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Beth Lucas – “Ta-Da!”
May 6 – July 1, 2012.
For head scenic artist Beth Lucas, the Macy’s Parade Studio’s move from Hoboken to Moonachie last year was bittersweet. While the new facility offers better lighting and working conditions, she misses being surrounded by historic details scattered throughout the architectural landscape of Hoboken. Her keen eyes pick out such decorative features as rosettes and ornate carvings as she walks along Washington Street and Central Avenue in Jersey City Heights, where she’s lived for 20 years.
Click here to see a virtual gallery of the exhibit.
In her personal artwork, she uses acrylic paints to translate these shapes in bright colors and larger-than-life images on canvas and linoleum that can hang on walls, or even serve as floor-coverings or table tops, once they’re coated in tough polyurethane.
The resulting artworks are whimsical and fun, which is not surprising, considering Lucas’ job for the last 25 years has been decorating the brightly colored, whimsical floats that entertain millions on Thanksgiving day. Come see them on Sunday, May 6, at a free opening reception from 2 – 5 p.m. for Ta-Da! Artworks by Beth Lucas in the Museum’s Upper Gallery. The show will be on view through July 1.
“My dual background in fine art and commercial art has led me to continuously develop a style that is bold with expressive color,” she says. “My imagery is taken from both popular culture and subculture. My work explores the recontextualization of ordinary objects I see, we see, in everyday life.” Flowers also figure prominently in her work, perhaps inspired by her work on Macy’s Annual Flower Show scenery.
After earning her Master’s degree in Fine Art from Rutgers in 1984, she started working at Macy’s Parade Studio, which was based in Hoboken at the former Tootsie Roll factory until last year. She loves working for Macy’s, and met her husband, Charles Walsh, there. After living in Hoboken for five years, she moved to Jersey City Heights where the couple renovated two houses and raised two daughters, Isobelle and Olivia.
The one down side to working on the Parade is never getting to celebrate Thanksgiving on the appointed day, she says. The design crew creates floats that are cleverly designed to fold up into boxes that can fit through the Lincoln Tunnel. This requires the team to start unpacking the floats at 7 p.m. on the Wednesday evening before the Parade in the staging area near the American Museum of Natural History.
They work through the night, finishing just in time for the Parade to get under way, and race down to the finish line at 37th St. to grab a quick bite and start repacking the floats as they arrive. They don’t get home until after 4 p.m., too exhausted to make or even enjoy a meal. Fortunately, the Macy’s Parade Design Studio hosts a special Thanksgiving dinner for the employees’ families on the Friday afterwards.
The exhibit is supported by a block grant from the State/County Partnership program for the Arts, administered by the Hudson County Division of Cultural and Heritage Affairs.
Laura Alexander – “Mostly Rosemary”
January 29 - March 11, 2012.
Hoboken artist Laura Alexander’s Monroe Center studio is a fixture on the annual Artists Studio Tour. In addition to her paintings, her studio walls are covered with colorful and interesting pop culture artifacts, which are fun to look at, but it’s her large portraits that arrest the visitor’s gaze and stay with you after you leave.
A series of four large portraits—with a twist—are the focus of her latest exhibit, “mostly Rosemary, Paintings by Laura Alexander” is on view in the Museum’s Upper Gallery from January 29 through March 11.
The title of the show is inspired by the model who posed for the photographs that Alexander worked from in creating these 50-inch-square portraits. “They’re ‘mostly’ her,” Alexander explains, “but we changed her cosmetically for each portrait. The concept was to portray different ethnic varieties. I attempted to do this with wigs and make-up, while Rosemary is skilled enough as a model to change her facial expressions…the pull of her smile, the squint of her eyes, etc.” The model applied her own make-up and the two spent as little as an hour to capture three different “personas.” While the results look very serious, Alexander said she and Rosemary had a lot of fun doing the photo shoots.
“The point of art making is to say something: hopefully, to create a dialogue with the viewers…within the viewers’ own thoughts,” Alexander says. “These paintings speak about the many differences we perceive in one another while we still recognize our shared humanity. Real tolerance of these differences seems to be the challenge of this century.”
