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Physical Culture City: The Kingdom of Health
- Rutgers University Press
- Chapter
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85 Physical Culture City The Kingdom of Health Back on Route 18 again, this time I’m heading for Spotswood, a name on a sign that I have passed many times en route to work. I know this is where Bernarr Macfadden built his utopia,but I have never explored it. Now I swoop down the exit ramp,around to the right,and onto Main Street. The center of Spotswood is small: the library, post office, a strip mall, and an old tavern building. Physical Culture City existed a little beyond Spotswood, mostly in the section called Outcalt, partly in Helmetta. I drive on as Main Street becomes Route 615. Physical Culture City is the most grandiose of utopian names, but of Macfadden ’s city little remains save the layout of the streets. Turning left on Daniel Road, I cross Manalapan Brook by the VFW building, probably the site of the old mill that became Macfadden’s publishing operation. I take a turn onto one of the lettered avenues. Physical Culture City was laid out as a grid of numbered streets and lettered avenues with spaces of woodland between them. This Lower East Side alphabet soup seems incongruous in such suburban territory , where roads are usually named for trees or for the developer’s female relatives. The wooded buffer zones have long since been sacrificed to housing. At the end of this road I find myself on South Shore Drive, which winds around, with the ends of the avenues on one side and overgrown deciduous woods on the other. Where the woods are would once have been the shore of Lake Marguerite, Macfadden’s artificial lake named for his first wife and long since dried up. Trash litters the edge of the woods. A rusted trailer with a FOR SALE sign stands next to a mailbox. At first I wonder if some eccentric holdout could be UTOPIA, NEW JERSEY 86 living down among the trees in the old lakebed. Then I realize that there are a number of mailboxes and that, for some reason, they belong to the houses across the street. A white cat peers at me from a REWARD FOR LOST CAT poster duct-taped to a telegraph pole. The cat went missing somewhere on Avenue I. I drive on. At the end of Avenue K, where a meadow is becoming a new subdivision, I can see the pines massed against a sunny blue sky. These are the remains of Macfadden’s healthful pine woods. The houses on these streets are small capes and ranches, with backyards cluttered by children’s bright plastic play equipment. In some driveways, RVs wait under blue plastic tarps. Here and there appear a few scaled-down McMansions, as though the contractor hit the shrink button while copying plans. Off Avenue K, Dynasty Estates offers only a few houses and a lot of empty ground. On North Shore Boulevard, some refurbished cottages, including a little red log cabin, might date back to Macfadden’s settlers, although most of the bungalows and ranches look newer. Avenue E even boasts a house with a pair of stone lions, beloved of New Jerseyans, flanking the path. On one of the numbered cross streets,I find a white cottage,built on blocks and with a glassed-in porch that was once probably screened. It is definitely a summer cottage, although it may date from a period after the demise of Physical Culture City, when the area remained a working-class summer resort. I wind back by the defunct lake, noticing that the trees are mostly oaks and that there are paths leading to a sort of wild common area. I get out of the car to walk. It is very quiet, with just the wind in the trees on this February day. On Avenue C, I pass a bungalow of the right period, screened by huge pines. Otherwise, the architecture is pretty much bastard suburban: southern pillars, fifties bay windows, stone mixed with gingerbread frame. I wind back to the bridge over Manalapan Brook by theVFW building. The brook is wide and muddy brown,the water eddying around the fallen branches of the trees that lean over it, some grown with ivy. It would be a cool tunnel in summer. After the demise of his colony, Macfadden is said to have returned to this bridge from time to time, to muse and say that his heart was here in his abandoned City. Today, the February wind blows...