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In this Tipsheet: ‘Mercy’ Brings Jersey City to the Small Screen | AhoraJC Set for Liftoff | Easy Riders Wants to Help You Bike the Studio Tour | The Loew’s Kicks Off its New Season

‘Mercy’ Brings Jersey City to the Small Screen

The series premiere of NBC’s new hospital-nurse drama, Mercy, which aired last Wednesday, Sept. 23, opens with a scene of protagonist Veronica Callahan, played by the relatively unknown actress Taylor Schilling, enjoying some coffee in Basic, when two cars suddenly collide on the corner of 8th and Erie Streets (not the most uncommon occurrence, residents of that neighborhood might tell you), prompting her to rush out and perform a rather gruesome impromptu incision on one of the drivers, who’s about to go into cardiac arrest.

“You’re not even a doctor? You’re just some stupid nurse?” the man’s girlfriend yells in a Sopranos-esque accent a few minutes later inside the fictional Mercy Hospital in Jersey City. “If he dies, if he has so much as a scar, I swear I will sue you, the hospital and the city!”

And so begins Mercy, which, as you may have already gathered from the chatter emanating from local message boards, is set, and was largely shot on location, in Chilltown.

So far, aside from Basic — and Public School No. 5 over on 4th Street, the façade of which is supposed to be the hospital’s exterior (the interior is Paterson’s now-closed Barnert Memorial Hospital Center) — local dive Lucky 7 also makes some prominent cameos, portraying itself as the characters’ preferred watering hole. (Although, for anyone who saw last week’s pilot and was wondering when Lucky 7 got so nice, the inside bar scenes were actually shot at Park Tavern on West Side Avenue).

“It’s been neat,” said Lucky 7’s owner, Michael Garcia. He said there’d been two shoots at Lucky 7 so far, including a fictional late-night bar brawl from the pilot episode that spilled out onto the corner of 2nd and Coles. The second episode, which airs tonight, features a softball scene (shot at Enos Jones Park) with the real-life Lucky 7 team, he added.

And apparently some of the cast and crew have been boozing at Lucky 7 during their downtime. “The guy who plays the lead girl’s boyfriend on the show,” Canadian actor Diego Klattenhoff, “he hangs out here quite a bit. He’s a really cool guy,” said Garcia.

So how did Mercy end up in Jersey City in the first place?

“I don’t know,” said Liz Heldens, the show’s executive producer, speaking by phone last week from L.A. “I think I had read a book set in Jersey City, or an article. It was just on my mind. I loved the idea of setting the show across the river so you could see Manhattan but aren’t there, and it seemed like a city with an urban feel but not the same city we see on TV all the time.”

Heldens first visited Jersey City back in March, staying at the Westin Jersey City Newport, when shooting began for the pilot.

“I really had a lovely impression of it,” she said. “ Lots of nice, tree-lined brownstone streets. It’s really pretty!”

Likewise, the city seems pleased with Mercy’s presence around town.

“It’s cool to be able to see a film or television show and say, ‘Hey, that’s Jersey City!’” said city spokesperson Jennifer Morrill in an email. “We’d like to keep it that way.”

Asked if there had been any complaints from residents about production, Morrill said she hadn’t heard of any. “So far, Jersey City residents seem film-friendly,” she said.

Which the city must be happy about, considering Mercy isn’t the only shoot currently calling our streets home. Another, said Morrill, is Oliver Stone’s forthcoming drama-thriller, Wall Street 2, starring Michael Douglas and Shia LaBeouf.

Other recent movies with scenes shot in Jersey City include Two Lovers, The Wrestler and Disney’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, she said.

AhoraJC Set for Liftoff

A date has been set for the first meeting of AhoraJC, a new grassroots organization focused on funding and promoting the arts for underserved Jersey City youth.

The goal of the meeting, which will take place on Oct. 14 at La Conguita (at 7 pm), is to introduce AhoraJC to the community and scout for potential board members, said David Cruz, the group’s founder.

“I’m kind of in the process of seeing who has what to bring to the organization,” said Cruz, 47, a longtime journalist and Downtown Jersey City resident. “I don’t expect we’ll have 50 people working on it immediately. My goal is to start small.” Like with a Facebook page and blog, he added.

Cruz, a former editor-in-chief of The Hudson Reporter who now freelances for the public radio stations WNYC and WBGO, where he worked until last year, said most of the Jersey City’s elementary- and high-school-aged residents don’t have access to its predominantly Downtown, “hipster”-oriented arts scene. AhoraJC, he said, would help them fund artistic endeavors of their own, whether that means buying equipment for a high-school jazz band or putting together trips to nearby performing arts centers.

“I’ve always felt that young people here are starved of the arts,” he said. “Or maybe they’re not necessarily starved of the arts. They’re just not fed the arts.” Asked whether AhoraJC would cater primarily to the Latino community, Cruz said, “Only to the extent that young Latinos are one group that is underserved. And it just happens to be run by a Latino individual.”