A full-time artist who attended the Maine College of Art, the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vt., and the New York Art Students’ League, Alexander lives in Hoboken and has had a studio at 720 Monroe since 1991, when it was still known as the Levelor Factory. She works at her art while she’s home-schooling her 11-year-old son (also an artist), and teaches art to young students on Saturdays. Art is a family affair, as her husband has a studio there as well.
This is Alexander’s second Hoboken Museum exhibit. Her work is exhibited frequently in New York and New Jersey, and occasionally internationally. She earned a fellowship in 2006 from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and was awarded a solo exhibit in the 1998 Viridian National juried competition in New York, as well as an award from the Marie Walsh Sharpe Studio program in New York (1996).
The exhibit is supported by a block grant from the State/County Partnership program for the Arts, administered by the Hudson County Division of Cultural and Heritage Affairs.
Driving Under the Hudson: A History of the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels
January – June 2012.
Click here to take an interactive virtual tour of the exhibit.
Through this exhibition, we celebrated the 85th anniversary of the Holland Tunnel and the 75th birthday of the Lincoln Tunnel. Love them for the access they provide to New York City, or curse them for the rush-hour traffic that ensnares Hudson County drivers, the tunnels define Hoboken’s northern and southern borders. Today we take them for granted, but when they were built, they were marvels of both engineering prowess and public works initiatives.
For hundreds of years before either tunnel was built, the Hudson River could only be crossed by boat. While railroads transported goods easily across the country, once they arrived at the Hudson River, delivering them to New York City was more complicated. A system of lighters, private ferries, barges, and car floats was employed by the railroad companies, but this was a slow, inefficient and very costly way of moving goods. Shippers were at the mercy of ever-changing river conditions, which dictated when—or whether—goods could be moved.
By the beginning of the 20th century, what the region needed most was a freight rail tunnel. Passenger access was improved in 1908 and 1910 with the construction of the Hudson & Manhattan Tubes and rail tunnel to Pennsylvania Station. But they weren’t keeping up with population growth. The story behind how the two new vehicular tunnels were planned, funded and constructed reveals a fascinating struggle between public and private sector powers against daunting physical and financial obstacles. It is also a testament to the workers—known as sandhogs—who risked their lives under highly pressurized conditions until engineers figured out how to improve worker safety. Indeed, when it was completed in 1927, the Holland Tunnel, named for its chief engineer, was called the “Eighth Wonder of the World.”
The public is invited to explore the tunnels’ back story and ongoing significance in the Museum’s online virtual gallery for the exhibition, Driving Under the Hudson: The History of the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels, which was on view at the Museum from Jan. 29 through July 1, 2012.
Waterfront reformers and political progressives wanted a freight tunnel, but that would have threatened the power of racketeers and politicians, especially Mayor Hague of Jersey City, who used the piers as a source of job patronage. It was agreed, however, that something was needed to link the eastern edge of New Jersey with Manhattan.
As America’s love affair with automobiles grew, engineers and sociologists argued for building a bridge, assuming drivers would prefer light, air and a view to a long, claustrophobic, dingy tube. But a 1913 engineering study concluded that a bridge would cost $42 million, versus $11 million for a two-tube vehicular tunnel. Ultimately, money and the lack of space to build a bridge would decide the debate in favor of a tunnel.
Two things precipitated matters. The harsh winter of 1917-1918—when the Hudson River froze over as temperatures dipped well below zero—made getting fuel and food to New York City almost impossible. The following winter, a strike by the Marine Workers’ Affiliation affected freight deliveries as well as commuter ferries. As tens of thousands of ferry travelers poured into the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad (now PATH), police were called in to deal with extreme overcrowding on the trains.
Cooperation and obstruction
In September 1919, New York and New Jersey quickly came to consensus and signed an agreement that provided for the joint construction, operation, repair, and maintenance of the tunnel, with the costs shared equally by both states. Tolls would be instituted to pay each state back within 20 years. Clifford Holland, the youngest chief tunnel engineer in the U.S., was appointed to direct and design the largest vehicular tunnel ever built. Again, the biggest challenge would prove to be Jersey City’s Mayor Frank Hague, who found many ways to hold up the project and extort money and concessions for his office and supporters.
