The municipal, state, and federal courthouses in Newark, New Jersey, are arranged largely without any evidence of a planned arrangement. This is no mere happenstance to those that understand politics in New Jersey. This is how things work.
Just before the Ironbound section of the city, the southern sliver of Newark that is home to many Portuguese restaurants and one notoriously mobbed up diner, there are the two federal courthouses. The old courthouse, which shares space with the main post office for the city, is an art deco beauty that often surprises me with some nuance of design – a marble cutaway that I recognize to be Zeus throwing a lightning bolt in Courtroom Two, the red leather and wood honeycomb doors on the ceremonial first courtroom’s door, the one used when Judge Martini was sworn in before the bench. The new federal courthouse, with the statue depicting the body-less head of Justice, one eye peaking out from under a blindfold, is calm, modern order. I don’t feel the fear that ceremony often gives me when I enter that building. I nearly shake from it when I pass into the marble hallways of the old courthouse.
It’s a cool, sunny day, the sort that brings me pleasure greater than most other weather. I light a cigarette and walk past the federal building and the long line of immigrants waiting to interview with Citizenship and Immigration Services and the much shorter line of defense counsel waiting to fight with the US Attorney’s Office. There is a small courtyard between the federal building and the federal courthouses that runs up to Green Street and the municipal courthouse and police headquarters. The courtyard is blocked off by anti-terrorist barricades on the south and east, and by the back entrances of the shops and the Baptist Church that run the length of Broad Street. I walk down the courtyard, slightly swinging my nicked and scarred briefcase as I go. I nod and lift a hand as I pass an attorney I met at a wake. I struggle to remember his name, but can only dredge up a vague recollection that he might have been a federal public defender. That helps me little, so I continue the nod-and-slight-hand-wave. I’m wearing sunglasses. Perhaps he is also unable to remember my name.
As I pass the back edge of the Baptist Church, I notice a sign for T.M. Ward Coffee Co., proclaiming that the store sells peanuts roasted on the hour and Kona coffee every Friday. I stop short. Kona and Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee beans are rarities, usually costing well over $25 per pound. I suck down on the cigarette and flick it away. I have enough time, and the idea of getting coffee is not exactly one I’ll resist, so I decide to check out Ward Coffee.
Coffee is my dearest addiction. It forces the fog of my early morning mind out to sea and keeps me going when I sit at my desk well past sunset. Until very recently, I was well known at Single & Single for drinking upwards of fifteen cups of coffee a day. I had a very healthy bladder. I had a very unhealthy stomach. I forced myself to cut my consumption down to three to four cups of coffee per day.
I’ve noticed that I’m not the only attorney at Single & Single that has a devoted, albeit unhealthy, relationship to coffee. We are a close, somewhat consistent group. The drinkers, the smokers, the disheveled wiseasses. We stare blankly at the Italian-made coffee machine that turns a single pod of beans into a freshly brewed cup of Kenyan coffee. We make the walk back to our desks slowly, as though we balanced the Incan idol of Raiders of the Lost Ark in our hands.
I pass the Baptist Church and head up Broad Street, past the rhyming, slightly mad shoeshine man. Ward Coffee is a few doors down from the church, so there isn’t much time for me to study it before I’m inside the store.
It’s beautiful. It’s the past. In the front of the store are rows of oak cabinets containing loose, rare teas. The smell of bergamot is heavy like incense in the air and I am dizzy with its sweetness. I cross the wide-beamed floor and listen to the creaks and groans of the old wood. The floor dark brown, almost black, but has been worn away by the front door.
To my left are three rows of coffee urns, each labeled with a small, yellowed, typed index card. Ward’s Blend. Decaf. Hazelnut. Then the delicacies: Sulawesi. Kenya AA. Tanzanian Peaberry. Morning Glory. Judge Alito’s Blend. Judge Politan’s Blend.
I’m home.
I walk past the coffee urns and peer through an open door at the back of the nearly all-wood room. Under harsh white lights, a man in a white apron and brimless white hat holds a stick that pushes nuts running along a belt that leads to a roaster. The belt is covered in pecans. Around the walls of the back room are small plastic bags with roasted peanuts, almonds, cashews, filberts, and the like, arranged in long wooden bins. There’s something all-together different about this place from the modern Starbucks or Dunkin’ Donuts with which I’m familiar. This is a product of an era long before mine. I grab a small bag of toasted almonds and pour myself a large cup of Judge Alito’s Blend. What the hell, I think, he decided the Lucchese Crime Family Case.
It’s a little weak. I smirk at the irony.
I pour myself a second cup. Tanzanian Peaberry. Sweet, strong, and an aftertaste of lemon. I have to get the stout, blonde woman who works behind the nut counter to bring over Sweet & Low for the coffee. She doesn’t speak to me as she performs the task. She and I are 100 years from the days that this place came into being.
Another lawyer comes into the coffee shop. I shake my head and give him a nodded greeting. I stop gazing at the walls. The coffee and almonds are paid for, and I am outside, in barely a minute. I give the weak coffee to the shoeshine man and head back to the parking lot behind the Citizenship and Immigration Services Building.
Note: The T.M. Ward Coffee Company is a real dried goods emporium, located at 944 Broad Street in Newark, and is well worth your time and patronage. At that location for 132 years, I don't think my piece, above, or its rather efficient, corporate website does the emporium justice. It's a unique throwback to 19th Century mercantilism, much like the upscale farmer's market of Delicious Orchards, Colts Neck, New Jersey.
Oh, and Judge Alito's Blend is actually pretty decent. I still prefer Kenyan, but who am I to argue with the bench?
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