this conversation, Ivy talks about what it means to truly see an artist, how to make a gallery feel like a place anyone can walk into, and why she thinks the gallery’s role has fundamentally changed in the social media age. She also tells the story of her grandmother, a Chinese opera singer who lost her voice and still woke every morning at 5:30 to practice — a woman whose example shapes everything Ivy has built in Jersey City and beyond.

Meet Ivy Huang

Ivy Huang is the founder of IMUR Gallery on Green Street in Jersey City — a space whose name, I Am You Are, arrived by accident and turned out to be Rumi spelled backwards (which is also the name of the amazing Turkish restaurant next door). Before opening the gallery, Ivy worked in international marketing and logistics and practiced law as a barrister at the High Court of New Zealand. She is also co-founder of Ivy and Tris Productions with writer Tris McCall, which produces short documentary content about artists and curators. Through IMUR Initiatives, she connects Jersey City artists with international opportunities and residencies.

Connect with Ivy Huang

• IMUR Gallery website

• IMUR Gallery on Instagram

• IMUR Initiatives on Instagram

• Ivy and Tris Productions on Instagram

Key Insights

• A gallery is not a storefront. Ivy is clear that IMUR exists to carry a message, not just to display work. Every exhibition has a conceptual direction — diversity, rethinking collaboration, positivity — and the gallery’s identity depends on that consistency.

• Studio visits are about mutual recognition. Ivy has done around 160 studio visits. She goes not just to evaluate work, but to let artists evaluate her — to see whether there’s genuine understanding on both sides before any commitment is made.

• Showing is more powerful than teaching. Ivy’s grandmother, a Chinese opera singer who lost her voice, never stopped practicing every morning. Ivy says she wasn’t teaching — she was showing. That distinction runs through everything Ivy does.

• Artists shouldn’t have to post like influencers. The gallery’s new role, in Ivy’s view, is to take on the marketing, branding, and social media strategy — so artists can focus on making work rather than performing their own visibility online.

• Collaboration requires matching expectations, not just enthusiasm. Ivy’s test for a good collaboration: both parties want the same thing, communicate openly, and are thinking about the long-term relationship — not just the project at hand.

• Jersey City artists need opportunities beyond Jersey City. Through IMUR Initiatives and Art Voyages, Ivy is working to connect local artists with international residencies and exchanges — not for commercial reasons, but because exposure to different environments deepens the work.

Resources

• IMUR Gallery — 237 Green Street, Jersey City

• Art House Productions — frequent IMUR collaborator

• Tris McCall — Episode 105 of Nat’s Sidewalk Stories

• Ivy and Tris Productions — ‘The Curators’ Episode 1

Coming Up Next

Join me for the next episode where I will talk with artist Kati Vilim!

Connect with Nat

• • Website

  • Substack

  • Instagram: @natkalbach

  • Email: podcast@natkalbach.com

  Music:Our theme music is “How You AmazeMe,” composed by Jim Kalbach and performed by Jim Kalbach, Bryan Beninghove, Charlie Siegler, and Pat Van Dyke.

  Support the Show: Subscribe to the podcast and sign up for Nat’s Substack to receive additional stories and visuals that complement each conversation.

  Nat’s Sidewalk Stories explores the intersection of place, community, and storytelling through conversations with artists, organizers, and community builders shaping Jersey City. New episodes release on the 2nd and 4th Thursdays of each month.

Just like so much of our German past, it was too massive to be destroyed or simply forgotten. In fact, this enormous, unsightly thing in the heart of St. Pauli was so big that the amount of explosives required to demolish it would have damaged the entire surrounding neighborhood that was still standing after the war. So it stayed.

And inside, while I was living there, it became the so-called Media Bunker. Band rehearsal rooms, clubs, a huge photo equipment store, offices. Lately it has been transformed further: apartments built on top, a mountain path added for the public to walk up and around the building to a rooftop with a view of the city, and an urban farm moved in. While you walk the path, you learn the full history, not just that it sheltered civilians, but that it was built by forced laborers. It now has a memorial for the victims of the Nazi regime and the Second World War. I am glad it has been acknowledged and not just buried in a prettified mixed-use project. It is not hiding what it was built for, or when. It makes everyone who has never heard the story stop and ask: what is this building? What happened here?

If you don’t know this about me yet: I am a sucker for interesting adaptive reuse. One of my favorite summer destinations is the Cochecton Pumphouse. A … well, you guessed it… pumphouse built in the 1890s, of which only the four walls are standing nowadays. The roof gone, the interior gone. My friends run it as a beer garden and it is much beloved by everyone. Sometimes it becomes an indoor outdoor market without a roof, yeah, I know, weird. Sometimes you can hear great bands there, or go to the best Halloween parties on earth: funky and strange, with the kind of untamed creativity that only a place like that can bring forward.

There are prestigious versions of this too. The old warehouse turned Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg. They added a glass tower on top that mimics ship sails, fitting for a building right at the harbor. I toured the construction site with a hard hat when it was being built, standing inside what would become one of the finest concert halls in the world, cranes overhead, the harbor visible through the open frame. Now it is part of the city skyline in a way you wouldn’t even remember doing without.

And of course the Tate Turbine Hall in London, now the Tate Modern, a destination for any art-loving visitor, and a building I mention often in my gallery talks about my Powerhouse painting.

All these buildings do something to a city or town that new buildings simply can’t. They carry the weight of what came before, and somehow make room for what comes next. I keep looking for them everywhere I go.

Which brings me to the Powerhouse. I have been painting it ever since I moved to Jersey City, because it has the same quality as every building I just described. Birds flying through, light poking in, peace and spookiness living side by side. It is waiting for something. It wants to stay part of this city … and it can. It remembers what Jersey City used to be: an industrial, progressive engine that electrified a transportation tunnel, powered the subway system that became the PATH and parts of New York City. We have always lived in the shadow of the big city across the water, but we also made it work. Isn’t that something.

And now the question is how we bring it forward. How we give this building a new life that doesn’t erase what was there. As Chris Perez described it in our conversation, the Powerhouse is a building waiting for its “and yet.” Can we start every reason why this building couldn’t be preserved with a curious and imaginative “and yet”? Let’s try. It’s fun. And I believe in it, which is why I keep painting it.

