The Bridges of New Jersey: Portraits of Garden State Crossings

Preface

xi PREFACE This book is intended as a testament to the aesthetic and engineering achievements found in the bridges of New Jersey. It is also a personal commentary on this most original, misunderstood, and occasionally peculiar of states. New Jersey is a breathing paradox. Nicknamed the Garden State for its agrarian roots, it is also one of the most densely populated and industrialized of states. Although often mocked and stereotyped in popular American culture, New Jersey boasts some of the finest educational and scientific establishments in the world. We should not forget its citizens ’ contributions to national and world culture. Not least among these achievements are the state’s numerous bridges, making New Jersey a vast open-air museum of “structural art.” According to the New Jersey Department of Transportation Web site, there are 6,337 highway bridges alone in New Jersey. Of these, 2,431 are owned by counties , 2,346 by the state, nearly 1,000 by the New Jersey Turnpike and Garden State Parkway authorities, 68 by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and some 55 by the Atlantic City Expressway. One hundred twenty-four are identified as “orphans.” Some 2,000 of the state’s highway and railroad bridges are of sufficient size to have been surveyed for their historical significance. Numerous other railroad bridges also exist, many of which have been similarly surveyed by New Jersey Transit. Bridges traverse rivers, streams, railroads, and roadways. Several dozen cross the Delaware River, carrying pedestrian, vehicular, and railroad traffic. Three connect New Jersey to Staten Island. Some date back to the state’s colonial era and the Revolutionary War. Others are recognized worldwide for their size or their importance in the annals of engineering. Still others serve as symbols, cherished by their local communities. Remnants of abandoned, decayed, or neglected bridges provide visual links to the state’s industrial and social history. Some of those still in use are built of materials that will never be used again, or are of a design no longer considered worth building. They are like the rare survivors of endangered species. New Jersey is a peninsular state, bordered east and west by the Hudson and Delaware rivers. Other significant rivers—the Raritan, Passaic, and Navesink, to name a few—cut swaths across it, and their tributaries meander throughout the state. Before bridges spanned the state’s major rivers, there were ferries. Different regions of the state were brought together by early roads, such as the ones that connected Coryell’s Ferry (Lambertville), Trenton, and Burlington in the center and, in the south, linked Burlington to Haddonfield to Gloucester to Raccoon (Swedesboro) to Salem. Consequently, travelers who wished to continue on to Philadelphia or New York, or to cross where the roads were interrupted, as at the Raritan River in New Brunswick, had to use the local ferry. Such crossings were subject to not only the vicissitudes of weather but also the vagaries of the ferryman, who might be on the other side or “delayed” in one of the taverns that marked the ferry stations. In the period from about 1700 to 1760, according to historian John Cunningham, a trip across New Jersey “required a ferry ride from Philadelphia to either Bordentown or Burlington, followed by a jolting stage wagon ride to the Amboys, and then another long and uncertain ferry trip to New York by way of the Arthur Kill.” He later quotes “a traveler” writing in 1793: “[I]f the surgeons of Princeton object to having the roads mended for fear travelers will have no bones broken, they ought to get their bones broken.” It would seem that commuter frustration in New Jersey has deep roots. Although historian Wheaton J. Lane claimed that the colonial officials of New Jersey did not pay much attention to bridge building, and that New Jersey had “few large stone bridges because of their high cost,” that situation (if true) seems to have changed by the end of the eighteenth century. Three significant bridges—one in New Brunswick and two in Newark—were constructed in 1795, spanning the Raritan and the Hackensack and Passaic rivers, respectively, and another was completed over the Delaware at Trenton in 1806. Cunningham notes that by 1806, thanks to these bridges, “a traveler could proceed on land or over bridges from Philadelphia to Paulus Hook” or Hoboken. As stagecoach travel became regularized, and as business and political leaders began...