The Swamps of Jersey: In Praise (?) of the Meadowlands

My machine she’s a dud, all stuck in the mud
Somewhere in the swamps of Jersey

Bruce Springsteen – “Rosalita”

The best opportunity to survey the sodden, urban landscape of the northern portion of New Jersey beyond the banks of the Hudson is to take an Amtrak train from Manhattan’s Penn Station to any point south. Speedily emerging from a tunnel beneath the river, the passenger is hurtled headlong into one of the more bizarre landscapes of urban America. What is seen is the backside of the New Jersey Palisades as they slope up for their plunge down to the river in high cliffs. These hills, viewed from the New Jersey side, and blanketed with teeming neighborhoods including the regrettably-named Seacaucus, seem to make a mockery of the Manhattan skyscrapers across the river. They clip the view of those towering structures, even making the Empire State Building appear without a torso.

If your eye is relatively quick, you get several glimpses of the area between Newark and the Hudson when you see Tony Soprano puffing away on a fat cigar while cruising through the area during the The Sopranos opening sequence. I don’t know of any TV show that so evokes a place. In those two minutes, the viewer catches the briefest glances of the Pulaski Skyway, Newark Airport, factories, pizza shops, white- and slate-colored row houses that give way to mansions further west, and bits of the sprawling suburbs of New York City, which stretch deep into the neighboring state. But what the segment only hints at is that amid the miles of powerlines, petrol storage tanks, ship containers and ribbons of highways coursing through dense neighborhoods, lies a patchy expanse of green and water with a romantic name only the Garden State could conjure: the Meadowlands.

This low lying area, actually at sea level, is streaked with sluggish streams and languorous canals that look as if they might belong in an Iowa cornfield, presenting an obstacle toward constructing more freeways for hulking trucks and zooming cars. Throughout, tall, thick bunches of reeds carpet the wet ground, harboring a wide array of waterfowl and the occasional birdwatcher in the errant canoe, all of this within shouting distance of the Empire State Building, easily seen from the middle of the marsh. This little sylvan scene amidst the densest population in America is one of the oddest sights in the NYC conurbation, a statement not without weight in an area that takes particular pride its plethora of oddities.

Pity the poor folks of North Jersey; they live in the shadow – literally – of the greatest city in the world. I’m certain they’d be comfortable with it if they weren’t constantly reminded of the fact. New Yorkers can be ruthlessly territorial. They think their great city belongs to them. Anyone entering via a bridge or tunnel – not to mention visiting as a tourist – may be viewed as an intruder or at least with some degree of initial skepticism or a down-the-nose glare. Despite the fact that Manhattan’s population during the workday, due to commuter influx, increases fivefold, this has mostly to do with economics and the social makeup of things. But New Jerseyans have it right. Why would they want to pay twice as much for a living space a quarter the size? Why would they want to call a yardless shoebox-sized excuse-for-an-apartment home? Who would trade their commute on the comparatively-clean New Jersey Transit for the packed rush hour throngs of the New York City subway? I’ve always been amazed at how smelly some folks can be at seven in the morning in those crowded, moving sweatboxes. No, New Yorkers can have it. The folks west of the Hudson delight in more open space and more money in the wallet at the end of the day. Unfortunately, some two million people from New Jersey work in Manhattan and commute to the slender island daily. The area is strung with train tracks and tunnels, overpasses, steel and concrete bridges, the two spurs of the New Jersey turnpike (clogged even in the middle of the night), and buslines intersecting the sometimes dreary suburbs that make up the infrastructure of New York. In any other part of the country, Newark (pop. 270,000) would be considered a major city. In the lee of New York, it appears little more than a trifling mess of buildings, disused railway bridges, powerlines and traffic, and with the roar of jets approaching and leaving its international airport.

Mention Meadowlands to most people and they will enthusiastically tell you about the relative merits of the Jets, Giants, or Nets, three teams that play in a complex of stadiums on the western edge of the swamp. But The Meadowlands are the geographic feature that gives the development its name, a vast meadow of rushes and strings of placid water now encircled and bisected by roads. The beauty of the area is small-scale. Few people have stood atop Snake Hill, the highest point of the Meadowlands – indeed, the only high point, and coated with graffiti - looked inspiringly across the green vastness while drawing in a deep and satisfying breath, for that breath might kill you. The industrial smells of Newark, Elizabeth, Linden and the Turnpike are something beyond words. To appreciate at all this slice of nature crammed into an urban environment, you must walk or take to a small boat.

The 8450 remaining acres of the Meadowlands are shrinking every year. The rush of people that come to live in New York means that more and more new construction borders the marshlands, homes and businesses built mostly on reclaimed land above the bog. Due to the abundance of discarded trash and household items, the area was known for decades as “the dumps”. Poor drainage and industrial waste disposal have the fringes appear tattered beyond repair. The banks of the Hackensack River, the slow-moving main artery, are littered with junked cars, plastic bottles, wood and iron from abandoned factories and sheds, and perhaps the odd discarded body from a mob hit, though this last may be my imagination colored by movies and TV. Most people in the area can say little positive about Meadowlands. I’m certain that they’d tell you it’s about as charming as a station wagon interior.

But the wildlife of the Meadowlands is slowly rebounding. The New Jersey Meadowlands Commission, established in 1969, has largely kept in check the rapid development of the region and is helping to restore the Hackensack River watershed, an area that for years looked and smelled like a sewer. The spongy Meadowlands are actually a marine estuary, but the industrial buildup along the shores of Newark Bay – America’s largest port – prevents tides from properly flushing out the watershed’s lower reaches. The maintaining of this delicate ecosystem is essential for the survival of wildlife – including several state-listed species – as the marine estuary ecosystem is one of the most biologically abundant of its kind in the world. In busy New York/New Jersey, ecologists and environmentalists constantly fight back the waves of development. An ad man in the late 19th century, upon sighting craggy Snake Hill and the prison chain gangs that chipped away at it with sledgehammers, coined the “get a piece of the rock” phrase the heralded the birth of insurance. (Bastard.) Pieces of the Meadowlands have been chewed away ever since and only recently have those tides of development begun to turn away from the region. The area that was once a place to back up to and dump one’s trash – though a cul-de-sac amid the millions traveling elsewhere– is now a Garden State asylum of nature in the midst of a metropolis.

Sean Hickey