About This Episode

Some buildings hold a whole city’s story inside them — and some people dedicate years to making sure those buildings don’t disappear. Chris Perez, president of the Jersey City Landmarks Conservancy and founder of the Bayside Park Neighborhood Association, has been doing exactly that. This conversation moves between the personal and the civic: how an outsider earns his place in a community, why history belongs to the people who bother to learn it, and what it actually takes to save a building — and a neighborhood — from being erased.

Meet Chris Perez

Chris Perez grew up in Queens, moved to Jersey City’s South Side in 2007, and spent years quietly learning the history of a neighborhood that wasn’t originally his. He founded the Bayside Park Neighborhood Association and now serves as president of the Jersey City Landmarks Conservancy, leading the Save the Powerhouse campaign to adaptively reuse the 1908 landmark before it’s lost. His community work spans historic preservation, zoning advocacy, youth programming, and building connection between new and longtime residents.

Connect with Chris:

Jersey City Landmarks Conservancy

Walking Tours- Jersey City Landmarks Conservancy on Eventbrite

Key Insights

• Earning your place in a community takes patience, curiosity, and listening before you ever try to lead.

• History on the South Side isn’t lost — it’s sitting in archives, old maps, and the memories of neighbors who are slowly disappearing.

• The Save the Powerhouse campaign has been running since 1999. Preservation takes longer than anyone wants it to.

• Once a historic site goes into fully private hands, the community loses its ability to shape what it becomes.

• New arrivals don’t always know what already exists — giving them access to neighborhood history changes how they show up.

• The goal for the Powerhouse isn’t just preservation — it’s public access, community use, and Jersey City maintaining some ownership stake.

Visual Documentation

Powerhouse at a recent walking tour with John Gomez - photo Nat Kalbach

At Novado Gallery- talking to the JCLC walking tour participants about the powerhouse painting at Novado Gallery - Photo Chris Perez

Related Resources

• Jersey City Landmarks Conservancy: jclandmarks.org

• John Gomez, founder of the JCLC — one of the best walking tour guides in Jersey City

• Save the Powerhouse campaign — follow updates at jclandmarks.org

• Bergen Arches and the Embankment

Coming Up Next

Next up: Ivy Huang, founder and director of IMUR Gallery — artist, educator, and connector of creative communities across Jersey City and beyond.

Connect with Nat

• Website: natkalbach.com

• Substack:

Nat’s Sidewalk Stories

I'm an artist-historian uncovering the stories hidden in Jersey City's buildings, one painting, podcast, and preserved memory at a time.

By Nat Kalbach

• Instagram: @natkalbach

• Email: podcast@natkalbach.com

Music: Our theme music is “How You Amaze Me,” composed by Jim Kalbach and performed by Jim Kalbach, Bryan Beninghove, Charlie Siegler, and Pat Van Dyke.

Support the Show: Subscribe to the podcast and sign up for my Substack to receive additional stories and visuals that complement each conversation.

Share Your Story: What sidewalk stories have you discovered in your neighborhood? Share them with me through email or social media.

Nat’s Sidewalk Stories explores the intersection of place, community, and storytelling through conversations with practitioners, community leaders, and local changemakers.

I have two coffees in the morning. They are the juice that gets me going. The first coffee is with my husband. We drink it at breakfast, talk about the day ahead, the news, whatever is on our minds. That one belongs to us.

The second cup is mine. I carry it up to my desk and open a notebook. The computer stays dark a little longer.

I don’t really care about the notebook itself. I have a lot of notebooks. I am kind of a notebook collector and I care about all my other notebooks. But that one. WHATEVER. It is not supposed to be a diary, not a legacy, not for me to ever read it again. It is just a small container to sort out my thoughts. To connect the dots, if you will, to give myself time to think about the creative stuff that is in my head and hasn’t quit yet found its footing. It is not pretty and definitely not coherent. It is creative vomit on a page. All of it, the painting, the book, the research rabbit hole I fell into at 11pm, and the thing I read in the news that I am still not over. It goes all in.

I love writing in it with my fountain pen. Not because I want it pretty, but because I love the fountain pen. It is the act of how it glides over the page, and the act of having to refill the ink while I am writing - out of a bottle -of course. That short pause between the words, when the ink runs out but the thoughts continue.

And yes, sometimes there are sentences about the state of the world in there. With curse words. Lots of curse words. Because that is what keeps me up at night and needs somewhere to go before I can get to the painting.

Sometimes I look at a photo of the painting I am working on. The one I took the previous day before cleaning the palette, the brushes and the dirty water, and prepared the studio for the next morning. Yes, I cheat - the photo is on a phone - no one here to judge me in the morning. Well, almost, maybe Pretzel does who lies on the desk giving me a side eye while I write. Cats! I didn’t say I was working totally without devices in the morning. I am the boss applesauce. What does the painting tell me in this stage? Where did it go from the previous day and where does it want to go? Anything in that little screen that tells me something that is still unresolved, a color that wants to riff off the others already there, a story that still wants to be told.

Sometimes I think about the conversations that I had on the podcast, if I had it the previous day. The conversations linger. They often happen later in the day, no time to really absorb them. The pages let me percolate what I heard. What resonates, what I learned, what was surprising. What do they trigger, what do I want to explore.

Elizabeth Deegan was talking about her neighbor drying clothes on a clothes lines. Something slow, she said. Something still worth it. The best smell in the world, clothes dried outside in the summer. It made me look up from the notebook and think, the world can be so good.

By the time the coffee goes cold, a couple pages are filled and I am ready to go. Writing, painting or whatever else needs to be done. That is how I know I am ready.

This piece was inspired by my conversation with Elizabeth Deegan on Nat’s Sidewalk Stories. You can listen to the full episode here.

About This Episode

Elizabeth Deegan didn’t move to Greenville with a plan. She moved there because she could afford a house with a clawfoot bathtub and a chunky banister, a place that felt like what a home is supposed to look like. What she found was a neighborhood with a real sense of community and almost no infrastructure to tell the rest of Jersey City it existed.

About fifteen years ago, she did something about that. She converted her backyard garage into an art space, recruited friends from Queens, Brooklyn, and Long Island to help build it, and started hosting shows. That became Project Greenville, still running, still volunteer-powered, still the farthest dot on the JC Friday map.

This conversation is about what it takes to show up for a neighborhood, year after year, on a shoestring budget, mostly without anyone asking you to.