Eventually, Holland planned a secret groundbreaking for May 31, 1922. With a small crew and a few officials, Holland clandestinely crossed into Jersey City, where he was photographed with a shovel in the ground. With the photograph in all the papers, Hague had been outmaneuvered.
Planning for the Midtown Hudson Tunnel, as the Lincoln was originally named, seemed to go much smoother, at least at first. With the technical knowledge gained from the Holland Tunnel, the construction of the Lincoln Tunnel would be the turn out to be the easiest part of the project. But the crash of 1929 and the advent of World War II delayed construction of the first two tunnel tubes for many years and by 1937 only one was completed. Each decade brought a new impediment: In the 1930s it was a lack of capital; the ’40s saw a lack of manpower and materials due to the war, and by the ’50s, a postwar building boom on both sides of the river meant complex real estate transactions had to be negotiated. Work on the second tube wasn’t completed until 1945, and the third tube delayed until 1957.
The exhibition featured original documents such as official correspondence and engineering plans, plus historic newsreel footage, and objects such as a now-defunct “catwalk car,” which was driven along specially constructed side rails to deal with vehicle emergencies. Photographs and oral histories from the original sandhogs involved in the construction of the Lincoln Tunnel will tell their history.
Curators Bob Foster and David Webster were advised by Dr. Angus Gillespie, Professor of American Studies at Rutgers University and author of Crossing Under the Hudson, The Story of the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels (Rutgers Press, 2011); and historian and engineer Robert W. Jackson, author of Highway Under the Hudson: A Story of the Holland Tunnel (New York University Press, 2011). Both authors came to the Museum to give lectures, along with architectural historian John Gomez, a member of the Museum’s History Advisory Board and a founder of the Jersey City Landmarks Conservancy, and Steven Hart, author of The Last Three Miles: Politics, Murder, and the Construction of America’s First Superhighway, which documents the construction of the Pulaski Skyway.
The exhibit is made possible through funding from the New Jersey Historical Commission, Applied Companies, Bijou Properties, T&M Contracting, United Way of Hudson County, and Wiley & Sons.
Liz Cohen – “Walkabout”
November 13 - December 23, 2011.
Artists’ muses can assume unexpected forms; the artist’s challenge is to be open to the muse’s inspiration. For artist Liz Cohen, a handmade doll from her childhood has emerged as a significant influence in her art. As a little girl, she had wanted one toy more than any other: a shiny new Betsy Wetsy doll. Once she had one of these dream toys of her own, however, she found herself coveting her older sister’s simple, homemade cloth doll, named Hazel. Cohen negotiated with her sister to trade dolls, and counts pulling it off as her first real accomplishment. The doll, beloved by both sisters, actually changed custody several times as they grew into adults, finally coming to stay with Cohen for good some 20 years ago.
For most of her career as an artist, Cohen worked in watercolors and oils, painting images of mythological women, elements of her dreams, and seashells. Her work is infused with motifs and techniques learned in her world travels, including seven years living in Australia and working with Aboriginal people, as well as trips to Africa and Latin America.
Then, about 15 years ago, Cohen’s husband passed away and she immersed herself in creating art to help deal with her grief. She soon found Hazel began appearing frequently in her work. “Hazel represents joy and happiness to me,” Cohen says, “I’m trying to convey the joy of a simple, well-loved object to others.”
In the resulting Hazel-inspired series, Cohen works in new and sometimes mixed media. Walking around Hoboken, for example, she would photograph Hazel in different settings. Some photographs she paints with aboriginal motifs of dots and cross-hatching, and she’s also been making fabric art, sewing new dolls of her own creation. Ten to 12 pieces from this recent work, titled Walkabout: Photographs and Mixed-Media Works by Liz Cohen, were on display in the Upper Gallery of the Museum from Nov. 13 – Dec. 23.
Lately, Cohen has invented an entire alternate world, peopled by her handmade dolls, with its own language and religion, bridging different times and cultures. Drawing on her knowledge of other cultures’ traditional beliefs and mythologies, she has created a goddess-centered culture with these dolls, using fabrics that she has collected from all over the world. The mix of fabrics gives the impression that the dolls could be artifacts from any number of civilizations. Many of these were exhibited in New York City in November, in a show titled “Mother Lore,” at the Ceres Gallery, on 27th St. Find out more on her website, www.elizabethweinercohen.com.
