Newark Mayor Cory Booker (at podium) and basketball star Shaquille O’Neal (right, rear) announced plans to expand the Newark Screens movie theater yesterday

Shaquille O’Neal, the iconic basketball star, and Newark Mayor Cory Booker
announced a $7 million deal yesterday to expand the Newark Screens movie
theater by 20,000 square feet, part of an effort to revitalize the city’s struggling
Central Ward.
O’Neal, a Newark native and four-time National Basketball Association champion,
announced the deal before hundreds of screaming fans at the movie theater,
located at 360-394 Springfield Avenue in Newark.
The deal between New Brunswick, N.J.-based Boraie Development and O’Neal’s
development company Miami-based O’Neal Group, involves doubling the theater
from six to 12 screens. There will be stadium seating and 3-D screens. Goldman
Sachs Urban Investment Group helped finance the project, which is expected to
create 40 construction jobs and 20 permanent jobs in Newark.
The expansion is scheduled to break ground in June and will be completed by
early 2012. [more]

The site at 158 Mount Olivet Avenue and Newark Mayor Corey Booker

Mayor Corey Booker is expected to announce a deal with Stamford, Conn.-based Pitney Bowes tonight, which signed a seven-year lease to relocate its international mail distribution center to Newark, a deal that will bring 180 jobs to the city and provide for another 25 new jobs over the next five years. Pitney Bowes agreed to lease 76,000 square feet of space at 158 Mount Olivet Avenue, an existing Urban Enterprise Zone location that includes 64,000 square feet of production space and 12,000 square feet of office space. The new facility will be used to sort 50 million pieces of international mail per year.
UEZ was established by the state of New Jersey in 1983 to revitalize urban communities and stimulate growth by encouraging businesses to develop and create private sector jobs through investment. “This part of our business — a combination of international mail and the pre-sorting of domestic mail — has been a very rapidly growing part of Pitney Bowes,” said spokesperson Matthew Broder, in a telephone interview. “As the network has grown, we’ve been on a pretty constant search for facilities to keep up with it.” [more]