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Foundation’s Unauthorized Plan For Marconi Park Renovation Scuttled By Somerset County

COUNTY TAKES OVER – Somerset County will renovate Guglielmo Marconi Memorial Park after officials stopped unauthorized work being done by the Franklin Township Marconi Foundation.

Plans by a private organization to refurbish the Guglielmo Marconi Memorial Park at Easton Avenue and JFK Boulevard have been scuttled by Somerset County officials, about two months after the Township ordered that work on the park be stopped because proper permissions had not been acquired.

The work, conducted under the auspices of the township-based Marconi Foundation, was to include the erection of a bust of Marconi, along with lighting, landscaping and other amenities.

It was discovered in early December 2023 that the Foundation had not secured permission from the County to do the work on what is a County owned property, nor had it received the needed permits from the Township.

The County established the park in 1974. The site where the park is now located once held one of Marconi Wireless Telegraph Co.’s transmitters.

The County will start refurbishment work on the park over the Spring and Summer, County spokesman Nathan Rudy said on February 21.

Included in that work will be “new access points for pedestrians, walkways, and fencing along the back,” he said.

“The park will be 90 percent landscaping with some pedestrian pathways leading to the marker,” Rudy said.

Rudy said the work will be “a full renovation of the plaza.”

A plaque installed on a large boulder was placed on the site in 1974 to commemorate the fact that it was the location of one of Marconi’s transmitters. That will be the only marker in the park, Rudy said.

Guglielmo Marconi is credited as being the “father of modern radio,” although his history is not without controversy, as he was a member of Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Party in the 1920s and 1930s, an issue not addressed by the County.

The controversy around Marconi stems from his joining the Italian Fascist Party in 1923, and his appointment by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini as his “goodwill ambassador” and president of the Royal Academy of Italy, which was the country’s scientific academy during Mussolini’s rule.

In 2002, documents were discovered showing that while academy president, Marconi marked the applications of Jews to the academy with an “E”, symbolizing “ebreo,” the Italian word for Jew. During his time as president, no Jews were admitted to the academy.

Marconi also publicly supported the leading proponent of the Nuremberg Race Laws, a series of laws passed in Germany in 1935 which stripped German Jews of their legal rights because they were not considered Germans, and expressed no reservation about the laws’ tenets.

The laws “were an important step in the Nazi regime’s process of isolating and excluding Jews from the rest of German society,” according to the Holocaust Encyclopedia.

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