Developer
Richard Tucker at a one of Fort Lee’s public meetings where rival
proposals for mixed-use construction projects were presented
My “think global, act local” campaign continues, as I seek the selection of architect Bernardo Fort-Brescia,
partnering with Tucker Development Corp., to design a high-profile
mixed-use project at the base of the George Washington Bridge in my
town, Fort Lee.
In today’s Record, our regional newspaper, is my opinion piece: Shaping a New Look for Fort Lee—an Op-Ed article that I adapted from the statement I made at the borough’s Dec. 28 town hall meeting (for which I previously received a smattering of newspaper and television coverage).
Since then, our local newspaper, the Fort Lee Suburbanite, gave my comments more play on its website (and perhaps also in next Friday’s hardcopy).
There’s
been a lot of talk on the part of our Fort Lee Film Commission about
devoting part of the vacant site to some kind of museum, perhaps one
devoted to Fort Lee’s role in the early history of American movies.
Actor John Barrymore once lived here and the early “cliffhangers” were filmed on our Palisades:
My
own hope is that we devote at least part of the museum (if there is
one) to changing displays of living artists and maybe even some
site-specific outdoor commissions, possibly in partnership with one or
more existing cultural organizations. But that’s a bit of advocacy for
another day…
UPDATE: After I wrote this, I got heads-up from Tom Meyers, executive director of the Fort Lee Film Commission, that today’s Wall Street Journal mentions the key role played by Fort Lee in film history. In a piece about filmmaking pioneer Alice Guy Blaché, pegged to her retrospective at the Whitney Museum, Kristin Jones writes:
She spent $100,000 to build a spacious glass-roofed facility in
bustling Fort Lee, N.J., a pre-Tinseltown moviemaking hub. There she
nurtured a stable of stars and tackled genres including westerns,
comedies, detective stories and domestic dramas.