Meet Elizabeth Deegan

Photo by Jason Logan

Elizabeth Deegan is the founder of Project Greenville, an independent community art space operating out of a converted garage — and sometimes the living room — of her home on Winfield Avenue in Greenville, Jersey City. She has been running shows, hosting artists, and building community there for fifteen years, entirely on a volunteer and grassroots basis.

Project Greenville participates in JC Fridays and JCast, and hosts themed exhibitions throughout the year including a beloved Winter Wonderland show. Elizabeth is not an artist herself, she is, as she puts it, the person making the Canva flyer at 11 o’clock at night, hanging the art, and making sure people know it’s happening.

Connect with Elizabeth & Project Greenville

• Project Greenville on Instagram: @projectgreenvillejerseycity

Key Insights

• Greenville was invisible on the cultural map — literally. A tourist pamphlet Elizabeth found showed downtown Jersey City, the Loews Theater, Liberty State Park, and then an arrow pointing to Bayonne. That part of the city just wasn’t there.

• The only press Greenville got was bad press. The neighborhood was named in the paper almost exclusively when something went wrong — never for the sense of community Elizabeth was experiencing on her block every single day.

• Project Greenville was built by outsiders. The friends who gutted the garage, repaired the concrete floor, and hung the lights were all from Queens, Brooklyn, Long Island, and the Bronx. None of them lived in Jersey City. They just thought it sounded like a good idea.

• The art is almost beside the point. Elizabeth describes it herself: 90% of what makes a Project Greenville afternoon special is just Greenville. The Indian wedding down the street, the music from a neighbor’s boombox, the clothesline. The art is the excuse to come.

• Community fills the gaps institutions leave behind. When the city removed park benches to discourage loitering, high school students fought to bring them back — and funded it themselves. Nobody else was going to do that.

• Fifteen years of building something changes what you can let go of. Elizabeth walked out of her own event to go see a comedy show in Staten Island — and the house ran itself. That was the moment she knew it had worked.

Places & Resources Mentioned

In Greenville

• Neptune Bakery — custard cups, heroes, a place to actually sit down

Boulevard Paint & Hardware Co — 1790 John F. Kennedy Blvd, Jersey City, NJ 07305. An old-school hardware store where the guys actually know your old house, won’t bullshit you, and the ownership is being passed to someone who’s worked there for 25 years. A model for how neighborhood businesses survive.

Columbia Park, Winfield Avenue — Elizabeth’s corner. The park where benches were removed to discourage crime, and then a picnic table and benches arrived in concrete, courtesy of local high school students who fought for it.

Historic Greenville (as described by Elizabeth’s neighbor)

What Greenville once had: shops all along Ocean Avenue, a drive-in theater, concerts at Roosevelt Stadium, a public pool on Kennedy Boulevard with a hamburger restaurant next door. Elizabeth’s answer to the signature question is to go back to 1958 Greenville and ask some teenagers: what are we doing today?

Mentioned in Context

JC Fridays — citywide art event; Project Greenville is reliably the farthest dot on the map

JCast — Jersey City’s open studios event

The Loews Theater, Jersey City — mentioned as evidence that an art community existed in the city that Greenville residents weren’t being told about

Visual Documentation

Project Greenville- The Art Shed

The Clothesline

Photo of Columbia Park with benches in Greenville, photo by Project Greenville

old postcard of Columbia Park

1945 Trolley at Old Bergen St and Winfield Avenue

Bowling Alley in Greenville- long gone

Explore Further

A companion Substack article is coming the week after this episode drops. Subscribe to my substack here- so you don’t miss it!

Coming Up Next

My next episode will drop in two weeks and I am excited to have Chris Perez as a guest!

Connect with Nat

• Website & Substack: natkalbach.com

• Instagram: @natkalbach

Email: podcast@natkalbach.com

Theme Music: “How You Amaze Me,” composed by Jim Kalbach and performed by Jim Kalbach, Bryan Beninghove, Charlie Siegler, and Pat Van Dyke.

Support the Show: Subscribe to the podcast and sign up for Nat’s Substack to receive stories and visuals that complement each conversation.

Share Your Story: What sidewalk stories have you discovered in your neighborhood? Share them with Nat via email or social media.

There is a sentence I have carried for over 20 years. It was said by Argyris Sfountouris, a client of the law office where I worked for 13 years as a paralegal in Germany. Argyris was four years old when an SS Division massacred 218 people in his village of Distomo, Greece, including his parents and 30 of his relatives. He is the little boy in the photograph with the bag. The photo was taken right after it happened.

At a screening of a documentary about his life “A Song for Argyris,” a young man stood up and asked how he, at 23, should feel responsible for something he wasn’t alive for. The room erupted “how can you ask such a question?” Argyris raised his hand and said: “Stop. Let him speak. It’s a good question.”

Then he answered it with so much grace that it has never left me.

The responsibility to make sure this never happens again.

I was a paralegal for in total 17 years. WWII reparation cases. Asylum cases. Crossings, separations, verdicts that arrived too late or not at all. I remember the day we got news about a family we had fought for for years. A woman and her seven children, finally reunited with her husband, an accepted asylum seeker in Germany. After many years, we had won. Three months later he died of a heart attack driving home from a night shift. And then the government moved to send her back, because the reason she had been granted entry was now, in their words, obsolete.

I went home that day and made something. I don’t remember deciding to. I just needed somewhere to put it.

That’s how it started really. Not a plan, not a pivot. Just the studio as the only room big enough to hold what the office and my heart couldn’t.

The law taught me other things too. Research, precision, the discipline of deadlines, the habit of getting details right because someone’s life might depend on it. I brought all of that with me when I left. It lives in how I prepare every podcast conversation, how I chase a historical thread for the book, how I can’t let a fact sit unverified, and how if I commit so something, I try to give it my best.

But what I learned most of all is empathy. These cases taught me empathy in a way nothing else could. Not empathy as a concept. Empathy as a daily practice of sitting with someone else’s worst chapter and still showing up the next day.

Those years also gave me something I didn’t expect. A hunger to understand how things connect. Why history matters to the present. Why a building is never just a building. Why I want to know who lived somewhere before me and what they carried. It’s why I’m writing a book about my 135-year old house. It’s why I keep choosing podcast guests who are digging into this city’s layers. It’s why I paint the places that are disappearing. You sit with enough human stories and you start to understand that nothing is isolated, that everything has a before, and that paying attention to it is its own form of responsibility.

