The clothing company founded by Kim Kardashian will pay $200,000 to end an investigation accusing it of charging New Jersey customers sales tax for a period of five years, even though clothing is exempt under state law.
The New Jersey Office of Attorney General accused Skims Body of improperly collecting sales tax between 2019 and 2024. The 6.625% levy applies to most consumer goods, but clothing and footwear for human use — including Skims’ underwear and shapewear — are largely exempt.
The attorney general’s office said that Skims engaged in “unconscionable business practices.” But the company said it “mistakenly” collected the taxes for half a decade, according to the consent order.
“As prices on everything from clothing to groceries soar, our office is committed to protecting our residents from unlawful practices that drive up the prices they pay at the register,” said New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin in a statement.
The tax collection was due to a “technical error,” a Skims spokesperson said in a statement. The company fixed the error and said it is proactively reaching out to all affected customers to provide refunds.
“We remain deeply committed to the highest standards of compliance and have implemented enhanced safeguards to prevent any recurrence of similar issues,” the spokesperson said.
Skims agreed to pay $200,000 to close the investigation, according to a consent order dated Jan. 16. The agreement also requires the company to “use best efforts” for the next four years to refund customers.
The sales tax collected by Skims has already been remitted to the New Jersey Division of Taxes, the attorney general’s office said.
The company had been issuing refunds to New Jersey customers who complained about the sales tax charge even prior to the agreement, according to social media posts.
The apparel brand is valued at $5 billion, according to Fortune, and serves mainly Gen Zers and millennials.
NEWARK, N.J. — Mikie Sherrill was sworn in as New Jersey governor Tuesday, becoming the second woman to govern the state and the first from the Democratic Party.
Sherrill, who is also the first female veteran from either party to be elected to the office, broke tradition by opting to be inaugurated in her home county of Essex, in northern New Jersey, instead of the state’s capital city, Trenton.
She took the oath at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark in the morning. Joined onstage by her family and high-profile Democrats, Sherrill spoke about her love for New Jersey and denounced President Donald Trump in a speech on Tuesday.
She also gave two shout-outs to South Jersey, noting that she learned on the campaign trail that South Jerseyans say “pork roll” instead of “Taylor Ham.”
“I have heard you in South Jersey, where you want jobs, transportation investments, innovative businesses, and not to be forgotten or left behind,” she also said.
New Jersey Governor-elect Mikie Sherrill waves as she arrives for her inauguration, Tuesday, Jan. 20, 2026, in Newark, N.J. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
She even referenced Philadelphia while talking about the founding of the United States — in a very Jersey way.
“In fact, not too far away, in the greater Camden metropolitan region, in a place called Philadelphia, Thomas Jefferson wrote a declaration of our independence, marking the birth of this great nation,” she said.
“This entirely unique and revolutionary declaration claims human beings had universal rights to life, to liberty, to the pursuit of happiness, not because of who their parents were, but because every human being is endowed with these rights by their creator, not by a king,” she added, and was met by applause.
She drew parallels between England’s king at the founding of the United States and Trump, whom Democrats have criticized through “no kings” protests. Sherrill said Trump is “illegally usurping power, unconstitutionally enacting a tariff regime to make billions for himself and his family while everyone else sees their costs go higher.”
Sherrill, a former Navy helicopter pilot, former federal prosecutor, and mother of four, was elected to Congress in 2018 and stepped down in November after winning the election, defeating Jack Ciattarelli, who had won the endorsement of Trump.
Sherrill, whose closely watched candidacy drew significant national support, promised during her campaign that she would make New Jersey more affordable and would stand up to Trump.
White flowers lined the front of the stage, and large American and New Jersey flags served as a backdrop.
Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger, Sherrill’s friend and former congressional colleague, was in attendance. Spanberger became Virginia’s first female governor on Saturday in a ceremony attended by Sherrill and other high-profile Democrats.
New Jersey and Virginia were the only states to hold gubernatorial races last year, and the Democratic victories were viewed as a positive sign for the party heading into the midterms with Trump in the White House.
Sherrill, who turned 54 on Monday, succeeds Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat who served two terms. It’s the first time the same party has held the governor’s mansion for three consecutive terms since 1970.
After the ceremony, Sherrill was slated to head to Trenton to sign more executive orders before going back north for an inaugural ball Tuesday evening at the American Dream in East Rutherford.
Sherrill’s lieutenant governor, Dale Caldwell, 65, was also sworn in Tuesday. Caldwell, a Middlesex County-based Methodist pastor, most recently worked as the first Black president of Centenary University. He has worked for state government, started nonprofits, and led charter schools.
In his speech Tuesday, Caldwell said his father marched with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whom he and Sherrill both mentioned in their speeches.
“My father taught me that faith must be active, not passive. He taught me that justice is not an idea, it is a responsibility,” Caldwell said. “And he taught me that service is not optional, especially for those who have been blessed with opportunity.”
Her decision to be inaugurated up north was celebrated by Newark officials, but Trenton City Council member Jennifer Williams, a Republican, argued in an op-ed that it was an insult to Trenton.
Christine Todd Whitman, the first woman to serve as New Jersey governor, used the same venue as Sherrill when she was sworn in for her second term in 1998 while the war memorial in Trenton, the traditional site, was undergoing renovations.
