From celebrated superhighway to despised eyesore in only half a century
Metropolis
August / September 2001
This is a special construction advisory from Highway Advisory Radio, the New Jersey Turnpike Authority. Motorists will experience heavy delays while traveling through the construction zone and may wish to seek alternative routes.
So warns the New Jersey Turnpike's official radio station, the pike's verbal instruction manual. For me, the warning comes too late. I am in bumper-to-bumper traffic just north of the Delaware Memorial Bridge, the southern terminus of America's most notorious autobahn. I am peeved, but not as peeved as I would be if I had a destination in mind. My goal is to explore the turnpike on the eve of its 50th birthday.
Of course, when the pike first opened in November 1951, it wasn't the toxic speedtrap with vile road food that most people picture today. Then motorists cruised the highway solely for pleasure. After all, the roadway boasted: No cross traffic. No traffic lights. No Left Turns. No sharp Curves. No sudden stops. No congestion. Built in a record two years, it was hailed "tomorrow's highway built today," "the Miracle Turnpike," and "the world's most modern nonstop express highway." The 118-mile route passed through the nation's most densely populated state, carving two hours off the trip between New York to Philadelphia. This monstrous tangle of asphalt cut through swamps and farms, neighborhoods and industrial plants. It blasted its way through cliffs, wound under bridges and over railyards.
Roadway engineers praised the highway for its technical excellence. They still do. However today, New Jersey's landmark of efficiency and modernity has come to symbolize everything that is wrong with America: pollution and sprawl, racial profiling and processed food. How did something so reverved become so reviled? Today I am driving the superhighway to find out.
With me is Curtis Bertschi, historian for What Exit?: New Jersey and Its Turnpike, the New Jersey Historical Society exhibition that opens in late September. Bertschi is as eager as I am to cruise the Mixing Bowl, the Merge, and the famous Tri-Level Crossing (for which I own a commemorative dinner plate). The names, we agree, sound like amusement park rides.
For all its infamy, New Jersey's superhighway wasn't the first turnpike, however, it soon became the busiest, exceeding traffic estimates for 1981 in its third year. The highway was built for efficiency rather than aesthetics at a cost of $256,000,000. Today the cost of painting one of its 491 bridges can run $80 million. The Miracle Turnpike had all the amenities you'd expect from a road that dared to charge a fee. There were gleaming modernistic service areas, call boxes to summon instant help (they were removed with the advent of the cell phone), and -- in the words of the Newark News -- "even-riding, easy-on-the-eyes bituminous pavement."
It is 7:15 a.m. and already there is traffic in all twelve lanes when we grab a ticket from a toll collector at Interchange 9 in New Brunswick. Turnpike headquarters is perched on a hill above the toll plaza, which, like the booths, is manned 24/7. Underneath the tollbooths is a tunnel that the collectors, all of whom went to tollbooth collector school, use to walk to and from their stainless-steel cages.
Rolling down the New Jersey Turnpike is like driving into a new world. A world without stoplights or sharp curves, a world especially created for motoring pleasure, says a cold-war era promotional film that will be shown as part of What Exit? In actuality, cruising the pike is like swimming in a relentless undertow of traffic. On any given day some 600,000 vehicles cruise its 4 to 14 lanes. During the year 3,478 of these motorists will summon police to their flat tires. They've been called for much stranger things: jackknifed trucks with escaped steer, unclaimed money bags, and, inevitably, emergency births (troopers deliver 2 to 3 babies per year on the pike). Bertschi remarks that the first automobile fatality in the U.S. was recorded in New Jersey. The worst turnpike accident happened one night in October 1973 when a dense fog collided with the black smoke from a burning garbage plant near Secaucus. Visibility was so bad that 65 vehicles crashed into each other, including a 20-truck pile-up. Ten people were killed.
Still, the turnpike has always been a comparatively safe highway, run with a militaristic efficiency that is most obvious when you hear workers describe it. "We speak our own language," says Jackson, who has been with the Traffic Operations Center -- the pike's equivalent of air-traffic control -- for 30 years. He's referring to the acronym-filled gibberish used by workers to pinpoint Turnpike locations: for example, N.T. means "North to Toll," N.S.E.-O means "North to South Outer on Easterly to Outer." And so on.
Today is bright and cloudless. We drive S.N.(South to North) in the cars only lane, passing structures owned by the Turnpike Authority (T.A.), including domes for winter salt storage, compounds of abandoned trailers used for the last road widening, 225-foot-tall radio-wave transmitters, the toll sergeant's quarters. Crews of painters cocoon bridges like giant Christos to recover lead dust. Litter patrol in orange pick-up trucks scout the shoulders for refuse or money bags.