Cohen’s studio is a staple on the Hoboken Artists Studio Tour, and her work has been exhibited in many solo and group shows. About 10 years ago, she founded the Hob’art artists group, which is searching for a permanent home. She was an art major at Douglass College, Rutgers University, and earned a Masters in Art and teaching credentials at the University of California at Berkeley. She has taught art for more than 30 years at a private school in Summit.
Cohen returned to the Museum on Sunday, Dec. 4, at 4 p.m., to discuss her work and answer visitors’ questions. The exhibit was supported by a block grant from the State/County Partnership program for the Arts, administered by the Hudson County Division of Cultural and Heritage Affairs.
Exhibition Videos
Learn more about Hoboken’s exhibitions
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Litopintura: Paintings on Stone by Walter BarcoMarch 22 - May 3, 2015 Ecuadoran artist Walter Barco creates extraordinary “rock-works” that evoke nostalgic memories of his native Guayaquil’s colonial architecture and 19th century homes, using a technique he describes as "la litopintura," or stone-painting. With incredibly fine…View More
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Local Motion: Artworks by Jennifer Place and Jodie FinkMay 18, 2014 Jodie Fink and Jennifer Place discuss their many years of friendship, collaboration and independent work that resulted in the mixed-media sculptures on display in the Museum exhibit, "Local Motion," on view in the Museum's Upper Gallery May…View More
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Important Clouds: Pastels & Giclées by Tim DalyMarch 23, 2014 Upper Gallery exhibit, "Important Clouds: Pastels and Giclées by Tim Daly" was on view at the Hoboken Museum March 23 - May 11, featuring pastels and giclee prints of paintings that find the beauty in unexpected places,…View More
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Barbara Mauriello – “Unfolding Landscapes”
September 25 - October 2, 2011.
An artist with a bachelor’s degree in English and a master’s in painting, Barbara Mauriello hadn’t given much thought to how the books she loved to read were constructed until she took a class in bookbinding. She had done 10 small paintings and wanted to put them together in a book.
“I got hooked on bookbinding the first time a bowl of freshly cooked paste passed under my nose,” she recalls. “And the lovely, fat paste brushes…then a ‘bonefolder,’ the bookbinder’s essential tool, fell into my hands and that was that. I was in love: with my tools, my materials, paper, cloth, leather, thread, paint.” She made the radical decision to quit her job and, following in the tradition of centuries of craftspeople, she began an apprenticeship at the Center for Book Arts, on Bleecker and the Bowery.
Thirty years later, Mauriello is just as passionate about the art and craft of making books, if not more so. She now makes her living creating and repairing books, as well as colorful boxes that serve as containers or simply as art objects, using the same techniques. She also teaches bookbinding at the Center for Book Arts, the International Center for Photography, and the School of Visual Arts. And she has served as a consultant in book conservation to major institutions such as the Newark Public Library and the Brooklyn and New York Botanical Gardens.
By now, she’s created thousands of books and boxes by hand, for her own projects and for her clients, mostly artists and poets, who hire her to create an individual book or a small edition of up to a few hundred copies. In addition to traditional books, she makes them in unusual formats, such as accordion-style “tunnel” books, with an opening in the center of the pages that forms a tunnel when the book’s covers are pulled in opposite directions.
An exhibit of several of her books and boxes, Unfolding Landscapes: Books and Boxes by Barbara Mauriello, will open in the Museum’s Upper Gallery on Sunday, Sept. 25, with a free reception from 2 5 p.m. The show will be on view through Nov. 6. She returns to the Museum on Sunday, Oct. 2, at 4 p.m. for a talk about her craft.
Her fascination with tunnel books may be inspired in part by her decision to move to Hoboken some 20 years ago, because she commutes frequently through tunnels to New York. She loves it here, and has formed a private press with friends here who are artists with skills in calligraphy and printing. With her artist’s eye, she is drawn to rich colors and geometric shapes. She admires the work of French artists of the mid-20th century, including Henri Matisse, Joan Miro, and particularly Sonia Delaunay, who created her own books without any formal training.