Whitman served as a Republican from 1994 to 2001 before joining the Bush administration and has since left the Republican Party for the Forward Party. She endorsed Sherrill’s candidacy.
New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill speaks after taking the oath of office during an inauguration ceremony, Tuesday, Jan. 20, 2026, in Newark, N.J. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
The region evidently is about to migrate from the refrigerator to the freezer this week, with wind-chill levels possibly approaching zero as temperatures fall to the teens and a brisk west wind adds sting.
“Wind chill” has been a staple of National Weather Service forecasts and media weather reports since 1973.
(Commercial services, such as AccuWeather Inc., now have their own variants.)
At different times it has been a subject of contention, confusion, derision, and revision; its popularity, however, endures.
In terms of alerting the public to potential health hazards, “I think it’s useful,” saidMichael DeAngelis, vice chair of emergency medicine at Temple University’s Lewis Katz School of Medicine.
Said Harvey V. Lankford, a retired physician and writer who has done a deeper dive into wind chill than most humans: “It’s a yardstick.
“The public loves it.”
But where do those numbers come from, and do they tell us how we really feel?
The birth of ‘wind chill’
Gentoo penguins walk at Neko Harbour in Antarctica, Saturday, Nov. 22, 2025. (AP Photo/Mark Baker)
Wind chill is a measure of heat loss from the body from the combination of temperature and wind.
What we know about its effects has a lot to do with former Eagle Scout Paul Siple, the pride of Erie’s Central High School.
He pursued his quest while accompanying Admiral Richard Byrd on his legendary expeditions to that icy forbidden planet known as Antarctica, where the wind stings “like a knife drawn across the face,” as one of his associates put it. At age 19, Siple had won a highly publicized national competition to join Byrd.
Siple minted the term wind chill in his 565-page unpublished doctoral dissertation, a copy of which Lankford obtained from Clark University, in Worcester, Mass.
On a later expedition, Siple, assisted by geologist Charles Passel, conducted experiments measuring how long it took to freeze a container of water under a variety of temperature and wind conditions. Winds obviously accelerated the freezing process.
Using that data they estimated heat loss from human skin, publishing their findings in a landmark 1945 paper.
But Lankford said Siple got remarkable results in his more primitive earlier research, which included estimating frostbite thresholds, using a relatively simple formula involving wind speeds and temperatures.
Siple’s work would become the basis for the wind chill factor that the weather service massaged and began sharing publicly in 1973.
Frostbite and the wind chill revision
The wind chill calculations underwent a significant revision a quarter century ago.
U.S. and Canadian scientists during the 1990s used human subjects to upgrade the index, including establishing new frostbite thresholds.
Twelve subjects, with sensors inside their cheeks and their faces bare, were subjected to temperatures ranging from 32 to 58 below at three different wind speeds.
They were monitored for signs of “frostnip,” which precedes frostbite by about a minute.
For the record, the researchers found that with wind chills of 40 below, frostnip occurs within 15 minutes.
The weather service said the revised index profited from “advances in science, technology and computer modeling.”
Yet Siple obviously had been on to something decades earlier, Lankford said.
In a paper published in 2021 in the journal Wilderness and Environmental Medicine, Lankford and coauthor Leslie R. Fox wrote that some of the modern findings on frostbite thresholds were remarkably similar to what appeared in Siple’s dissertation.
Lankford said they were not surprised by the similarities: “We were stunned.”
Those conditions can seriously exacerbate certain lung problems.
For the healthy, he recommends proceeding with caution while exercising. Sweating in the cold — it does happen, just ask runners and hikers — can increase the risk of hypothermia.
Plus, your brain, heart, kidneys, and other internal organs will be diverting blood flow from muscles and extremities, and that could slow recovery from exertion.
Or you could just put off that run or bike workout until Thursday, when it may go up to 40 degrees.
The long-lost demo tape had always held a certain mythos in Charlotte Astor’s imagination.
For years, the Cherry Hill teen had heard stories about it, recorded about 30 years ago by her mother’s very loud, very short-lived, teenage hardcore band, Seed.
Shannon Astor, now 47, had been a vocalist for the group, just 14 or 15 years old, at a time when female representation within the genre was rare. Within a year or so, the group had disbanded — but before it did, the group, which typically practiced in a member’s parents’ basement, recorded a single demo. There had been only a few dozen copies produced back then, and they had all sold, scattering out around the South Jersey area.
For Charlotte, the tape became a kind of white whale — a relic of her mother’s hard-charging past, something the teen occasionally scoured the web for, to no avail.
She’d never heard her mother’s band. And she wanted to. Badly.
“Ninety-five percent of what I have about my mother is in the stories she tells me,” says Charlotte, 16, a junior at Cherry Hill High School East.
But a demo was something tangible. Something concrete.
“A demo,” she decided, “I can find.”
And so one night last spring, that’s what she set out to do.
She had little to go on: A rough estimate of when the demo would have been released (1993-94), a general geographic location (South Jersey), and a single lyric (“In the wind of the AM shadows cling to nearby trees as season shifts to satisfy the light from above”).
“I have been looking for this tape for 4 years,” she wrote in an appeal to her 1,000 or so Instagram followers, “… and it would mean the absolute world to me to find this tape.”
Butsomething about her search — this desire to connect with a parent, to bridge a gap three decades wide — resonated. It became, within the tight-knit confines of the hardcore music scene, a united pursuit.