From an aerial perspective the Pike's complex, cloverleafing interchanges resemble colossal sculptures. From my dashboard they are unnerving speedways. The most convoluted of them is the Newark Interchange (Exit 14), aptly called the Mixing Bowl. Here the western and the eastern alignments of the turnpike converge in a chaotic maze of asphalt. The Mixing Bowl's busiest cross-section has 16 intertwining lanes; many of them feed onto local highways, maintenance roads, and toll plazas. But that's not the only distraction. From the front dash, we see commuter, freight, and light rail trains zooming past. A container ship at Port Newark, to the east, is unloading a parking lot's worth of new cars. And overhead we hear the deafening rumble of jets lifting off at Newark Airport. So far, a jet hasn't landed on the Turnpike, but the possibility is, according to Leo Jackson, a real hazard.
Driving this stretch requires extraordinary focus and restraint; my eye wants to veer from the road to watch 747s touch down or catch the name of a passing train. "The Mixing Bowl is an overwhelming example of the interconnectedness of different forms of transportation. Bertsci says. "It shows how transportation decisions in Western culture are underthought and assumed."
North of the Mixing Bowl, the Turnpike cuts through the Meadowland's tidal flats and marshes. We drive past fields of pond grass, stumps of cedars, and defunct smoke stacks. Building on the Meadows required turning ten miles of swamp into ten miles of solid road. The undertaking was prodigious. The soil was so sludgy that workers had to dredge some 25 feet of wet silt and mud to reach a solid base of clay. From there they stabilized the foundation with 15 to 30 feet of sand fill -- the bed on which the Turnpike now rests. At the time, people marveled at the accomplishment. "It was a wasteland to be crossed as quickly as possible," explains Bertschi.
While in the Meadows, we exit the Pike and follow a gravel road past a garbage-fueled power plant, until we are directly under the massive cement pylons of the Passaic River Bridge, one of the Pike's largest elevated structures. The 110-foot high, 6,955 foot long bridge spans numerous rail lines, an old truck route, and the Passaic, a navigable river that winds along grass-covered mountains of garbage. When the bridge was built, its massive steel girders had to be floated to site by barge.
We climb out of the car and explore. The hum of traffic is the perfect soundtrack for this landscape of derelict factories and switch yards. Looming in the distance is the 1932 precursor to the Turnpike, a functional antique: the Pulaski Skyway. The Skyway's still New Jersey's longest bridge. It's also a historic landmark, and, to the frustration of engineers, cannot be altered.
We pull into the Alexander Hamilton Rest Area and park near an A.A.R.P. tourbus bound for Graceland. Soon after Turnpike opened, there were 10 "Streamlined Moderne" service areas -- each eventually named after a famous American, like Vince Lombardi or Joyce Kilmer, who had some ersatz relationship to New Jersey, though, fortunately, no relationship to each other. Each rest stop had a Howard Johnsons, "the Landmark for Hungry Americans," and a Cities Services gas station where attendants in uniforms greeted requests with a hearty, "Yes sir!" Cities hired Pikettes, the flight attendant of the Turnpike, to hand out maps and plot routes for its customers.
Today, where the Cities station would have been is a Sunoco convenience store with its own Pikettes, Colleen and Barbara, who stand behind the counter in striped blue Oxfords, assisting customers while "Born to Be Wild" blasts from a radio:
Barbara: We're the friendliest. We have the freshest coffee and we help people with dogs that get lost. Colleen: Once we reunited a family. Barbara: We're humanitarians. Colleen: We feed the birds. Barbara: We love truck drivers. Colleen: They all have a good sense of humor. I keep the place spotless. I leave at 3 p.m. and then they make a mess. Barbara: You know how men are.
For What Exit? curator Ellen Snyder-Grenier acquired numerous Turnpike souvenirs sold at the rest stops over the years: ashtrays, charm bracelets, salt and pepper shakers (one side depicts a deer; the other, a tollbooth). Though mass-produced, they are carefully rendered and evoke the Turnpike's glory days. With this in mind, I head over to the Alexander Hamilton gift shop to browse. The shelves are lined with enough Police Department City of New York gimcrack to pack a landfill. There are N.Y.P.D. shot glasses, snow globes, and socks. There are also taxicab spoon rests, Subway Series T-shirts, and key chains that say "New Jersey" and depict -- oddly enough -- skiers. But nothing celebrating what one observer calls "New Jersey's horizontal monument to postwar America."