Melida Rodas, poet laureate, projection artist, and as it turns out a fellow paralegal, told me in our podcast conversation, she learned to go into the dark forest with stones instead of breadcrumbs, so she could always find her way back to herself.

I understood exactly what she meant. And I kept thinking about Argyris and that sentence he said. You have to take responsibility. I heard it as a paralegal in Germany. I carry it now as someone who chose this country, this city, this community. Times are asking us to mean it, loudly, locally, in whatever way we have. For me, some of it is the podcast. Some of it is the book. Some of it is showing up. And some of it, maybe most of it, is this.

Maybe my stones are making art.

This piece was inspired by my conversation with Melida Rodas on Nat’s Sidewalk Stories. You can listen to the full episode here.

About This Episode

Some people seem to exist at the center of a community not because they’re chasing visibility, but because they keep showing up and doing the work. Melida Rodas is Jersey City’s Poet Laureate, the founder of the Jersey City Poetry Festival, a projection artist, former cruise director, paralegal, sailor, and mom — and in this conversation, she shares things she doesn’t usually talk about. We get into sailing through a storm on the Hudson, what the law taught her about poetry, going into the dark forest of memoir writing and finding your way back, and why she keeps choosing joy even when the creative work demands going to very difficult places.

Meet Melida Rodas

Melida Rodas in Liberty State Park

Melida Rodas is the Poet Laureate of Jersey City and the founder and executive director of the Jersey City Poetry Festival, a free, citywide nonprofit festival celebrating poetry in all its interdisciplinary forms. Born in Guatemala and raised in the New York/New Jersey area, Melida came to poetry through fine art — her degree is in sculpture — and has built a creative practice that moves fluidly between writing, projection art, photography, and film poems. She is currently collaborating with the Division of Parks and Recreation to embed poetry into Jersey City’s reservoir landscape, and is part of the creative team on the inaugural theatrical pilot of Monsters, Inc., a collaboration with Disney and City Kids Playhouse. She is also a member of the Lincoln Association.

Connect with Melida

• Website:

https://www.melidarodas.com/

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/melidarodaspoet/

• Jersey City Poetry Festival:

https://www.jerseycitypoetryfestival.org/

• REED Magazine: https://www.jerseycitypoetryfestival.org/reedmagazine

Key Insights

• A life that looks scattered from the outside — cruise director, paralegal, artist, sailor, poet — can turn out to be a single convergence, not a contradiction

• The discipline of legal writing made Melida’s poetry tighter, more compressed, and fiercely edited — two seemingly opposite worlds shaping each other

• Sailing through a storm on the Hudson taught her that if you keep going when you could turn back, you earn something that carries you everywhere after

• Writing memoir means learning to go into the dark forest with stones instead of breadcrumbs — so you can always find your way back to your present self

• The Poet Laureate role is only as big as you make it; Melida turned it into a free citywide festival, a nonprofit, and a platform for interdisciplinary art

• Liberty State Park isn’t just green space — it’s the shore where immigrant families stood and looked out at what they’d crossed everything to reach, and it’s worth fighting for

• Abraham Lincoln passed through Jersey City twice: once alive to cheering crowds, once in a coffin — and the children of this city helped pay for his statue with their pennies

• Poetry belongs in the landscape, not just on the page — the reservoir pilot project is proof that art can live anywhere the city does

Visual Documentation

Poetry Museum at the Museum of Jersey City History- photo curtesy of Melida Rodas

Liberty State Park - photo Nat Kalbach

The Mystic Lincoln Statue at Lincoln Park in Jersey City- photo Nat Kalbach

The Reservoir in Jersey City - photo Nat Kalbach

Related Resources

• Jersey City Poetry Festival

• REED Magazine

• Friends of Liberty State Park

• Museum of Jersey City History

• City Kids Playhouse

• 14C

• Jersey City Parks Coalition

Explore Further

Companion Substack piece: “Maybe My Stones Are Making Art” — Melida’s dark forest metaphor sparked a reflection on what it meant to work as a paralegal on WWII reparation cases and asylum seeker cases, and how making art became the way to process stories too heavy to carry home. Coming soon.

Coming Up Next

Next up: a conversation with Elizabeth Deegan, the wonderful person behind Project Greenville.

Connect with Nat

• Website: natkalbach.com

• Substack:

Nat’s Sidewalk Stories

I'm an artist-historian uncovering the stories hidden in Jersey City's buildings, one painting, podcast, and preserved memory at a time.

By Nat Kalbach

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/natkalbach/

• Email: podcast@natkalbach.com

Music: Our theme music is “How You Amaze Me,” composed by Jim Kalbach and performed by Jim Kalbach, Bryan Beninghove, Charlie Siegler, and Pat Van Dyke.

Support the Show: Subscribe to the podcast and sign up for Nat’s Substack to receive additional stories and visuals that complement each conversation.

Dear New Neighbor,

welcome. I see your lights on. I know you’re here. Well kind of. You only sleep here. Allow me to be THAT neighbor. The nosy one. The one who knocks.

See, I moved to Jersey City in 2013 and almost immediately got pulled into an exhibition called Gentrification. It was curated by Allison Hall who’d interviewed all kinds of people. Longtime residents, newcomers, people who’d lived here their whole lives. And then there were others. the ones who described Jersey City as the place where they slept. Nice apartment, great PATH access, see you never. I remember listening to those interviews and thinking…HOW? How do you live somewhere and not get curious about it?

I’ve since learned the answer. You get busy. You get tired. You get comfortable with the communte to New York EFFING City - I mean - people come from all over the world to go there, after all. And you know three restaurants here - that’s all that there is, no? My friend Nirupa did that for fifteen years. Fifteen years in Paulus Hook before she walked the city in earnest. She drove to her yoga studio seven minutes away. She took the PATH. She worked in Manhattan and came home and slept. And then she left Wall Street, did the Camino de Santiago - and something clicked. She came back and started mapping Jersey City with her feet. She fell completely in love with it. The irony is that she’s leaving it now, priced out, grieving it, crying on her early morning drives. But that’s a different story and you can listen to it on my podcast.

Consider this your onboarding. The one nobody gave you when you signed the lease.