At an age when most teenagers couldn’t get far enough away from their parents, here was one launching a quixotic quest to better understand hers.
A senior class photo of Shannon Astor in the 1996 Cherry Hill High School East yearbook. Now 47, Shannon was previously in a hardcore band called Seed.
Soon, strangers from across the country were digging through old boxes in basements, or tagging old running buddies from Jersey’s 1990s hardcore scene in social media posts. Some reached out to old producers from the area, wondering whether the demo might have made its way into some dusty studio corner.
Messages poured in, too — hundreds of them — with suggestions ranging from the plausible to the outlandish. Had she tried getting in touch with Bruce Springsteen’s people? You never know what the Boss might have stowed away in some mansion closet.
“I suddenly had communication with so many people who I thought I would never in my life have any connection with,” Charlotte said. “California to Jersey, and everything in between.”
The lead singer of a well-known Jersey straight-edge band of the era, Mouthpiece, joined the search, messaging Charlotte after others reached out to him about the tape. (He vaguely remembered her mother, Shannon, but not the band.)
Much of the outside help, Charlotte notes, has come from the hardcore community.
Indeed, much of Charlotte’s young life is rooted in the same hardcore music scene that her mother’s once was. Like Shannon before her, Charlotte spends many nights at hardcore shows around the area, photographing the scene for the magazine she self-publishes, “Through Our Eyes.” And like her mother previously, she’s a member of the “straight-edge” hardcore community, a group with a shared collection of ideals that includes abstaining from drinking or drugs. (Her first flirtation with teenage rebellion came when she snuck out of the house one night to go to her favorite record store.)
And though her mother does not necessarily share Charlotte’s zeal for locating the old tape — “I’m not waiting for some garage band demo to be unearthed,” Shannon joked — she understands what it would mean to her daughter to have it.
“It’s special to me only because of how much she needed to hear it,” said Shannon. “I’m just so pro-Charli and everything that she does … But this is her journey, and something that was intrinsically important to her.”
To those in the scene, meanwhile, the response has been very hardcore.
“A bunch of people banding together to help this random girl find her mom’s thing,” said Quinn Brady, 19, of New York, and a friend of Charlotte’s. “Most people assume that hardcore people are not very nice or friendly. [But] there’s this inherent kinship. It connects people across the nation in a way that not a lot of other genres of music do.”
A recent selfie by Charlotte Astor (right) and her mother, Shannon Astor, taken at Reading Terminal Market.
Those outside the hardcore scene have been no less enthralled, however.
In December, after NJ.com picked up the story, further extending its reach, a documentary filmmaker reached out about the possibility of doing a film on her quest.
Last year, after posting in some “old-head” hardcore Facebook groups about the tape, Shane Reynolds — a member of the Philly-based hardcore band God Instinct — stumbled upon what appeared to be the most promising lead yet.
“I found the guy who allegedly made the demo,” Reynolds said.
But when she got the man on the phone, Reynolds says, it proved to be a dead end.
The closest Charlotte came was last year, not long after she first posted about the demo on Instagram. Her mom’s former bandmate in Seed, convinced he must have kept something from that period, recovered from storage an old cassette that featured a recording of a single Seed practice session.
Charlotte took it home, pushed it into the stereo in her bedroom. She stared at the ceiling as the tape began to play and 30 years fell away.
For the first time, she could put a sound to the stories she grew up hearing.
“The first thing I heard was a few seconds of my mom talking,” Charlotte said. “That’s my mom, when she was 16. I’m listening to a clip of my mother, listening to her at the same age I am.”
Charlotte Astor, a junior at Cherry Hill High School East, and her vintage 35mm film Nikon camera in the school’s photography classroom.
Still, that small taste has only reinforced her devotion to unearthing the actual demo.
Charlotte remains realistic about her odds of finding it. No, it’s not likely to be found in some radio station’s studio. And no, Bruce Springsteen is almost certainly not in possession of a three-decades old demo tape from her mother’s teenage years.
But some graying hardcore fan from the ’90s, with a penchant for hoarding and a cluttered garage?
Stranger things have happened.
“I have confidence — unwavering confidence — that someone has it,” Charlotte says. “And that I will get my hands on it.”
The reconstructed “ghost” structure with partial walls and windows of the building known in the eighteenth-century as 190 High Street is officially titled, “Freedom and Slavery in the Making of a New Nation” (2010).
The open-air President’s House installation in Independence National Historical Park was designed to give visitors a sense of the house where the first two presidents of the United States, George Washington and John Adams, served their terms of office.
The commemorative site designed by Emanuel Kelly, with Kelly/Maiello Architects, pays homage to nine enslaved people of African descent who were part of the Washington household with videos scripted by Lorene Cary and directed by Louis Massiah.
Just like the Rocky statue I photographed last week in anticipation of this week’s news, the President’s House was in the news last year so it remains on my radar as I walk around Old City (our newsroom is right across the street).
The cloud formation in the winter sky was what first caught my attention. Then it was seeing the sun lined up directly behind the triangular pediment above the Georgian home’s “front door.”
I played with “placement” of the sun peeking through a tiny gap at a bottom corner of the gable. I knew knew that f/22 on my mirrorless camera’s lens would give me a nice starburst. It’s an optical effect that happens because the lens’ aperture blades don’t form a perfect circle. And the narrower the opening — like f/22 — the more pronounced the effect (shooting at f/2.8 is not quite as dramatic).
