Corrections or additions?
This article by Barbara Fox was prepared for the August 7, 2002 edition of U.S. 1 Newspaper. All rights reserved.
`Big’ on the Garden State
The New Jersey tourist bureau has its glossy leaflets.
New Jersey’s chambers of commerce have their carefully worded
brochures.
Bookstores sell coffee table picture volumes of New Jersey. Any of
these are inadequate tools for recruiting executives to join New
Jersey
companies because they lack credibility. Without it, lustrous photos
of historic houses and the Jersey shore cannot quell the stereotype
that this state consists of turnpikes and oil tanks.
A Manhattan-based publishing company may have filled this gap by
dedicating
one issue of its magazine, named Big, to New Jersey. It addresses
the curse of stereotypes with 1,500 to 2,000-word essays on turnpikes
and art photos of oil tanks. It takes care of the credibility problem
by engaging well-known writers to provide commentary on subjects like
housing, suburban sprawl, and towns at the Jersey shore. And it
packages
all this in a big, 9 by 12-inch format with superb production values.
This half-inch thick issue of Big is available at Barnes & Noble and
Borders bookstores for $15 for the next couple of weeks. At the end
of August, when the next issue (called “Surf”) comes out,
the New Jersey issue will be relegated to the archives and the price
will double. The magazine can also be ordered on the website at
At the newsstand price, it makes a superb recruiting tool.
Until now, the 10-year-old magazine had taken a international stance
by focusing each issue on one city (Tokyo) or one country (Brazil).
This issue is the pilot for an All-American series in 2003 that will
feature, for instance, Detroit as the auto city and Boston as a
technology
town. “Big is an insider trade publication for the creative
industries,
fashion, and advertising, but we think it has potential to speak to
a larger audience,” says Carla Iny, assistant to the publisher,
Marcelo Junemann.
New Jersey was the chosen focus for the pilot because a freelance
editor, Phil Bricker, pitched it as the USA’s “most typical
state.”
The literary editor, David Cashion, used an excerpt from a book by
John McPhee and commissioned essays from Don Linky (of the Carnegie
Center) and Angus Kress Gillespie and Michael Aaron Rockland (both
of Rutgers). Laura McPhee and Virginia Behan contributed a photo
essay,
as did children from Trenton who learned their craft in a program
sponsored by the Young Audiences of New Jersey.
Every issue of Big is conceived and designed differently, from
scratch.
“We change contributors, direction, and design with every
issue,”
says founder Junemann. “It keeps ideas very fresh. People put
100 percent of their energy into it because they know it is the only
issue, and that’s it. We don’t care about fashion, we care about
creativity
and quality.”
The next issue, for instance, will be insider’s look at surf culture
and will be radically different in tone and content. Such ruthless
reinvention of the wheel lets the magazine get along with just five
full-time staff members, including Junemann. The self-educated
Chilean-born
son of a landowner and an artist, he started a printing business in
Spain but despised the usual business of tawdry brochures and yearned
to produce something beautiful.
Ten years later the magazine has a circulation of 50,000 worldwide,
including 35,000 copies in the United States, and all but five percent
of the press run is sold by subscription. Under this business model,
the photography and literary contributors get their work showcased
beautifully but their honorarium is limited to $200 plus several
complimentary
copies. “They really have to want to be a part of this,” says
Iny.
“Junemann prides himself on sourcing talent to push the
boundaries,
not just for fashion, but of photographic imagery in general,”
said a reviewer in London’s Sunday Review. Big “is considered
to be the most stingingly hip of all coffee-table bibles.”
The editor of the New Jersey issue, Bricker, is British and has worked
for the British magazines noted for their cheeky, hip attitude, but
that did not carry over for the New Jersey issue. “He has such
a profound love of New Jersey,” says Iny, “that he did not
work tongue in cheek, and the end result is so sincere.”
Among the photo features are aerial shots by John Majoris, an essay
on Newark’s attempts at urban renewal by Camilo Jos Vergara, a
portrait
of Mendham as a suburban community by Juliana Sohn (who is married
to Bricker), an essay on backyard family life by Margaret Salmon and
Dean Wiand, and interior shots of the Merrill Lynch Hopewell campus,
part of a series called “New Jersey Inc.: a private look into
the wall-to-wall carpeted corridors of power.”
