New Jersey

I want to tread very lightly here -- I have some biases when it comes to New Jersey supermarkets. I worked (full disclosure) for two summers tarring the parking lot and changing fluorescents at the Shop Rite in Lincoln Park, New Jersey. When I was in middle school, I also once shoplifted (and then ate) six Cadbury Creme Eggs from a Grand Union in my hometown of Ridgewood, New Jersey and learned a valuable lesson about crime not paying and an equally valuable lesson about sugar freakouts. So it is maybe with a bit of a skewed perspective that I say that I have never really thought terribly highly of Foodtown, and even considered it something of a lesser figure in the Jersey Supermarket Constellation. Somewhere between Pathmark and Stop N Shop, on the further, colder reaches of the universe. But with the news that six Garden State Foodtowns are installing massive arrays of the very promising Solyndra solar panels, I clearly need to revise my stance.

I really should handle this one. The good news is that Stephen is back from his Far East honeymoon, safe and sound, but while he'd usually be our hockey correspondent -- given the fact that he cares about the sport, and I only write about it when my other job requires it -- he's 1) currently saddled with a body clock that is telling him it's 13:72 a.m., Bermuda Triangle time and 2) such a devout New York Rangers fan that it'd be hard for him to write a post about the New Jersey Devils without inserting all-caps "Let's Go Rangers" interjections throughout. And anyway, as New Jersey relatives, we both share a track record with the Devils that goes back to their old Christmas Tree Color Scheme days, so I'm qualified.

Yeah, we know. But this is for real. Whether it's another green-building tipping point or a sign of the apocalypse as foreseen in prophecy, another surpassingly unlikely property has secured LEED recognition. Anyone who has traveled New Jersey's sublimely un-scenic Route 80 knows that it's a fairly strange place to find anything green, and the sprawling Mt. Olive, New Jersey campus of the Garden State's International Trade Center and Free Trade Zone doesn't sound terribly promising, either. No, the ITC isn't the sprawling concrete wasteland its name suggests -- there's a lot of landscaping, a lot of shrubs -- it's still a tax/duty shelter dedicated to office space, light manufacturing and warehouse space.