Mauriello has made books from fragments of fire-damaged 18th century illustrated manuscripts and 19th century contracts written on vellum, and created books inspired by Apache playing cards, Russian constructivist costumes and good-luck charms embroidered on kimonos. Her work has been exhibited in many museums, art galleries, and libraries; one piece is being sealed in Santiago Calatrava’s New York Times time capsule.
Books as Art: Barbara Mauriello’s Unfolding Landscapes Sunday, Sept. 25, 2-5 pm: Opening reception for “Unfolding Landscapes: Books and Boxes by Barbara Mauriello.” Local artist Barbara Mauriello learned traditional techniques of bookbinding the old-fashioned way, through an apprenticeship. Now her skills are in high demand to produce limited editions of special art books or to restore antique books. Over the years, she’s expanded her craft to create innovative book shapes and decorative boxes, many of which will be on display in the Museum’s Upper Gallery through Nov. 6. She returns for a talk and demonstration on Sun., Oct. 2 at 4 pm. The opening reception and talk are free.
The Upper Gallery exhibits are made possible by a block grant from the State/County Partnership program for the Arts administered by the Hudson County Division of Cultural and Heritage Affairs.
Louise Gale – “Mixed Media”
August 7 - September 18, 2011.
www.louisegale.com/art/
As a child growing up in South London, Louise Gale was encouraged to be creative, spending hours after school and during the summer drawing, painting, and creating patterns with her beloved Spirograph. She loved making decorations for Christmas, Easter, and birthdays. Gale was accepted to art school at 16, studying drawing, photography, sculpture, and design, then spent two years in the “potteries” in Stoke on Trent, England, learning ceramic design and how to make surface patterns.
Her practical side led her to pursue a corporate career in training and development, however, and she decided to keep up with her art as a hobby. Her career brought her Hoboken in 2004, which she loves because it reminds her of an English village with a “high street” through the center of town, and people say hello on the street. After struggling to find the time to truly nurture her creative side—even pulling the plug on her TV set—she finally found the courage to take the plunge and become a full-time artist.
Gale participated in several creative retreats to sharpen her focus on certain projects and materials. She started a blog and networked online to find other creative people, whom she found to be a very supportive global community. “They help you celebrate successes and support you through hard struggles,” she says, “and we give each other feedback through blog comments.” She joined the local hob’art artists group for mutual support.
“I like to dabble in all sorts of things,” Gale says. “Lately, I’ve been experimenting with sewing.” Several of her mixed-media works will go on display in the Upper Gallery of the Museum on Sunday, Aug. 7, with a free opening reception from 2 – 5 p.m. The show is titled Sew Hoboken: Mixed Media Works by Louise Gale, reflecting her recent interest in working with needle and thread. There’s a collage piece featuring flora and fauna of Hoboken; another piece depicts the waiting room sign from the Hoboken train station, with sequins sewn into the image. The works on display will each have a sewn element, and incorporate other media, such as plasterwork, acrylic paints, photography, and book craft.
Her career as a corporate trainer continues to be useful: She has developed online courses to help other artists achieve their goals, and is currently in training to be a creative coach. She also works part-time as a co-manager for an expatriate community, planning events. She’s very active online, with a website and blog at www.louisegale.com, as well as a Facebook page, a Twitter account and an Etsy presence. She also sells her work, which has been exhibited in solo and group shows at galleries in New York City and Hoboken. Recently, her work was featured in Somerset Studio Magazine, on the cover of a book by Patti Digh, and in an article on Etsy in Inc. magazine.
Louise will return to the Museum on Saturday, Sept. 10, at 4 p.m. for a meet-the-artist reception, where she’ll discuss her work and answer visitors’ questions. The exhibit is supported by a block grant from the State/County Partnership program for the Arts, administered by the Hudson County Division of Cultural and Heritage Affairs.
Jennifer Place & Jodie Fink – “Friends & Relations”
April 30, 2011 - June 12, 2011.