WALK THIS THING. the whole city is intact and walkable - and yes, don’t get distracted by the stupid turnpike overpass- that sucks, we all know but once you get past it - there are other worlds that are full of surprises. Tris McCall, who knows a lot about Jersey City, once pointed out that the towers around Journal Square are basically designed to funnel you to the PATH. But don’t let them. You are not sheep, are you? Take a detour. Look up. There are street signs painted by hand still surviving at certain street corners. There’s a street sign on top of St. Peter’s Prep that will stop you cold if you could actually look at it. My friend Kelly Carroll who is the director of the Atlantic Avenue BID in Brooklyn, calls these things in Jersey City, little treasures hiding in plain sight. She’s right.

THE PARKS ARE NOT JUST PARKS. Liberty State Park, our crown jewel, with, let’s be honest, the best view of Manhattan on the entire East Coast. It exists only because one man named Morris Pessin spent nineteen years fighting to turn a garbage dump into a green space. Nineteen years and his son is still fighting the fight to keep it a public park. Maybe go and feel grateful - it is free…not much in our area is actually free. Lincoln Park has free outdoor concerts on summer evenings by a fountain that looks like it wandered in from a European city and never left. You can plunk yourself right on it’s wall or bring a chair and join us. Van Vorst has a farmers market, beautiful trees, and as my friend Nirupa reminded me, a bulletin board where actual humans post actual things that are actually happening this weekend. Revolutionary!

THE ART SCENE will surprise you. Deep Space gallery has a vibe that is channeling the spirit of the legendary 111 First Street. Arthouse Productions does theater and runs several exhibitions in their gallery a year. Novado Gallery. IMUR, Drawing Rooms, Smush Gallery, Curious Matters- I am forgetting a couple and that will make me look bad - but we need a whole space here. And then there is Project Greenville - Elizabeth opens her own home in winter, her backyard garage in summer, for local art. The last time I was there, an Indian wedding was playing out next door and someone’s neighbor was hanging laundry on a line out the window. If you don’t find that magic, I honestly can’t help you. Keep sleeping.

THE MUSIC IS WORLD CLASS and almost nobody knows it. Ted Chubb’s The Statuary in the Heights brings NEA masters into his literal living room. In summer it spills into the backyard, people dance in the street, there’s a taco cart on the corner. Moore’s Place in McGinley Square has been there for decades. Walk in on the right night and you’ll watch someone who just finished a gig in the city come through the door, unpack their instrument, and join the jam session while tap dancers make the floor shake.

THE FOOD. I can’t onboard you on the food in one paragraph but I’ll try. Go to Little India. Get the pani puri at India Square like Rimli recommended to me. Find Saigon Café on Newark Avenue, there is a grandmother in the kitchen and you will taste it. Find Korai Kitchen, a tiny Bangladeshi place that has been quietly reviewed by the New York Times multiple times and seats about twelve people. Branch out. Become a regular somewhere. The day the owner knows your oder is the day Jersey City actually becomes yours.

When you’re ready to go deeper: your neighborhood association meets monthly and is full of people who will tell you everything. The Museum of Jersey City History has programming, not just artifacts. John Gomez leads walking tours through the Landmarks Conservancy which are genuinely fun. Not docent-voice fun, actually fun. And maybe, if you’re curious, there’s a podcast called Nat’s Sidewalk Stories where I’ve been having conversation with people who make this city what it is, for three seasons now. Every guest teaches me something new about a place I thought I already knew but I’m also still new and I’m only one or two steps ahead of you in the long scheme of things.

Jersey City has always been here. The people have always been there. Scultpor Jerome China once lived here and used it as a bedroom and left, came back yars later, and found everything completely different. Because he was different. My friend Nirupa mapped it with her feet after fifteen years of driving past it.

You don’t have to wait that long. We’re right here.

Your neighbor

Nat

P.S. Longtimers, I see you too. What did I miss? What’ the place you’ve been going to for years that nobody talks about? The corner, the café, the Saturday morning ritual. Drop it in the comments. Consider this a living document.

About This Episode

Nirupa Umapathy has lived in Jersey City for over two decades. She fell in love with it the way a lot of us do — one corner at a time, one regular table at a restaurant where the owner knows your order. But she may be leaving. And what’s striking is that even as she’s falling out of love with Jersey City, she’s still thinking about how people could fall in love with it. This conversation is about belonging, about place as sanctuary, and about the gap between sleeping somewhere and actually living there.

Meet Nirupa Umapathy

Nirupa Umapathy is a writer, memoirist, and salon host based in Jersey City. She arrived in Newark in 1998 with a one-way ticket from Madras and a full scholarship to Smith College — not quite knowing what Wall Street was, but figuring it out fast. After 14 years as a Managing Director in finance, she left — what she calls “immigrating from Wall Street to the artist way” — and has since become a connector of creative communities through her living room salon series, inspired by the French Enlightenment salons. She is currently writing a memoir exploring trauma, burnout, and post-traumatic growth.

Connect with Nirupa:

• Website: Radical Everything

• Salons for Life

Key Insights

• Place as sanctuary. For Nirupa, Jersey City wasn’t just a home — it was relief. From the trading floor, from India, from Manhattan. That relationship to place as refuge is something many immigrants and transplants will recognize.

• The bedside community problem. Thousands of new residents arrive in Jersey City and never break past the PATH station. Nirupa was one of them for years. She didn’t walk the city in earnest until 2019 — after a Camino de Santiago finally taught her how to slow down.

• Falling out of love with the circumstances, not the place. When Nat asks if she’s falling out of love with Jersey City or with living in a city, Nirupa’s answer is precise: “I’m falling out of love with the circumstances of what it means to love in Jersey City.”

• Language as a third sense of place. Food, people, and language — Nirupa maps home through all three. She tears up the moment she hears Tamil on the street. She shape-shifts her English when she’s in India. Home isn’t a fixed address; it’s what comes out of your mouth without thinking.

• The onboarding gap. There’s no consolidated way for newcomers to find Jersey City’s arts organizations, neighborhood associations, walking tours, or community spaces. Nirupa and Nat identify this as a real structural gap — not unwelcoming, just fragmented — and wonder who might close it.

• What to do if you just moved here. Nirupa’s practical list: start with your neighborhood association, go to Liberty State Park in summer, check the bulletin board at Van Vorst Park, go to Nimbus or Mana Open Studios, and find your local hairstylist. Stop getting your coffee in Manhattan.