Then it was simply a matter of my moving my head ever-so-slightly to align the sun with the little hole — like threading a needle.
While standing in the thin shadow of the door, I was getting blasted in the eye each time I moved. Then a group of tourists, or a noise, startled a flock of pigeons and as they took flight I was not poised just right, but I liked having the birds there better than a perfect placement of the starburst.
I tried a similar “trick” a few years ago, when walking around my town photographing with my iPhone. It doesn’t have a mechanical diaphragm so the effect is not the same. Plus, the threading-the-needle part is much more difficult when you are not actually looking through the lens as in a DSLR. And with a backlight sun blasting you directly in the face.
The optical principle of refraction through a lens diaphragm is the same for both mirrorless and DSLR cameras because light travels through the lens elements and aperture in the same way.
Since 1998 a black-and-white photo has appeared every Monday in staff photographer Tom Gralish’s “Scene Through the Lens” photo column in the print editions of The Inquirer’s local news section. Here are the most recent, in color:
Deepika Iyer holds her niece Ira Samudra aloft in a Rockyesque pose, while her parents photograph their 8 month-old daughter, in front of the famous movie prop at the top of the steps at the Philadelphia Art Museum. Iyer lives in Philadelphia and is hosting a visit by her mother Vijayalakshmi Ramachandran (partially hidden); brother Gautham Ramachandran; and her sister-in-law Janani Gautham who all live in Bangalore, India.January 5, 2026: Parade marshals trail behind the musicians of the Greater Kensington String Band heading to their #9 position start in the Mummers Parade. Spray paint by comic wenches earlier in the day left “Oh, Dem Golden Slippers” shadows on the pavement of Market Street. This year marked the 125th anniversary of Philly’s iconic New Year’s Day celebration.Dec. 29, 2025: Canada geese at sunrise in Evans Pond in Haddonfield, during the week of the Winter Solstice for the Northern Hemisphere. December 22, 2025: SEPTA trolley operator Victoria Daniels approaches the end of the Center City Tunnel, heading toward the 40th Street trolley portal after a tour to update the news media on overhead wire repairs in the closed tunnel due to unexpected issues from new slider parts.December 15, 2025: A historical interpreter waits at the parking garage elevators headed not to a December crossing of the Delaware River, but an event at the National Constitution Center. General George Washington was on his way to an unveiling of the U.S. Mint’s new 2026 coins for the Semiquincentennial, December 8, 2025: The Benjamin Franklin Bridge and pedestrians on the Delaware River Trail are reflected in mirrored spheres of the “Weaver’s Knot: Sheet Bend” public artwork on Columbus Boulevard. The site-specific stainless steel piece located between the Cherry Street and Race Street Piers was commissioned by the City’s Public Art Office and the Delaware River Waterfront Corporation and created and installed in 2022 by the design and fabrication group Ball-Nogues Studio. The name recalls a history that dominated the region for hundreds of years. “Weaver’s knot” derives from use in textile mills and the “Sheet bend” or “sheet knot” was used on sailing vessels for bending ropes to sails. November 29, 2025: t’s ginkgo time in our region again when the distinctive fan-shaped leaves turn yellow and then, on one day, lose all their leaves at the same time laying a carpet on city streets and sidewalks. A squirrel leaps over leaves in the 18th Century Garden in Independence National Historical Park Nov. 25, 2025. The ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) is considered a living fossil as it’s the only surviving species of a group of trees that existed before dinosaurs. Genetically, it has remained unchanged over the past 200 million years. William Hamilton, owner the Woodlands in SW Phila (no relation to Alexander Hamilton) brought the first ginkgo trees to North America in 1785.November 24, 2025: The old waiting room at 30th Street Station that most people only pass through on their way to the restrooms has been spiffed up with benches – and a Christmas tree. It was placed there this year in front of the 30-foot frieze, “The Spirit of Transportation” while the lobby of Amtrak’s $550 million station restoration is underway. The 1895 relief sculpture by Karl Bitter was originally hung in the Broad Street Station by City Hall, but was moved in 1933. It depicts travel from ancient to modern and even futuristic times. November 17, 2025: Students on a field trip from the Christian Academy in Brookhaven, Delaware County, pose for a group photo in front of the Liberty Bell in Independence National Historical Park on Thursday. The trip was planned weeks earlier, before they knew it would be on the day park buildings were reopening after the government shutdown ended. “We got so lucky,” a teacher said. Then corrected herself. “It’s because we prayed for it.” November 8, 2025: Multitasking during the Festival de Día de Muertos – Day of the Dead – in South Philadelphia.November 1, 2025: Marcy Boroff is at City Hall dressed as a Coke can, along with preschoolers and their caregivers, in support of former Mayor Jim Kenney’s 2017 tax on sweetened beverages. City Council is considering repealing the tax, which funds the city’s pre-K programs. October 25, 2025: Austin Gabauer, paint and production assistant at the Johnson Atelier, in Hamilton Twp, N.J. as the finished “O” letter awaits the return to Philadelphia. The “Y” part of the OY/YO sculpture is inside the painting booth. The well-known sculpture outside the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History was removed in May while construction continues on Market Street and has been undergoing refurbishment at the Atelier at the Grounds for Sculpture outside of Trenton.October 20, 2025:The yellow shipping container next to City Hall attracted a line of over 300 people that stretched around a corner of Dilworth Park. Bystanders wondered as they watched devotees reaching the front take their selfies inside a retro Philly diner-esque booth tableau. Followers on social media had been invited to “Climb on to immerse yourself in the worlds of Pleasing Fragrance, Big Lip, and exclusive treasures,” including a spin of the “Freebie Wheel,” for products of the unisex lifestyle brand Pleasing, created by former One Direction singer Harry Styles.October 11, 2025: Can you find the Phillie Phanatic, as he leaves a “Rally for Red October Bus Tour” stop in downtown Westmont, N.J. just before the start of the NLDS? There’s always next year and he’ll be back. The 2026 Spring Training schedule has yet to be announced by Major League Baseball, but Phillies pitchers and catchers generally first report to Clearwater, Florida in mid-February.October 6. 2025: Fluorescent orange safety cone, 28 in, Poly Ethylene. Right: Paint Torch (detail) Claes Oldenburg, 2011, Steel, Fiberglass Reinforced Plastic, Gelcoat and Polyurethane. (Gob of paint, 6 ft. Main sculpture, 51 ft.). Lenfest Plaza at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts on North Broad Street, across from the Convention Center.