Michael Aaron Rockland discussed the image problem in
a keynote essay:
“Probably no other state has a more uncertain image thanNew Jersey. While it is considerably agricultural, the Garden Stateis actually the most highway-intensive and most densely populatedof the fifty members of the union. It is by some reckonings the mostaffluent state, yet its cities are among the most degraded in thenation. It has handsome hills and stunning beaches, yet it is heavilyindustrialized and known for its toxic waste dumps. Most states havesomething characteristic about them? New Jersey is not as lucky.”Nature writer Joanna Burger contributes “Bears in theDriveway:the balance between man & animal,” Gillespie (the Rutgersfolkloristand the author of the book on the construction of the World TradeCenter) tells about towns at the Jersey shore, and McPhee isrepresentedby an excerpt from his book “The Pine Barrens.” An essay onsprawl by Owen D. Gutfreund contrasts with the 1992 position, takenby futurist Joel Garreau, that New Jersey consists of “EdgeCities.”There are 10 fabulous portraits of athletes in Hamilton and Hightstownby Nancianne Vizzini, an essay on how immigration affected New Jerseyby Linky, and a McPhee/Behan photo of the Trenton Makes bridge. Thebig surprise, however, is a photo of a building on Cranbury-SouthRiver Road. It is not labeled as such; it is merely identified asbeing in South Brunswick.But the street number shown on the building reveals that the occupyingcompany is Genesis Group Inc. Based in Chicago, it tripled its spacefour years ago with a move from Edison and now employs 35 people, saysMichele A. Guariglia, the terminal manager (www.genesislogistics.com).Among its clients for trucking and warehousing are American Express,W.W. Grainger, and a host of pharmaceutical firms, such as ScheringPlough.This unusual 250,000 square-foot building, designed by SamuelAlexander Klatskin, is curved and comes to a point at one end. Itserves as the entrance to the Forsgate Corporate Center, the kind ofcorporate park that futurist Garreau writes about. An excerpt from his1992 book, “Edge City: Life on the New Frontier,” is reprintedin this issue of Big. Among his observations:”New Jersey is headquarters to dozens of Fortune 500companies,as well as thousands of entrepreneurial startups. This is also thestate that gave birth to fiber optics, the transistor, the solar cell,sound movies, the communications satellite, and evidentiary proofof the Big Bang hypothesis of the origin of the universe. Yet allthis economic prowess, technological advancement, and urbanity hasbeen achieved without New Jersey’s having within its boundaries whatmost people would consider even one major city. All this proves,however,is that most Americans’ idea of what makes up a city no longer matchesreality, because it doesn’t encompass the central reality of NewJerseyedge cities.”An old-fashioned downtown is only one way to think of a city.In fact, it is only the 19th century vision. The edge cities of NewJersey, instead, represent our new standard and are being copied allover the world. Buildings rarely rise shoulder to shoulder. Instead,their broad low outlines dot the landscape like mushrooms, separatedby greensward and parking lots. Their characteristic monument is nota horse-mounted hero, but the atria reaching for the sun and shieldingtrees perpetually in leaf at the cores of corporate headquarters,fitness centers, and shopping plazas. Their landmark structure isthe celebrated single family detached dwelling, the suburban homewith grass all around that made America the best-housed civilizationthe world has ever known.”In the late 20th century, New Jersey’s edge cities grew morerapidly and generated more jobs than the entire state of New York.These edge cities now rise as their own commonwealth, from the onein the Route 1-Princeton area to the office tower forest emergingalong interstates 80 and 287. New Jersey’s edge cities exemplify thenew mix of urbanity, demonstrating what people want, can afford, andcan stand. These edge cities, in fact, are the fruit of our attemptto strike a delicate balance between the advantages and disadvantagesof 19th century cities and the opportunities and challenges of thecoming age.”The local connection that generated the most excitement wasa collection of photographs by Trenton students in Young Audiences’Ennis Beley project. “It was a thrill for these students to knowthat someone had bothered to find out about their work,” saysChrista Conklin of the Roszel Road-based Young Audiences of NewJersey.”They saw their work compared to that of other professionalphotographersand had their photos in a publication more far reaching than a localexhibit.”— Barbara FoxPrevious StoryCorrections or additions?This page is published by PrincetonInfo.com— the web site for U.S. 1 Newspaper in Princeton, New Jersey.