Places & Organizations Mentioned

• Historic Paulus Hook Association (HPHA) — neighborhood association, runs monthly meetings

• Liberty State Park — “the crown jewel,” especially in summer

• Van Vorst Park — community bulletin board, local meetups

• Little India, Jersey City — Newark Avenue corridor

• Light Horse Tavern — corner of Paulus Hook, site of Nirupa’s signature question answer

• Nimbus Dance — local performing arts organization

• Mana Contemporary / Mana Open Studios — arts complex and open studio events

• Jersey City Theater Center (JCTC) — performing arts organization

• Museum of Jersey City History

• Jersey City Writers / JC Plums — the poetry group where Nirupa first found her arts community

• The Battle of Paulus Hook (1779) — Light Horse Harry Lee’s surprise raid on the British garrison; Nirupa’s signature question pick

Explore Further

A Substack piece tied to this episode is in the works — exploring the onboarding gap and what it would take for a new resident to actually fall in love with their city. Find and subscribe here

Connect with Nat

• Website: natkalbach.com

• Substack: [Substack URL]

• Instagram: [@natkalbach]

• Email: podcast@natkalbach.com

Music: Our theme music is “How You Amaze Me,” composed by Jim Kalbach and performed by Jim Kalbach, Bryan Beninghove, Charlie Siegler, and Pat Van Dyke.

Support the Show: Subscribe to the podcast and sign up for Nat’s Substack to receive additional stories and visuals that complement each conversation.

Share Your Story: What sidewalk stories have you discovered in your neighborhood? Share them with Nat through email or social media.

Nat’s Sidewalk Stories explores the intersection of place, community, and storytelling through conversations with practitioners, community leaders, and local changemakers. New episodes release on the 2nd and 4th Thursdays of each month.

Lucy Rovetto told me in our recent podcast conversation, how she as a kid would sit in church in Greenville and not understanding most of what was being said. So she drew. The old ladies in their funny hats and veils. The light. Whatever was in front of her. She had a notebook and she filled it.

When she got to school, she did the same and teachers would call her out, sure that she wasn’t paying attention. But she’d tell them exactly what they’d just said. Because she was listening. That was just how she did it. Hand moving, brain processing. The two working together in a way that sitting still never allowed.

I didn’t grow up sketching in church, but I’ve spent a lot of years standing in front of buildings, trying to figure out what I thought about them. The stories in side, how they connect with my own, with what I know. The powerhouse, the warehouses, the brick faces of different buildings all over town. Different angles, different seasons, different moods and every time I started painting, I learned something that I couldn’t have gotten just by looking. The painting is how I listen to a place.

I’ve noticed this with a lot of artists I’ve talked to on this podcast.

Woolpunk® told me about crawling under a lace tablecloth as a 3 year old, running her fingers across the fabric while the adults moved around above her. She can still feel that movement. Decades later, she stitches wool and thread into photos of buildings and street corners and sites of loss. And when she showed her work in Italy, the local women ran their hands over it the same way she’d run her hands over that tablecloth. The body holds what the mind lets go.

Jerome China meditates before he goes into his studio. Not to clear his mind, but to prepare it, to get into a state where he can actually receive what the material has to say. He works with scrap metal, stuff that’s passed through dozens of hands before his, and he thinks about that. Every piece carries a history he’s trying to honor before he gives it a new one.

Tris McCall calls it “eye level.” He writes about art the way other people write about politics. Carefully, slowly, with his whole attention. He says it’s his job to really see what an artist is trying to tell him after they’ve spent hundreds of hours trying to communicate something. He thinks the ball is in the viewer’s court.

What I keep coming back to is: none of us are passive. Listening, for all of us, is a physical act. It requires your hands, or your feet, or a movement. You have to orient yourself. You have to show up and then do something with what you encounter.

I think in a way that’s what the podcast is too, even if I couldn’t say that before talking to Lucy. I don’t take notes during conversations, I just listen. Lean in when something surprises me. And that’s where those articles come about. They follow the thread. It’s not that different from painting buildings, you’re using your whole self to figure out what you think.

Lucy said it in simple words “this is how I listened.”

I think a lot of us are still trying to find our version of that notebook!

This piece accompanies Episode 22 of Nat’s Sidewalk Stories - The Spark in the Room with Lucy Rovetto, painter and curator. Listen here.

About This Episode

Lucy Rovetto has spent her life making art that makes you stop — and that’s exactly what she asks for. In this conversation, Lucy and Nat talk about growing up in Greenville, working as an assistant to a sculptor in South Africa, nearly walking away from art entirely, and then winning a lottery for an artist live/workspace. They also get into what it means to curate — not just artworks, but the spark between them.

Lucy Rovetto - photo by photographer Megan Maloy

Meet Lucy Rovetto

Lucy Rovetto is a Jersey City-based painter, printmaker, and curator whose work asks hard questions about power, fear, and the structures we don’t let ourselves question. Raised in Greenville, she spent years traveling and working internationally before returning to Jersey City, where she won a city artist live/workspace lottery and never looked back. She’s curated exhibitions at JCTCI and the Museum of Jersey City History, and her studio is open by appointment.

Connect with Lucy:

Website: www.lucyrovetto.com

Instagram: @lucyrovetto

Key Insights

• On neighborhood: The Greenville she grew up in was defined by people knowing each other across differences — Italian, Polish, Cuban families all on Danforth Avenue

• On drawing as listening: Lucy discovered early that sketching wasn’t distraction — it was how she processed and paid attention, from church pews to classroom desks

• On the South Africa years: Working as an artist’s assistant taught her the discipline of a prepared studio — something she didn’t appreciate until years later in her own practice

• On power and fear in her art: The questions she couldn’t ask as a child in a religious household became the questions she’s been making work about ever since

• On curating: Half of what happens in a room isn’t the curator’s doing — it’s the spark between the pieces and the people, the dialogue that goes “beyond choices”

• On the Jersey City art scene: The most exciting moments have always been the raw ones — painting cars on Grove Street, experimental performances in buildings you weren’t sure were safe

Visual Documentation

Ecco, Lucy Rovetto - Acrylic paint, collage, ink, charcoal on muslin, 54x29 in., April 2022 - photo courtesy of the artist

Family Portrait 1 of 3 (Pink Monsters), Lucy Rovetto, Vine charcoal, conte crayon collage, marker, acrylic on drawing paper, 84 x 42 in., Sept 2025 - photo courtesy by the artist

Related Resources

• Museum of Jersey City History

• Art House Productions

• Deep Space Gallery

• Smush Gallery

• Elevator

• Nguyen Smith

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Stay tuned for more conversations with Jersey City artists, community builders, and the people shaping our cultural landscape.