OCEAN CITY, N.J. — Along the commercial stretch of Ocean City’s boardwalk, from Sixth to 14th Streets, there are 167 storefronts, including four Kohr Bros. Frozen Custards, three Johnson’s Popcorns, three Manco & Manco Pizzas, and eight Jilly’s stores of one type or another.
There are eight mini-golfs, nine candy shops, 18 ice cream places, 10 pizza shops, 18 arcades or other types of amusements, five jewelry stores, three surf shops, five T-shirt shops, and 47 clothing or other retail shops. There is one palm reader.
Even without Gillian’s Wonderland Pier, the iconic amusement park at Sixth Street that famously closed in October 2024, it still adds up to a classically specific, if repetitive, Jersey Shore boardwalk experience. Many of the shops are owned by the same Ocean City families, some into their third generation.
But now these very shop owners are sounding the alarm.
“This is a group that’s been hanging on for a long time,” Jamie Ford, owner of Barefoot Trading Co., at 1070 Boardwalk, said in an interview last week. “These places are hanging in there. They’re not going anywhere, but we’re nervous.”
Chuck Bangle, owner of the storied Manco & Manco Pizza, warned planning officials he might close one of his three locations if business did not pick up. Other boardwalk property owners said longtime tenants were not returning.
“It’s the 70th year of our family business, the 34th year on the boardwalk,” Bangle told the planning board Jan. 7, before it eventually deadlocked 4-4 on whether the Wonderland site should be declared in need of rehabilitation. “I wrestled with closing the Eighth Street location. I don’t want to close. The impact of Wonderland’s closing on all the merchants has been substantial.”
Business along Boardwalk near 7th Street, Ocean City, NJ., Thursday, Jan. 15, 2026.
Into blustery January, the debate has raged about whether a luxury hotel, even one that would save the Ferris wheel, would bolster or undermine the essential character of this dry town and its beloved boardwalk.
At this point, even the most ardent members of the Save Wonderland faction seem resigned to the reality that, as Will Morey of Morey’s Piers himself came up from Wildwood to say to the planning board, the odds of Wonderland coming to life again as an amusement park are slim to none.
A rendering of the proposed new Icona in Wonderland Resort, to be built on the site of the old Wonderland Pier. The proposal for a 252-room resort includes saving the iconic Ferris wheel and carousel.
It’s the rest of the boardwalk that now wants to be heard: merchants with the voice of their ancestors ringing in their ears.
“This is an incredible opportunity,” said Ocean City Councilman Jody Levchuk, a member of the family that owns the Jilly’s stores on the boardwalk. He is also a member of a boardwalk subcommittee that will report its findings on Feb. 7. “My grandfather — who’s a big boardwalk guy — he’d walk up and he’d say this man wants to spend $170 million and you’re ignoring him.”
Plummeting parking revenue
A season without Wonderland took its toll. Parking figures from municipal lots tell the story.
The 249-spot lot at Fifth and the boardwalk across from Wonderland brought in $483,921 in parking fees in 2024 (people paid an average of $21 to park there during the summer season), but dropped to $290,895 in 2025, a 40% decrease. Overall, parking revenue dropped by about a half-million dollars, from $2.46 million in 2024 to $1.95 million in 2025.
At the end of 2025, there were a half-dozen empty storefronts, according to boardwalk merchants who keep track, mostly in the 600 block adjacent to Wonderland, though there is inevitable churn during the offseason.
Becky Friedel, owner of 7th Street Surf Shop, said in an interview that the shop is planning to expand and take over two of the vacant boardwalk storefronts for a new breakfast and lunch spot and a clothing boutique.
She said that while businesses have seen the loss of some of the younger clientele who used to fill Ocean City rooming houses and group Shore houses, the newer second-home owners come “with a fair amount of money.” The boardwalk also has a handful of higher-end boutiques, including the Islander. The downtown saw the opening of a Lululemon last year. Some envision a boardwalk that might include more boutiques in the mix, and fewer repeating sequences of ice cream-french fries-pizza-beachwear.
“We’re optimistic,” Friedel said. “Obviously [Wonderland closing] hurt us a little bit, especially in the evening. Our night business isn’t as strong as it was. We’re taking over the french fry place to focus on breakfast and lunch.”
