June 22nd, 2010
The Greystone Park Kirkbride building’s future just got a little brighter. A special task force charged with developing a preservation plan for the building was just established by a bill that passed New Jersey’s state senate by a vote of 38 to 0 yesterday! The bill was sponsored by New Jersey state senator Bill Codey. The eleven member task force will be comprised of state employees and politicians, plus five members of the general public including “a former patient or family member of a former patient at the original Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital.” The task force will submit their plan within six months after their first meeting. Read more: Codey Measure to Preserve Greystone Park Approved.
This doesn’t mean preservation is guaranteed for the building, but it makes it much more likely. I’m especially pleased to see the unanimous vote which indicates there’s a lot of support for saving this historic structure. Hopefully within a year (or even less) the task force will have created a solid preservation plan and Greystone’s outlook will look even better.
March 18th, 2010
This is a “reprinting” of an email message from Preserve Greystone, the group dedicated to saving the Greystone Park Kirkbride building.
“On Thursday, March 25, the statewide historic group Preservation New Jersey will be holding an ‘Endangered Sites Summit’ to draw attention to five Places in New Jersey that are particularly at-risk of decay and demolition but particularly promising for reuse and valuable as landmarks. A few Preserve Greystone members will be at this idea-sharing, strategy-formulating season to present on Greystone and discuss the state of efforts to save it. Afterwards, there will be a press conference to draw further attention to issues discussed and the objectives set. As an intensive discussion group, the Summit is limited to about 20 participants, but the press conference is open to the public; the bigger the turnout the better a message it will send to politicians and the media of the interest people show and the stake they feel they have in these sites. I’m sure the other groups are rallying their troops and it will be good to have a sizable Greystone contingent too.
The press conference will be held at Centennial Hall in the Newark Public Library, 5 Washington Street, Newark, NJ 07102 at 12:30PM (the same location as the Summit earlier that morning). Please feel free to email mcgovernix@gmail.com with any questions.”