Connect with Nat

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Nat’s Sidewalk Stories

I'm an artist-historian uncovering the stories hidden in Jersey City's buildings, one painting, podcast, and preserved memory at a time.

By Nat Kalbach

• Instagram: @natkalbach

• Email: podcast@natkalbach.com

Music: Our theme music is “How You Amaze Me,” composed by Jim Kalbach and performed by Jim Kalbach, Bryan Beninghove, Charlie Siegler, and Pat Van Dyke.

Support the Show: Subscribe to the podcast and sign up for my Substack to receive additional stories and visuals that complement each conversation.

Share Your Story: What sidewalk stories have you discovered in your neighborhood? Share them with me through email or social media.

Nat’s Sidewalk Stories explores the intersection of place, community, and storytelling through conversations with practitioners, community leaders, and local changemakers.

There is a specific kind of encounter I have had a few times in my life with a work of art. It starts with something drawing me in - a texture, a color, a scale, a composition that simply catches my eye. I move closer. And then something shifts. A second layer reveals itself, and suddenly I am somewhere I did not expect to be. Not confused, but undone. Standing there, unable to move on, trying to figure out what just happened to me.

This is what Woolpunk®’s work did to me the first time I saw it, at JCAST in 2021. Home Sweet Home - a photograph stitched over with wool, lace, fabric and thread — stopped me in the middle of the room. At first it was the texture. The warmth of the fibers against the photograph. Something familiar and handmade. And then I started to really look. And I understood what I was seeing: an act of remembrance stitched directly into an image of loss- a building boarded up, falling apart. The beauty was not decoration. It was a vehicle. Without it, I might have walked past.

I have been thinking about that feeling often. About why some art works this way, and what it means that it does.

I can think back to certain pieces when I felt this way.

I felt it in Berlin in 2013, at the Jewish Museum, in a room called the Memory Void. There are several voids in the museum - empty spaces which represent the absence of Jews from German society.

The floor of Memory Void is covered with thousands of open-mouthed iron faces, each one slightly different, each one handmade by the artist Menashe Kadishman. The work is called Shalechet - Fallen Leaves. You are invited to walk on them. The museum warns you it will be loud.

It is not loud. It is shattering.

Nothing prepares you for the sound those faces make underfoot. A low, resonant clang that does not stop - it just rolls through the room and through you. I stood at the edge and could not make myself step in at all. All I could do was watch my friend, with whom I went - and when I saw her, I understood that this was the whole point. The beauty of the installation, the extraordinary, almost lyrical sight of thousands of faces covering the floor, had brought me to the threshold. But only by crossing it, by participating, by making that sound footsteps, the work completed itself. The art needed a body to tell its truth.

I have thought about that room many times since. The way Kadishman trusted the viewer enough to let the encounter do the work. No explanation required. No label telling you how to feel. As a German who knows about the past and what happened during the Holocaust this was a powerful experience.

Also in Berlin, in the Neue Wache, a neoclassical building that has served, over centuries, as a guardhouse, a memorial to the fallen of World War I, a Soviet-era monument, and now Germany’s Central Memorial for the Victims of War and Tyranny, there is a single room, a single shaft of light from an oculus in the ceiling, and a single sculpture.

Käthe Kollwitz’s Pietà - a mother holding her dead son — has been enlarged from the original and placed at the center of the space. Open to the sky. Rain falls on it. Snow can fall on it. When I first saw it several decades ago I cried. It was magical and heartwrenching, I didn’t even have all the information when I was a teenager yet.

Kollwitz lost her own son Peter in World War I. She spent the rest of her life making work about grief and war and the cost of both. The sculpture is not a symbol. It is a fact. And standing in front of it, in that spare, enormous room, with the light falling from above and the sounds of the city barely audible outside - something happens to you that no amount of reading about it can prepare you for. The intimacy of it is almost unbearable. A mother. A son. The whole catastrophe of history distilled into two figures you could reach out and touch.

What Kollwitz understood, I think, is that the personal is the only way in. The political, the historical, the enormous: none of it lands until it is specific, and human, and held.

But there are other pieces, not all of them in Berlin. Just last year I saw Amy Sherald’s Trans Forming Liberty (2024) at SFMOMA. The painting is a portrait of Arewà Basit, a Black, non-binary trans-femme artist, posed as the Statue of Liberty. She stands against a lavender background in a vibrant blue satin gown, one hand on her hip, the other holding a golden torch filled with Gerbera daisies.

The first thing you notice is how beautiful it is. The colors, the pose, the scale, the sheer confident glamour of it. Sherald is a masterful painter, and the formal elegance of the work does exactly what it is supposed to do: it draws you in before you have decided how you feel about anything.

And then you sit with it. And the questions begin arriving quietly, one by one. Who gets to hold the torch? Who does liberty actually belong to?

Just a year later the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, under pressure from the current administration, discussed removing the painting from Sherald’s traveling retrospective. What does it mean that this image, a portrait of a trans woman as the most iconic symbol of American freedom, felt to some institutions so threatening that they tried to make it disappear? Sherald pulled the entire show rather than comply. She said: “This painting exists to hold space for someone whose humanity has been politicised and discarded. I cannot in good conscience comply with a culture of censorship, especially when it targets vulnerable communities.”

The attempt to remove it tells you everything you need to know about what this kind of art does and why it frightens the people who need to control what we see and feel and think.

Art that works in layers, art that uses beauty or craft or formal elegance to bring you close, and then tells you something hard once you are there, is among the most dangerous things a person can make.

It is dangerous because you cannot legislate the moment of recognition. You cannot control the private reckoning that happens between a viewer and a work. An authoritarian government can ban a book, burn a painting, bulldoze a building. But it cannot un-ring the bell of an encounter that has already happened inside a person. It cannot reach back into the body and remove the sound of iron faces underfoot, or the sight of a mother and her son in a shaft of winter light, or the quiet gut punch of realizing that the figure holding the torch of liberty had to fight for the right to be seen at all.

This is why art is always one of the first things targeted when a society begins moving toward authoritarianism. Not because art is powerful in a simple, propagandistic sense, the kind of power that dictates how you are supposed to feel. But because it is powerful in the opposite sense. It gives the viewer the authority to connect their own experience, their own knowledge, their own grief and joy and memory, to something in front of them. It refuses to tell you what to conclude. And that refusal is, itself, a political act.