Taking on the boardwalk
Also optimistic are the partners behind Alex’s Pizza, the Roxborough stalwart dating to 1961 that is opening up this summer at 1214 Boardwalk, next to Candyland. Coming in hot with a tomato sauce swirl atop the pizza not unlike the Manco’s staple, Alex’s partner Rich Ennis said, “We’re more of a thin-crust pizza.”
The enthusiasm of Ennis and partner Dylan Bear to take on the boardwalk also raises the question of whether the center of gravity will continue to shift southward, away from the no-longer-Wonderland end.
Dylan Bear, owner of Alex’s Pizza, 1214 Boardwalk, Ocean City, NJ., Thursday, Jan. 15, 2026.
“If you don’t have an anchor down there, people are not going to walk down there,” said Mark Benevento, owner of Congo Falls golf at 1132 Boardwalk, among other properties he rents out. “They will turn around at the music pier.”
Rather than seeing the hotel proposal as a threat to the character of the town, the merchants have united to stress that they view it as essential to Ocean City’s preservation. In other Shore towns, it has been the push of residential development that has eaten away at commercial zones. The parcel is currently zoned for amusements.
In places like Seaside Heights, Long Beach Island, and Avalon, condo and new residential construction has chipped away at the essential character of the places, replacing some of their most distinctive destinations, from restaurants to motels to bars and nightclubs.
Mark Raab, a local pediatric dentist whose family owns five boardwalk properties in Ocean City, called the closing of Wonderland “devastating” in remarks to the planning board.
“People don’t know what’s going on,” he said. “This year we had three businesses that closed, longtime tenants that did not renew their leases. Six years ago we had a waiting list for these properties.
“The boardwalk is not thriving,” he said. “The boardwalk is slowly going down. It’s going down piece by piece. It is rapidly becoming a snowball effect.”
‘Now they have galvanized us’
Ford, of Barefoot Trading, thinks the time has come for the view of the merchants to be heeded. The 4-4 tie at the planning board is being seen not as an outright rejection of a rehabilitation designation, which would expedite zoning allowances and possible tax abatements, but as a pass back to the city council.
The families, he said, are “the backbone of it. What we’re speaking in favor of should carry a little bit of weight.”
In a usually sleepy Jersey Shore January, there has been an awful lot of intrigue, and packed meetings, with the latest talk of perhaps a limited zoning change that would allow a hotel, though perhaps one not as grand (252 rooms, seven stories) as Mita is seeking.
There is also talk of allowing residential units above boardwalk storefronts. And many believe the city council will essentially give the tie to the nonvoting planner, Randall E. Scheule, who told his deadlocked board he believed the Wonderland site did meet two needed criteria — significant deterioration and a pattern of underutilization — and to go ahead and approve the rehabilitation zone.
Mita has said that time is of the essence. He said he has been shocked at the way the town has stymied his plan twice.
Councilman Keith Hartzell, who twice voted against advancing Mita’s development plan, said he still wants to negotiate with Mita over height, parking, and other issues. One possibility, in conjunction with the boardwalk subcommittee, is rezoning just the 600 block of the boardwalk to allow a hotel. Hartzell has also been trying to bring a playground to that end in the meantime.
“I’m not anti-hotel at all,” Hartzell said. “Our job is to come up with something [Mita] can do that he can make money with and be happy with.”
For Ocean City’s merchants, the Wonderland saga, and Mita’s difficulty in getting his hotel off the ground, has prompted them to step out from behind the counter or out of the ticket booths and speak up.
Said Benevento, the Congo Falls owner: “Maybe we have never gotten political. Now they have galvanized us.”
Some snow is possible in the Philly region during the holiday weekend, but about the only thing certain is that schools will be closed until Tuesday.
Snow — not a whole lot of it — is expected Saturday morning, and possibly again during the day Sunday.
“Definitely something,” said Ray Martin, a lead meteorologist at the National Weather Service Office in Mount Holly, “maybe not a lot of something.”
In short, he added, expect a “100% chance of forecast uncertainty.”
How much for Philly?
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Some snow is expected in the early morning hours of Saturday, said Dan Pydynowski, senior meteorologist with AccuWeather Inc., and “sidewalks and streets could be slick for a time” in the Philly region.
However, temperatures in the afternoon are expected to approach 40 degrees and that should melt any snow. If the precipitation lingers, it likely would turn to rain.
That snow would be associated with a system from the west, and more significant amounts are expected well north and west of Philly.
On Sunday when it will be colder, the source would be a coastal storm that has been befuddling computer models the last three days. On Wednesday, the U.S. model was seeing a significant snowstorm for the I-95 corridor. On Thursday, it said never mind and fell in line with other guidance that kept the storm offshore.
On Friday, models were bringing the storm closer to the coast, but the model consensus was that it would be more of threat at the Shore and perhaps throw back a paltry amount to the immediate Philly region.
“On the other hand, a slight shift … in the track could bring 1-2 inches into the urban corridor,” the weather service said in its afternoon discussion.
Said Martin, “It’s always tricky with these offshore lows. It’s also possible that both systems pass us and we get basically nothing.”
Far more certain is a rather big chill
A Philadelphia firefighter spreads salt to control icing at a fire scene on Friday.
That the region was about to experience its coldest weather of the season to date was all but certain.
