Walking New Jersey (and Staten Island)

In a state between Manhattan and LA, and the strata of the American Dream

I never liked New Jersey, which isn’t surprising because the only way I’ve known it is from four decades of driving through it. Despite living adjacent to it for most of my adult life, the only night I’ve ever slept in the state was almost exactly forty years ago. That wasn’t the best perspective since it was when a college friend and I hitchhiked from Sarasota, Florida to New York City during Christmas break, and when kicked awake by Port Authority police rousing the homeless, we phoned the only person we knew in the area, a bus away in New Jersey, and crashed on their couches¹.

Consequently I equate New Jersey with lumpy sofas, gridlock, grimy toll booths (trying to toss quarters into the basket after waiting forty-five minutes in line, watching one bounce off the rim, and realizing you don’t have any more to make the exact change and being beeped at by a cacophony of angry drivers), industrial stench, all smothered in a rude antagonism that radiates hostility.

When I was hired by Salomon Brothers in the early ‘90s, with offices in the World Trade Center, I didn’t know much about New York City, but I knew I didn’t want to commute from New Jersey or Staten Island. I’d thought of doing that to save money, because I was in debt, and was certain my high-paying job wouldn’t last, but when I told relatives about my plan, one quipped, “No one writes romantic poems about New Jersey. Is that how you want to live your life? In Jersey?”

That fit, and so I settled in the borough of poetry (Brooklyn). Whenever I went through New Jersey during my two decades in New York, usually going far too slowly, I was reminded that I’d made the right decision.

I knew that was unfair, but still I never walked New Jersey, despite having walked almost the entirety of New York City (excluding Staten Island, of course), because it didn’t seem to offer anything other than a more logistically challenging, and lesser, version of the Bronx, Queens, or Brooklyn. It was another borough, but empty of poetry, with a different (and lesser) metro system, and disjointed.

That disjointedness was the biggest obstacle. Urban New Jersey is carved up into a jumble of segments by inlets, rivers, industrial zones, expressways. Getting from one to the other is often impossible for pedestrians, or so Google Maps says. I’d thought of long routes before, but all seemed too complicated, until motivated by being stuck here at home, I looked closer and realized I could now walk across the Goethals and Bayonne bridges, which meant I could get from Passaic to Fort Lee, via Newark and Elizabeth. Forty-five or so miles, over three days.

So that is what I set out to do, to hopefully right all the wrongs I’d assigned to an entire state, with the slight modification of starting in Nutley, and then spending my first night next to Newark Airport (literally), and my second in Bayonne, before ending in Fort Lee.

Driving into Jersey, I began regretting my decision. New Jersey has pockets of Manhattan’s density, but with LA’s reliance on cars, so it’s in a quantum superposition of the two, and that means it has two outcomes, or two different realities. For people who like it, that reality contains the best of both (Manhattan’s localized variety with LA’s space and freedom), and for those who don’t, it contains the worst (Manhattan’s crowding, with LA’s traffic).

Like any quantum state, which it collapses to depends on the viewer, and the black Escalade, inches behind my bumper, manically flashing its brights, despite me going sixty-five in a forty-five zone, despite us both being behind a line of cars on both sides that would require quantum tunneling to pass, reminded me it almost always collapses to the negative reality for me, at least when in a car. Getting the other perspective is what I hoped to do by navigating it on foot and by public transport.

I’ll cut to the chase and say, yes, walking New Jersey gave me a much more favorable view of the state, providing the positive reality, although I took a slightly different route than planned, ending at the Staten Island ferry terminal a day earlier because I realized I’d never done that before and when I reached the Bayonne Bridge it looked too steep, exposed, and pedestrian-unfriendly for my fear of heights to surmount.

During my first day I passed through long blocks thick with small homes festooned with Christmas decorations and religious statuary, punctuated by corners and downtowns with ethnic restaurants, cafes, hunting and fishing stores, bakeries, bars, diners, and Dunkin’ Donuts. I got handmade bagels a block away from a neighborhood of parks, beautiful sycamores, sculptured hedges, and well-cared-for ranch homes.

Those bagels were made by Sam, a Mexican-American baker who learned the craft from his Colombian boss two decades ago, who had learned it from his Jewish boss four decades ago.

That fit a pattern of ethnic layering I saw throughout the walk; like an archaeologist digging deeper to see the strata of time, you can see the shifts caused by those who fulfilled the American Dream — the cycle of immigration, entrepreneurial success, then moving to the bucolic burbs, followed by the arrival of the next wave of poor immigrants hoping to fulfill their own version². New Jersey, even more than New York City across the Hudson, is built on that continual cycle, and had I started farther north, or walked farther west I would have seen, in the higher up neighborhoods (Summit, Montclair, Milburn, etc) the lucrative end point of past cycles.

Those neighborhoods were where my established Salomon Brothers colleagues lived, commuting in each morning on the arterial roads that dice apart the state, often zooming over the humbler neighborhoods where their parents, and/or grandparents once lived.