AhoraJC also hopes to produce an annual Jersey City jazz festival, which will serve as its fundraising anchor, said Cruz. (If the idea of a Jersey City jazz festival sounds familiar, you’re right: It was floated by the mayoral campaign of L. Harvey Smith in a conversation with JCI back in April. But that’s no mere coincidence, folks: Cruz was the campaign’s communications director.)

As for the new organization’s board, Cruz said it should include people with proven fundraising capabilities rather than people who are simply well-known. He said he hoped AhoraJC would be incorporated as a 502(c)(3) nonprofit organization by the end of the year and that the inaugural jazz festival would take place next fall.

Easy Riders Wants to Help You Bike the Studio Tour

Have you been mapping out your route for this weekend’s 19th Annual Jersey City Artists Studio Tour? Figuring out how to maximize your wine-and-cheese intake while also hitting up galleries in as many different parts of town as possible? Feeling a bit fatigued just from the thought of hopping around from show to show on foot?

That’s precisely what Christopher Englese and Damian Wieczorek, co-founders of the new bike rental/bike tour company, Easy Riders, are hoping for.

They’ll be giving bike tours of the studio tour, one each on Saturday and Sunday (unless there’s demand for more, said Englese) for $20 per rider, which includes the cost of bike rental and a helmet.

“We’re trying to put the word out that there are other ways of getting around besides motor vehicles,” said Englese.

He rattled off the stops they’d make after departing from a meet-up point at Hamilton Park: First up, 58 Gallery. Then to a show on 5th Street called “Boxed.” Then (on Saturday, at least), they’ll pass through the 4th Street Arts and Music Festival before heading out of Ward E over to Rock Soup Studios on Grand Street, looping back around to Lex Leonard Gallery on Christopher Columbus Drive and then to an exhibition called “Exquisite Corpse” at 150 Bay St., and wrapping things up at the Raw Power graffiti mural in the Powerhouse Arts District.

The route is about four miles total, and they’ll be stopping for 20 minutes to an hour at each location depending on the exhibit. All told, it should take between three and four hours, said Englese.

“It will help tour-goers visit more exhibitions and events so less time is spent walking from site to site and more is spent viewing,” said Rebecca Feranec, director of Pro Arts Jersey City, which organizes the studio tour in conjunction with the city’s Division of Cultural Affairs and the Jersey City Museum.

“I’m really excited,” she added.

Englese said part of the reason he and Wieczorek started Easy Riders, a primarily web-based business that they launched in late June, was to promote cycling as an environmentally-friendly local transportation alternative, and to advocate for things like bike lanes, bike signage and additional bike racks around the city. Aside from the rentals, which are run out of a storage space near Hamilton Park, they offer guided waterfront tours to Liberty State Park and the Statue of Liberty.

But in Jersey City, for a variety of reasons, bike culture doesn’t seem to have taken off the way it has across the river.

So, how’s business?

“We’re doing alright,” said Englese, “although I wish there were more tours. One week we’ll do really well; then the next week will be a bit slower. But there’s definitely a demand and a need for this.”

The Loew’s Kicks Off its New Season

And now a plug: This weekend is the season opener of Journal Square’s historic Loew’s Jersey Theatre, which provides recession-friendly weekend activities for many a broke Jersey City-ite with its ongoing screenings of rare and classic films. (Hello, $1 popcorn!)

Things get started Friday night with an 8 pm showing of The Untouchables; then a Saturday matinee of the Marx brothers’ 1929 debut, The Cocoanuts; and later that evening, the 1923 silent comedy Safety Last with live organ accompaniment.

Looking at the theater’s schedule into June of next year (on its freshly redesigned website), we couldn’t help but notice that the lineup seems a bit more jam-packed than its usual three-weekends-or-so-of-screenings per season, with a Yo La Tengo or Bright Eyes concert thrown in here and there.

The theater’s director Colin Egan tells us more about that. “In most years over the last half decade or so, we’ve been slowly expanding programming, though that really wasn’t the case last year with the downturn in the economy,” he said in an email. “But in the coming year, we hope to be able to host more events than ever.”

Events like a three-day horror expo called “Saturday Nightmares,” Egan said. Just don’t get excited about factoring it into your Halloween plans — it’s not happening until next March. Still, “As far as we know, there’s never been anything like it in Jersey City before,” said Egan.

Egan also said there were some more concerts in the works, though it was too soon to specify any details.

Meanwhile, coming up this fall: Rosemary’s Baby, The Wolfman, Forbidden Planet, Monsieur Verdoux and more films that are yet to be announced. Starting in the New Year, the Loew’s will host decade-specific film screenings on the weekends, beginning Jan. 29 with Gold Diggers and other classics from the 1930s.

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