Hoboken artists Jennifer Place and Jodie Fink have been friends for so long, it’s hard for them to remember exactly when and where they met, but their long, close friendship is evident in the simpatico evolution of their artwork. They are collaborating on a show of about two dozen sculptures in the shapes of faces, figures, and pets, made of recycled found objects from the streets of Hoboken.
Old burner grills from gas stoves, muffler parts, a turkey bone, a tool handle, a computer motherboard, bits of rusty things-all come together in surprisingly animated and thought-provoking “portraits.” The show is playfully named Friends and Relations, though they doubt anyone will recognize themselves in these works. The exhibit opens on Sunday, Apr. 30, with a free opening reception from 2 – 5 p.m.
The two women both moved to Hoboken in 1983, attracted by a thriving arts community with plentiful studio and gallery space and art festivals. They first met in the late ’80s and had exhibits in the same group shows in places like the Jefferson Trust building and the “O’roe” Gallery.”
They had much in common: Fink, who started as a photographer then moved on to collage and mixed media, was starting to branch into sculpture after a stint in an art colony in France. Place focused mostly on drawing and printmaking, and found herself similarly drawn to more layered compositions. In the early ’90s, they collaborated on a chair-themed exhibit: Fink contributed found-object sculptures that functioned both as chairs and as wind chimes. Jennifer exhibited drawings of chairs. For a while, they formed Found Sound, a sideline art venture selling wind chimes at local festivals.
Recycling cast-off items into art has become second nature to them. In their everyday walks through Hoboken, their eyes are drawn to ordinary objects whose shape, color or texture might fill a need in a particular piece they’re working on, or inspire the next piece. Both continue to pursue art with a passion, although both have full-time jobs. Fink earned a Masters degree in social work and now has a practice in Hoboken-and raised a daughter. Place is a full-time corporate graphic designer. They can’t imagine life without an art problem to solve. “I love a blank wall,” Fink says, and Place says she enjoys scavenging for objects and giving them a new purpose, “it satisfies some hunter-gatherer instinct.”
On the last day of the exhibit, the artists will give a talk about their work, Sunday, Jun. 12 at 5 p.m. The exhibit is supported by a block grant from the State/County Partners
The exhibit is supported by a block grant from the State/County Partnership program for the Arts, administered by the Hudson County Division of Cultural and Heritage Affairs.
Sterne Slaven – “Deconstructing Hoboken”
January 30 - March 6, 2011.
Artist/photographer Sterne Slaven has an eye for the industrial soul of Hoboken. When he moved here in 1983, after graduating art school, he found himself drawn again and again to the old factory buildings in his uptown neighborhood: Ferguson Propeller Works, the old Shipyard machine shop, the Maxwell House coffee plant. He captured haunting images of many of these buildings, some in the process of being dismantled.
Born in Pittsburgh but raised in suburban Englewood, N.J., Slaven says he’s always had an affinity for old, rusting factories and broken glass and metal. He returned to Pittsburgh to study drawing and photography at Carnegie-Mellon University, and moved to Hoboken afterwards not just because the rents were more affordable than in Manhattan, but because he liked the look and feel of the city, and was happy to stay west of the Hudson, where his family still lives. In his career, he’s worked as a photographer’s assistant, carpenter and prototype model maker in industrial design.
For this show, Deconstructing Hoboken: Photomontages by Sterne Slaven, he incorporated the photographs, along with some double exposures and abstracted patterns from old buildings, into intriguing large-scale composite images. Some date from the midto late 1980s, and some are more recent. They depict Hoboken’s industrial buildings in their twilight years, including the huge ship propellers that used to lie on their sides in the yard of the Ferguson Propeller Works at 12th and Grand St. The effect of the layered photos in the montages and the use of double exposures gives the images a ghostly effect, as though the buildings have left traces— which they have for anyone who lived here at the time.
“Though perhaps not consciously,” Slaven says, “the pieces, with their overlapping and transparencies and general visual chaos, seem to echo the deconstruction of the buildings themselves, their broken windows and piles of twisted rebar.”