That cycle hasn’t worked for everyone in New Jersey, and a lot of my walk was through neighborhoods where the strata on display weren’t the layers of the immigrant American Dream, but the ever-shifting political attempts at dealing with its failure for some — most notably American blacks. The non-profits, the uplifting public art, the tax-sheltered office buildings, the housing projects, the community centers, the job training facilities, the charter schools, the rec centers with youth programs, and so on and so on, all around a drug-detritus-littered park with a statue to some past European great—from a stratum of successful immigration since moved higher, such as Venetian general Bartolomeo Colleoni on horseback in Clinton Park, Newark.

You can see the cycle of the successful American Dream, and its failures, in a long day’s walk in New Jersey, and you also see, starkly and jarringly, another very American quality: inequality, since both are adjacent to each other. Neighborhoods in New Jersey change rapidly, sometimes within a single block.

I spent the first day walking with a reader (Hi, and thanks for the company, Bill!) and as I said to him (or him to me) when we crossed the Second River from Belleville to Newark, “Did you notice how everything changed? How everything is now worse. The quality of homes, the amount of garbage, the traffic, the vibe, the smell, the bus stops, all of it is worse, crappier, less cared for, filthier, and less accommodating. It is like we crossed from Success-town into Failure-ville.”

That is especially true of the franchises, like the Dunkins, which, in Failure-ville, don’t have seats for their customers because they don’t want people in them, because they don’t trust their customers to behave, and don’t want to deal with the bullshit that they can bring.

I had met Bill to start the walk in a Dunkin in Nutley, where he had spent an hour happily sitting reading. That was the last Dunkin I found on my walk with seats, and most didn’t even have a bathroom.

The McDonald’s along the way did have seats, and did have bathrooms, but the quality of both declined as I went from well-to-do to poor neighborhoods, and rose again when I went into those of the middle-class. Which brings me to my “how bad is a neighborhood/public-trust” indicator of McDonald’s bathrooms, from best to worst:

1. Open bathroom, full glass mirror

2. Open bathroom, metal plate instead of mirror³

3. Locked bathroom, metal plate

4. Locked bathroom, blank wall

5. Locked bathroom, guard, blank wall

Which leads me to the rant part of this essay: I don’t know if the broken windows policing theory is fully causally correct, in that fixing the cosmetic and smaller problems fixes the larger structural issues, but I know that the social disorder broken windows represents is instrumental in building the next generation of broken lives. That is, if you live in a neighborhood that disrespects you, you can easily learn to disrespect the world.

No matter where I go politically and philosophically, I will always be empathetic to the poor (naively so to some), especially the children, because people learn from their surroundings, and if they grow up immersed in the dehumanizing, the dirty, the disrespectful, the dangerous, and the broken, then that is what they will know, become, and expect from life.

That doesn’t mean citizens’ behavior is not itself partly, or even largely, responsible for disorder, but that behavior is learned, from parents, relatives, neighbors, friends, and even the streets, not in the literary sense, but in the literal sense. If the streets are physically dirty, that adds to the belief that standards don’t matter.

As Robert J Sampson writes in his sociological study of Chicago, Great American City: “Neighborhoods are not merely settings in which individuals act out the dramas produced by preset scripts … but are important determinants of quantity and quality of human behavior in their own right.”

We know family matters, we know friends matter, yet neighborhoods matter almost equally. They have a character affecting the lives of those who live there; they have personalities that influence residents and determine who chooses to be a resident.

Again, I believe in individual agency, and people can overcome the dominant archetype a neighborhood provides if they want it badly enough, but the activation energy required to do that isn’t in everybody, and unless the reward is manifest, it can be a grueling, thankless task for even the most motivated.

Growing up in a poor neighborhood where everything is broken, ugly, dirty, and neglected, is a constant humiliation, and while that can inspire some, it also can break a lot more people.

My second day’s walk, from Newark to the Staten Island ferry, was colder, physically harder, and less insightful. I’d long dreamed of walking over the Goethals Bridge, even before it was rebuilt, because driving over it, a harrowing experience when it was so narrow you could smell the cologne of the semi drivers a lane over, seemed to offer majestic views of the less than majestic Bayonne and Elizabeth shipping terminals.

I got those views, and more, and that was one of the highlights of my two days. Despite my fear of heights, I love bridges, and I especially love bridges over industrial and logistical hubs, and Goethals delivers. Those ports, an underappreciated and essential node in what makes our modern world work, used to rim Manhattan island, and their dismissal to New Jersey and Staten Island represents a large reason behind the stigma attached to the two. Nobody wants to live next to the very things that allow us to live so well.

I would encourage anyone interested to cross the Goethals by foot or bike. The access on the Jersey side is easy, although you are deposited in a pedestrian-unfriendly part of Staten Island, next to a mobile home park (New York City’s only one?).

The rest of the walk to the ferry terminal wasn’t as inspiring — a forlorn movie plaza that now feels anachronistic (with only a geese family attending⁴ ), from the before internet streaming time, and then six miles of strip mall blah, with leafy neighborhoods of modest homes with lots of plastic statuary, on either side of the commercial strip.

When I reached the Staten Island ferry terminal I was exhausted from two days of sixteen mile plus walks, and then realized I hadn’t been on the ferry in over thirty years.