Pulling onto the pike near Exit 14 A, we see the oddest roadside attraction: a red-and-white stabile crammed onto what you might call a median. Frank Gurczeski and his wife raise chickens, sheep, cows, and horses here among the trains, planes, and automobiles. Instead of a barbed wire fence, the farm is surrounded by heavy gauge gaurdrail; instead of plows, Mack trucks barrel past on the Pike. Locals call this extreme holdout the Bayonne Barnyard. It is an anomaly now and it was always an anomaly; there haven't been farms here since the 189Os.
From there we head over to Elizabeth where the Turnpike has become a sort of Berlin Wall -- literally dividing the city in two. We roll along Fourth Street through a mostly Hispanic neighborhood, where the Turnpike is planted in the backyards of whole city blocks. Homes here shake and fill up with dust from exhaust. Cement noise walls hardly muffle the ceaseless traffic.
Transportation authorities have long chosen low-income neighborhoods for their rights-of-way, incredulously claiming to improve them. Elizabeth was no exception. Some 240 buildings, mostly homes, were demolished here and some 335 people were dispossessed to clear a path for the Turnpike. In January 1952 Life magazine reported, "Last July it [Elizabeth] was only a ruin and a railroad. Now cars glide along above the streets."
Nearly fifty years and several widenings later, the turnpike is actually closer to homes than it was when it was first built. At Martinez Supermarket, I meet Pedro Wong, a 17-year-old who lives on Fourth Street which abuts the Pike. "When the trucks come the houses shake and everything feels like an earthquake." he says.
Though the Turnpike sometimes deserves its bad rap, other times it's guilty by association. "It's basically the same road that it's always been, but American culture has changed," says Bertschi. "People hate sprawl and roads cause sprawl. Industrial pollution? Everyone hates it. We loathe it -- yet we all contribute to it because of all the things we consume."
No where is this more apparent than the refinery-lined stretch near Linden and Elizabeth which many people think is the quintessential New Jersey landscape. Children hold their noses when they pass this smog-choked corridor whose crowning jewel is the gargantuan Tosco Refinery plant. Formerly owned by Exxon, the plant is an overpowering example of industrial output. I always marvel at the refinery, but never before today have I stopped to see it in sharp focus: mammoth boilers and turbine generators, colossal tiki torches, and towers for a new plastics plant scaffolded like rocketships. Down the road, for as far as the eye can see, are fields of white holding tanks with "Sunoco" and "Mobile" tattooed across their chests.
Here, from the shoulder, we see what one Turnpike engineer "America's utility room." To the east is Port Elizabeth where a colossal tanker is off-loading crude into a tunnel located directly below the turnpike and into the Tosco plant. The crude will be turned into jet fuel, asphalt, napthalene and other petroleum products. Though refineries here preceeded the highway by some 60 years, the turnpike can't seem to shake off this public relations nightmare. Perhaps we despise this stretch because it exposes something we'd rather pretend does not exist.
Soon we're back on the road, sailing under the Tri-Level Crossing - three levels of overlapping roadways: the Turnpike, the Parkway and Woodbridge Avenue. This triple-decker highway is nothing like the image on my commemorative plate which depicts a manicured parkway and Model Ts. But perhaps the pastoral flourishes are wishful thinking. After all, license plates here still say Garden State.
Next stop is the Merge where five lanes of traffic condense into two, a seemingly innocuous feat until you realize what is actually merging: the industrial north and the semi-rural south. As New Jersey becomes more populous and its farms give way to strip malls, tract houses, and even more cars, the Merge steadily creeps downstate exit by exit. The Turnpike may seem monolithic, but it is really in a constant state of construction, its tentacles reaching farther and farther to accommodate us. Today the Miracle Turnpike spans 148 miles and has 28 interchanges.
Berreling down the superhighway at 65 m.p.h. offers no time for contemplation, but when you do slow down and experience the pike from the shoulder you realize that it will never be finished. For all its can-do optimism and state-of-the-art upkeep, the turnpike has not make our loves for relaxing or affprtless. Instead it has become a scapegoat for all the ills of our culture. For here is where we find ourselves in standstill traffic, staring through an oily haze at refineries, garbage mounds, and fast-food restaurants. And here is where we breath in exhaust and worse as our car sterios compete with jet engines. On the tunrpike we are forced to face ourselves. "These are ugly reminders of what it takes to live the good life," Bertsci says. "Nobody wants to outright pave over or pollute the environment, but they also want to climb into their Ford Expedition and drive to the 7-11 to buy a candy bar."
As Snyder-Grenier told me: "At the time [they were planning the turnpike], engineers knew the road wouldn't solve traffic problems. Roads just make more traffic."
Meanwhile on Highway Advisory Radio, a voice with a Jersey accent is saying: Thank you for traveling the New Jersey Turnpike and please have a safe trip.
© 2001 Melissa Milgrom
Back to Articles Page