High temperatures on Monday, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, probably won’t get out of the 30s, and no higher than the mid 20s Tuesday and Wednesday, forecasters say.
Overnight lows are due to tumble into the teens, with wind chills approaching zero early Wednesday.
No more precipitation is forecast at least through Thursday, but with odds favoring continued below-normal temperatures through Jan. 29 and above-normal precipitation, it should be a robust period for virtual snow threats, if not actual snow.
ATLANTIC CITY — The Atlantic County prosecutor said Friday his office would not go forward with a child abuse trial against Atlantic City Superintendent La’Quetta Small, the wife of Mayor Marty Small, after determining that their daughter no longer wanted the case to proceed.
Their daughter, who turned 18 this month, testified for hours at the December trial of her father, who was later acquitted by a jury of charges that he beat his daughter with a broom and further abused her with terroristic threats.
The office will also request dismissal of charges against Constance Days-Chapman, the principal of Atlantic City High School, who was accused of failing to properly report to the state hotline the accusations made by the daughter.
In a statement Friday, the prosecutor said the decision was based on the daughter’s wishes and the prior verdict.
“We believe it is prudent and responsible to dismiss the remaining indictments against them,” prosecutor Williams Reynolds said in the statement.
The charges have been hanging over the Small family for two years. After being acquitted last month, Mayor Small shouted, “Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, jury.”
Atlantic City Mayor Marty Small Sr. speaks to the media after being found not guilty on all counts of abusing his teenage daughter, Thursday, Dec. 18, 2025.
His daughter attended the ceremony when the newly reelected Small was sworn in, and the mayor said the family had spent New Year’s Eve together like old times and begun the healing process.
Small, 51, faced charges stemming from a handful of incidents in late 2023 and early 2024 in which prosecutors said he and his wife abused and assaulted the teen. The couple said the incidents stemmed from their disapproval of their daughter’s relationship with a young man, leading to escalating tension and arguments in the family home.
The jury delivered its verdict at noon after having deliberated for two days. They found Small not guilty of endangering the welfare of a child, aggravated assault, making terroristic threats, and witness tampering. A conviction would have required Small to relinquish his office.
La’Quetta Small was scheduled to stand trial in April on charges of endangering the welfare of a child and simple assault.
Also facing a forthcoming trial was Days-Chapman, the principal of the Smalls’ daughter’s high school. Prosecutors say when the teen reported her parents’ abuse, Days-Chapman failed to notify child welfare authorities and instead told the couple of the report.
Days-Chapman, who is Marty Small’s former campaign manager, was later charged with official misconduct and related crimes.
Mayor Small could not be reached for comment.
La’Quetta Small’s lawyer, Michael Schreiber, said Friday he was “happy they decided to do the right thing.”
“It was a very difficult time for my client and her husband and their daughter,” he said. “We have to work on reunification, which is hard.”
He said the matter should have been handled by counselors or in family court, “where you have therapists to help everyone involved.”
“When the case is over, the prosecutor goes to the next case,” he said. “Where does that leave everybody? What is the benefit of the prosecution to the daughter? Whether it’s guilty or not guilty, how do you pick up the pieces and help this family?”
He said he would now be officially appealing a ruling by the state Division of Child Protection and Permanency that made an initial finding that substantiated the allegations.
He said the daughter has been living with her boyfriend and his mother.
In the statement, the prosecutor said the victim had last week “received a threat, racial in tone, on one of her social media accounts pertaining to her accusations she made against her father.”
“While we actively investigate this threat, we believe it is no longer in her best interest both emotionally and perhaps even physically for us to continue with our cases against La’Quetta Small and Constance Days-Chapman at this time,” the prosecutor said. “The further intent of this decision is to hopefully allow [the daughter], her family, and the community the time to heal and move forward.”
Women working at Trump National Golf Club in New Jersey were required to wear tight uniforms that were too small and told to “smile more,” as they endured “sexist remarks about their bodies and menstruation,” according to two lawsuits by former employees.
Both complaints describe a similar pattern: A female employee at the Bedminster club, working in a culture hostile to women, reported safety issues and was penalized for doing so.
Maria Hadley, a former banquet server who worked at the private club, owned by President Donald Trump, from February until she resigned in August, says she suffered from a retaliation campaign after she reported a manager who spiked the drink of an underage employee with vodka. And Justine Sacks, who was hired as clubhouse manager in 2023, says that she was demoted and ultimately fired in May for reporting health and safety violations, including maggots and mold in the soft-serve machine.
The lawsuits describe a hyper-sexualized work environment, in which female staffers were expected to endure sexual harassment from workers and guests.
Both Hadley and Sacks are represented by the New Jersey-based McOmber McOmber & Luber law firm. Their attorneys did not respond to a request for comment.
The Bedminster club is operated by the Trump Organization, which is led by the president’s sons Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. Neither the club nor general manager David Schutzenhofer responded to requests for comment.
In this July 15, 2017 file photo, President Donald Trump turns to wave to the people gathered at the clubhouse as his walks to his presidential viewing stand during the U.S. Women’s Open Golf tournament at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J.
Vodka-spiked Shirley Temple
Hadley, a banquet server, says women were treated as “a prop” and “were expected to look pleasing, work without complaint, and stay quiet,” according to the lawsuit filed Monday in New Jersey Superior Court in Camden. Male managers and coworkers harassed their female peers, and called teenage guests “sexy.” When a guest inappropriately touched Hadley, a manager advised “they pay a lot of money to come here, just ignore it.”