During my first two years in Brooklyn, when I had a free day, I would ride the ferry to Staten Island to relax, taking a book to read, while listening to my Walkman, often going back and forth multiple times, because I found it that relaxing. I never got off other than to then return, never searched to see if there was actually poetry in Staten Island. I didn’t need it then anyways, because I was too busy building my own epic, or at least that is what I told myself I was doing.

I also didn’t get off because Staten Island has a stigma attached to it, one that didn’t interest younger me. It wasn’t this hell-hole, it wasn’t an extreme, or didn’t offer some lesson in X (insert sociological or anthropological question), rather it was boring, banal, and consequently, unfulfilling. It was, in today’s language, mid, and the least poetic thing in life is to be mid.

I’m older now, and hopefully less an elitist sob, and so I get the appeal of Staten Island. Like I saw in my first day’s walk, and as I’ve seen all over America, including in Michigan City, the sort of suburban and sort of urban life it provides, the “bland no-man’s-land” is perfectly fine and congenial, and while few are going to write poems about it, that’s ok because life comes with enough moments of drama, beauty, romance, and even elegance. You don’t need a bard to sing your praise, just enough friends and family to do so, hopefully every day, and Staten Island and New Jersey provides plenty of those, if you want them.

Although I cut my walk short by a day, partly out of fatigue, partly because I realized I wanted to return when I could do it slower, with a different route, and when the weather meant I would meet more people, I’m very glad I did walk through New Jersey, and Staten Island.

I saw the good state, the best of Manhattan and LA part, which is far richer, and more nuanced, than the bad state, although driving home I was reminded again why I hadn’t liked New Jersey, because the traffic, and other drivers, are bad enough that it almost washed away all the positive I’d just seen. Especially now that every car comes with blinding headlights.

But that’s the entire point of this newsletter, and while I keep saying “you can’t really understand a place unless you walk it, since you have to see it all, and can’t fast-forward past the bad spots”, in New Jersey’s case fast-forwarding (driving) means you only see the bad spots, and miss the entirety of the good.

---

A few scattered thoughts from walk, bullet-point style

• I’ve never seen a higher density of American flags than I did along this walk. That’s a sign of a region with lot of immigrants, both because the newer arrivals want to do their best to signal that they fit in (along with a genuine sentiment) and from the older groups trying to emphatically say, “I’m not one of those new arrivals, I’ve been here a long time!” (along with a genuine sentiment.)

  

  

• I’ve also never seen more statues of Mary, which given the pattern of Catholic immigrants (Italians, Irish, Mexicans) makes sense.

  

  

• Despite New Jersey’s reputation, the walking infrastructure was excellent. Sidewalks were well maintained, almost always available, and the same with crosswalks. That doesn’t mean the walk was easy, or always pleasant, but that is primarily because the region is carved up into disjointed segments by expressways, canals, and industrial zones, and not due to pedestrian neglect. New Jersey tries to make it so you can walk everywhere, the vast number of cars, roads, and drivers undercuts that though.

• The true magic of walking New Jersey is the unexpected oddities you stumble on. Like the Jewish Cemetery adjacent to Newark Airport and the Budweiser brewery.

  

  Or the statue to a six-hundred-year-old Portuguese poet in a park in downtown Elizabeth that is only a stone’s throw from a cluster of morning drunks. I know the Portuguese community is still very strong in Elizabeth, because the night before, and that morning, I had some great Pão de queijo at a cafe where I was the only person speaking English, and the only customer who wasn’t wearing a dirty Newark Airport orange safety vest.

  

• I want to send a special thanks to all the readers who made the trek out to Bens Bar in Elizabeth to meet up — I realize it wasn’t the easiest place to get to, and I hope I was able to answer every question. It was really great to meet all of you!

---

(I have minor surgery next week — I’m good, nothing urgent — so I’ll be out of commission for two weeks. I would like to get one more piece in before the new year, but if I don’t, my apologies.

I’ve been inundated with emails, texts, and comments, and I appreciate all of them, and I’m very sorry if I’ve not been able to respond . It’s not due to anything other than being overwhelmed, and I appreciate them all, and my apologies again. )

1. There are a lot of images from that “trip” I’ll never forget, but the one I thought of most this walk was taking the 10 p.m. People Express flight from Newark to Sarasota on Christmas eve. To be in the back with a bunch of very drunk customers, and stewardesses toasting as midnight struck and Christmas arrived while over North Carolina.

You think Spirit Airlines was lowbrow, well, you never flew People Express, which I paid for with cash, at the airport, and cash for all the inflight drinks.

2. The best example of that was the Shalom-Clemente Towers, in a neighborhood now composed of Caribbean, African, and South American immigrants.

3. I wrote about this for Phoenix. The metal plate is harder to break, less expensive to replace, but it can be tagged by scratching, which it often is. So when the metal plate gets overly tagged, they go to a blank wall. The other reason for the blank wall is they don’t want the surrounding homeless to use it as their daily toilet — the hours long process of personal grooming, bathing, dressing, and hair styling that means a constantly locked and trashed bathroom. Vanity doesn’t die with destitution, if anything, it rises!

4. Happy waddling Geese. Wonder which movie they wanted to see.