Slaven’s first Hoboken Museum exhibit opens on Sunday, Jan. 30, with a free opening reception from 2 – 5 p.m. His work has also been shown in galleries and juried exhibitions in Hoboken, New York, Pennsylvania and most recently at the Englewood Library in 2006. Slaven will give an illustrated talk about his work on Sunday, Feb. 27 at 4 p.m., and his work will be on display through Mar. 6. The exhibit is supported by a block grant from the State/County Partnership program for the Arts, administered by the Hudson County Division of Cultural and Heritage Affairs.
Yum Yum, Tootsie Rolls, and Chocolate Bunnies on Motorcycles… A Sweet History of Hoboken
January – December 2011.
Buddy Valastro put Hoboken on the national culinary map with his popular TLC cable network show, “Cake Boss,” but did you know that Hoboken has been a confectionary powerhouse since the mid-19th century?
It’s such a rich (and tasty) legacy, the Museum has traced a history of the city from its earliest days through its many commercial bakers, candy manufacturers and family-owned bakeries, including a smorgasbord of different immigrant groups’ food customs. Named for three of Hoboken’s signature treats, the Museum’s exhibit, Yum Yum, Tootsie Rolls, and Chocolate Bunnies on Motorcycles…A Sweet History of Hoboken, opened on Sunday, Jan. 30, 2011.
Telling the history of a community through its gastronomic traditions may seem a bit unorthodox, but the subject neatly illustrates Hoboken’s dual role as a manufacturing center—because of its transportation links and plentiful labor pool—and as a haven for newly arrived entrepreneurs, who catered to the tastes of their fellow immigrants. In addition to factories, Hoboken boasted many small bakeries and candy makers specializing in their national treats. Before Valastro’s father moved Carlo’s Bakery from Adams St. to Washington St. in 1990, the site opposite City Hall was occupied by German bakeries, first Wordelmann’s (from before World War I) and later Schonings (from 1930). And the 2010 House Tour included a Garden St. building that was once a marzipan factory.
Catering to the great ocean liners that docked in Hoboken, Germans also opened and operated successful commercial bakeries, like John Schmalz’s Sons Inc.’s “Model Bakery” at 8th and Clinton Sts. Established in 1867, it became famous for its Jersey Cream Malt Bread and boasted a production rate of 5,000 loaves in 10 hours. Eventually, the factory became part of the Continental Baking Corporation, which made Wonder Bread at that site and opened a Hostess bakery at 14th and Park, making cupcakes and Twinkies.
On the heels of the Germans, the Italians soon were baking their own delicious crusty bread at family-run bakeries, many of which supplied restaurants, delis, and home kitchens—and a few still do today. The Italians also popularized ice cream and flavored ices, including a flavor called “Yum Yum,” sold from carts throughout the sweltering urban cityscape. One Italian ice cream vendor, Italo Marchiony, who arrived in 1895, invented and patented (in 1903) a waffle cup to solve the problem of carrying fragile glass cups. When he ran out of them at his booth at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, he twisted the thin waffles made by a nearby vendor into a cone shape, and entered the history books!
The heyday of mom-and-pop ice cream parlors, pastry shops and luncheonettes was the early 1900s to the 1950s. A few remain, including Schnackenberg’s, located at 11th and Washington for over 75 years, where the family continues to make chocolate confections by hand, using whimsical molds at Easter, such as a bunny on a motorcycle. Nearby, the Castiello family still makes traditional Italian treats at Giorgio’s Pasticcerie, founded it in 1975. Both businesses have been documented in the Museum’s oral history chapbook series, in conjunction with the Hoboken Public Library.
Many national companies moved factory operations to Hoboken as an economical alternative to New York City. The Sweets Company of America made Tootsie Rolls in a “modern” factory building at 16th and Willow starting in 1938. Kids in Hoboken recall catching candies tossed to them by workers there after school. Other major factories included the R.B. Davis Co., which made baking powder, My-T-Fine puddings and Cocomalt chocolate beverages, and was a major sponsor of the iconic “Buck Rogers” radio show. Franklin Baker Company, maker of Baker’s Coconut and other commercial brands, such as Log Cabin Products, also operated factories in Hoboken.
The exhibit was made possible through funding from the New Jersey Historical Commission, Applied Companies, Wiley & Sons, and Bijou Properties.