Hadley reported in June that a bartender poured vodka into the Shirley Temple of an underage employee without the employee’s consent, saying it would give her energy.
The bartender was temporarily fired, but the club’s management launched a retaliation campaign against Hadley, the complaint says. She was denied a $1,000 bonus, isolated by her peers, and received worse hours and assignments.
Hadley resigned via email in August, the suit says, writing to the club’s human resources representative that her employment became “unbearable.” The club accepted her resignation, which the suit calls “effectively forcing her out,” and rehired the fired bartender.
That man went on to make sexual comments about 12-year-old guests with braces in September, according to a message Hadley sent to Eric Trump, the executive vice president of Trump National, which is included in the complaint.
Maggots and mold
Sacks joined Trump National in January 2023 and was told from the onset to expect “gender differences” in treatment, according to the suit, which was filed last month in Monmouth County Superior Court. She was instructed to hire women based on their looks, and received complaints from multiple direct reports about offensive, gender-based comments from male managers and peers.
The complaints were dismissed by Schutzenhofer, who told Sacks to “vote the mean girls off the island,” the suit says.
The club’s management slowly stripped Sacks’ authority and stopped inviting her to leadership meetings, in what the suit says was retaliation for elevating the complaints of female staffers.
People play golf next to the Trump National Golf Club Bedminster’s clubhouse in Bedminister on Friday, June 9 , 2023, in New Jersey.
Sacks was also retaliated against for reporting unsanitary conditions at the club’s kitchens, which included expired and unlabeled food, and the bistro operating without running water, the complaint says. There were flies all over the clubhouse in the fall of 2023, which even Donald Trump complained about, according to the lawsuit.
Management told Sacks that she was new to working at golf clubs and was “wrapped too tight” when she complained about the sanitation conditions, as well as employees drinking and vaping on the job. But even Eric Trump asked the club’s management team to make sanitation a “huge focus” because a few health inspectors are “eager and politically motivated to try and embarrass us,” according to a copy of an email sent by the executive vice president in January 2024.
The clubhouse’s bistro-area became more unsanitary, and by September 2024 the soft-serve machine was filled with maggots and mold, the suit says.
Sacks was placed on a 90-day performance improvement plan in December 2024 for, among other issues, being “off-putting,” the complaint says. In April, Sacks was reassigned from clubhouse manager to managing the bistro, which the lawsuit calls a clear demotion.
Schutzenhofer terminated Sacks in May, the lawsuit says, shortly after the club “failed miserably” a state health inspection.
Federal investigators pieced together a timeline for the deadly helicopter crash that killed two longtime friends in Hammonton, N.J., last month.
The National Transportation Safety Board released a preliminary report on Wednesday detailing the helicopter crash that led to the deaths ofpilots Kenneth Kirsch, 65, from Carneys Point, and Michael Greenberg, 71, of Sewell. Their aircrafts collided midair on Dec. 29. The two had been known to enjoy their flights together for years.
According to preliminary data, Kirsch and Greenberg started their flight session at the Vineland-Downstown Airport, departing at 9:48 a.m. The pilots, in separate aircrafts, flew in parallel paths to Hammonton Municipal Airport, arriving 10 minutes later.
Investigators are still trying to determine what happened next;there is no preliminary real-time GPS data on their subsequent flight out of Hammonton Municipal Airport.
The preliminary report confirmed Kirsch and Greenberg flew out of the Hammonton airport and collided at 11:24 a.m., almost an hour-and-a-half after they arrived at the airport.
During that time before their final flight, the two men stopped by Apron Cafe, a breakfast spot overlooking Hammonton Municipal Airport’s runway, the owner told The Inquirer. Minutes after they left, Apron Cafe patrons and staff could see one of the helicopters spiraling, engulfed in flames in the distance.
“I looked up, and I could see in the distance the one spiraling down, and then I see the other one coming down,” said the cafe’s owner, Sal Silipino. “It was hard to believe that they were crashing.”
While no data from the aircraft is available, surveillance video captured the fatal crash as it happened, according to the NTSB. The helicopters flew close together shortly before the accident.
Slightly staggered from one another, and heading in the same direction in what investigators liken to a “formation flight,” the helicopters “converged until they contacted each other.”
Investigators say one helicopter immediately began a tumbling descent to the ground, while the other pitched up sharply before leveling out. However, shortly after leveling off, the helicopter began spinning clockwise before descending rapidly to the terrain.
Kirsch was flying an Enstrom F-28A helicopter, and Greenberg, an Enstrom 280C. Both were operating the aircraft for personal flights.
The crash site was 1.5 miles southwest of Hammonton Municipal Airport and included a 1,211-foot debris path, with paint chips, main rotor blades, and the tail cone of one of the helicopters.
Kirsch’s aircraft was found split in half with the tail cone only held together by one tail rotor control cable, according to the report. There were no signs of fire in Kirsch’s helicopter. Major sections of Greenberg’s aircraft were destroyed by a post-impact fire, with the tail cone relatively intact.
The wreckage was recovered and retained for further examination by the NTSB. Investigators noted these were preliminary details, and the cause of the crash is yet to be determined.
A typical NTSB investigation can last one to two years.