Woolpunk® knows this. All of her work, the mass stitchings over photographs of tragedy, the knitted blankets made so beautiful that a passerby might want one, the American flag installed at the terminal near where her grandmother once arrived, operates on exactly this principle. The wool and thread and fiber are not softening the subject. They are the reason you stay long enough to let the subject reach you.

She said it herself, in our conversation: even when the work is hard, even when it is political, even when it is a rant: it’s out of love.

I think that is the secret of all the works I have been describing. Not that they trick you. But that they trust you. They offer you something genuinely beautiful or genuinely moving, and they believe that if you come close enough, the rest will do its work.

They are right to trust us. And the people who fear that trust are right to be afraid of it.

This piece is written in connection with Episode 21 of Nat’s Sidewalk Stories - my conversation with Woolpunk®, a Jersey City fiber artist whose work turns wool and thread into acts of remembrance, protest, and love.

About This Episode

Woolpunk® is a fiber artist, activist, and educator who has called Jersey City home since 1995. She stitches into enlarged photographs of buildings, streetscapes, and sites of tragedy — turning wool and thread into acts of remembrance, protest, and love. In this conversation, we explore what it means to be punk with a needle, how Jersey City became her muse, and the cultural losses the city still hasn’t reckoned with.

Meet Woolpunk®

photo curtesy of the Woolpunk®

Woolpunk® is an American artist born in Summit, NJ in 1971. She employs materials and techniques sourcing women’s work creation — machine-knitting fiber installations, quilting sculptures, and embroidering photographs. Her work champions social change, addressing issues such as homelessness, foreclosures, water contamination, and deforestation. Referencing her unique stitching and use of fibers, she trademarked the name Woolpunk®, which she has been using creatively since 2004. She has called Jersey City home since 1995.

Connect with Woolpunk®

• Instagram: @woolpunk

• Website

Key Insights

• Stitching as inherited language: Woolpunk®’s practice traces directly to a great-aunt who studied lace-making in Rome and a grandmother who sewed American flags after arriving through Ellis Island. She describes the moment she lay under a lace tablecloth as a child as one of her earliest memories — and the origin of everything.

• The name came from punk: Her trademarked name was coined by sound artist Matt Pass after watching her knit “like a sailor” at her solo show at the Jersey City Museum in 2005. Beauty was never the goal; the work is intentional, political, and intuitive.

• Jersey City as muse: Moving here in 1995, Woolpunk® documented the city’s textures of disparity — luxury condos beside the Turnpike, the Pathmark as community crossroads, the slow drilling sound of development drowning out the quiet she once loved.

• Making blankets so beautiful a passerby would want one: The Gimme Me Shelter project (2014), born from post-Hurricane Sandy work with the United Way, was rooted in the belief that people who feel unloved deserve something made with care. Everything was recycled fiber; the mission was love.

• Mass Stitchings as prayer: After the 2019 Jersey City mass shooting — when her daughter called crying from school — Woolpunk® began creating large-scale textile memorials photographing sites of tragedy. She describes stitching as “a bit like praying.” She is currently working on a piece for Sandy Hook.

• A flag facing Ellis Island: Woolpunk®’s massive knitted American flag was installed at the Central Railroad Terminal in Liberty State Park, directly facing the island where her grandmother once arrived.

• Closing question — who from the past: She’d go back to the Jersey City Museum and give the staff a chance to speak about what they worked so hard to preserve, what succeeded, and what the city should build from. The museum’s first exhibition featured Jaune Quick-to-See Smith — an indigenous artist — in her first solo show.

Visual Documentation

Home Sweet Home - the piece Nat made fall in love with Woolpunk’s work

Grandma Josephine with the flag she knitted for the bicentennial parade in Madison, NJ - photo curtesy of the Woolpunk®

Grandma Rosina who sewed American flags for a living in Verona at Annin Flagmakers -photo curtesy of the Woolpunk®

Woolpunk®’s flag at Liberty State Park - photo curtesy of the Woolpunk®

Places & Projects Mentioned

• Liberty State Park / Central Railroad Terminal — site of the knitted American flag installation

• 150 Bay Street (JCAST) — where Nat first encountered Woolpunk’s piece “Home Sweet Home” in 2021

• Jersey City Museum (now closed) — site of Woolpunk®’s 2005 solo show and years of teaching work

• Centre Pompidou x - a planned cultural institution in Jersey City which is not moving forward

• Ellis Island — where Woolpunk’s grandmother arrived as an immigrant

• Padula, Italy — artist residency site where Woolpunk® stitched onto photographs of the town

• Union Square, NYC — where the concept for Give Me Shelter first took shape

• South Street Seaport (Karen Bravin Gallery) — where Woolpunk’s Bernard Goetz piece appeared on CBS News

Coming Up Next

Stay tuned for our next episode — more conversations with Jersey City’s makers, preservers, and storytellers.

Connect with Nat

• Website: natkalbach.com

• Email: podcast@natkalbach.com

• Substack:

Nat’s Sidewalk Stories

I'm an artist-historian uncovering the stories hidden in Jersey City's buildings, one painting, podcast, and preserved memory at a time.

By Nat Kalbach

• Instagram: @natkalbach
  Music: Our theme music is “How You Amaze Me,” composed by Jim Kalbach and performed by Jim Kalbach, Bryan Beninghove, Charlie Siegler, and Pat Van Dyke.

Support the Show: Subscribe to the podcast and sign up for Nat’s Substack to receive additional stories and visuals that complement each conversation.

I’ve been working daily on the revision of “If These Walls Could Talk”. For those of you who are new here - I’m working on a book where the house itself is the narrator. It is a way of telling the history of our city…well the history of the U.S. through the building’s perspective. It’s a weird structure but the only one that feels true to the material and my love for art, storytelling and buildings.

Now that I have done most of the research and laid down the stories that I want to tell, I’m changing the whole shape of the book. I think that could only happen in this second pass, as I’m finally understanding what I was trying to tell all along.

My house has always been the narrator. That was the concept from the beginning. But when I moved along the early chapters, I realized she was almost like a motor that would just move through the 130 years without a real personality. She told stories, and yeah she was a bit wise, occasionally elusive …she worked … but she wasn’t yet a person.

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