Documentary Play on Hoboken’s History Is Lens on Its Present and Future

“We got you out of there.”

That was my parents’ reaction when I moved from a Central Jersey suburb to Hoboken in my late 30s to pursue a professional opportunity. They had, after all, achieved their American dream moving from Jersey City to the ‘burbs when I was seven years old.

I laughed when they said this. But I don’t think I fully got the impact of those words until I was sitting in Hoboken’s Mile Square Theatre Friday night watching writer Joseph Gallo’s documentary play about gentrification called Yuppies Invade My House at Dinnertime.

While I certainly wasn’t in the first wave of young upwardly mobile professionals to move into Hoboken, I suppose I was technically one when I came in 1998. I had a good journalism job working for “the man” in New York City. I was paying market rent. I was oblivious to the local goings-on, mostly focused on easy proximity to Manhattan as a cultural playground.

Then a few major things intervened — the emergence of the internet and changes in how people consumed news meant about 60 percent fewer journalism jobs, plus the terrorist attacks on 9/11 precipitated layoffs at my corporate media employer. Hence began my unplanned new role as an artist entrepreneur, a venture by no means for the faint of heart.