by With family in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, we often find ourselves adventuring in this area of the country. Here are some of the sights, sounds, and flavors we have uncovered during some of our excursions in the Garden State.
New Jersey is the diner capital of the world, so of course we’ve been checking out a few. Besides our traditional breakfast items, also pictured is the famous New Jersey Pork Roll (aka Taylor Ham), though we still need to track down a Pork Roll sandwich in order to check that one off our list.
Subs are a definitive food associated with New Jersey. Of course, you may also know it as a hoagie, grinder, or a hero, depending on where you grew up. We went to Cacia’s Bakery in Hammonton for ours, and while we both thought they were good, at the end of the day a hoagie is a hoagie is a hoagie. What they mostly were was “huge,” and we had ordered the half size!
We also accidentally purchased totally decadent desserts, as pictured in the cover photo.
Along the embankment of the Lawrence Brook in Rutgers Gardens (North Brunswick Township) one can find mysterious carvings in the sandstone. They were not easy to locate, and we had pretty much given up when I saw – barely – a landmark referenced in the “directions” we had. Even then, the carvings were difficult to discover. They supposedly date to 1876 and include unrecognized symbols. They obviously took some skill and effort to carve, but the what and why remain a mystery.
It was a short, easy walk into the woods to locate the Amatol Ghost Town, near Hammonton. The town dates to 1918, when a munitions plant was built shortly after the United States entered WWI, for the manufacture an explosive called Amatol. A town sprang up around it for the workers, reaching a population of 10,000 – but it all evaporated with the end of the war just a few years later. The houses, made of wood, are long gone, but the concrete munitions buildings still stand.
The Mighty Joe Gorilla definitely falls under the category of “roadside attraction,” though it’s got a sad story attached to it these days. The 25-foot-tall gorilla had prior names and previous lives on the Wildwood boardwalk and at a South Jersey go-kart track.
Now it stands in Shamong outside a gas station as a memorial to “Mighty Joe” Valenzano, a former body builder who died of brain tumor at just 29 years old.
The site of Project Diana (Wall Township), a 1946 experimental project to bounce radar signals off the moon. Radio waves successfully made the 477,000 mile round-trip journey in about 2.5 seconds. “The discovery that the ionosphere could be pierced and that communication was possible between earth and the universe beyond, opened the possibility of space exploration that previously had been only a dream.” (infoage.org) The original antenna used for the tests is long gone, which means we made a stop to look at what exactly?
In the early 1900s the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America installed a transatlantic radiotelegraph station New Brunswick to transmit signals, and another in Wall Township to receive.
After an “incident” in 1918, the US Navy took control of the towers to ensure transatlantic military communications during WWI. After the war they fell into disrepair – this section (on location in Wall Township) was salvaged from a river in 1974!
The Thomas Edison Center at Menlo Park, located in Edison, is a memorial and small museum dedicated to the famous inventor of the light bulb.
The Memorial Tower was opened in 1938 at the former site of Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory, a research and development site established in 1876. Here Edison recorded sound (1877) and perfected the incandescent light bulb (1879), along with hundreds of other inventions (Edison called it his “Invention Factory”). There’s nothing left at the site of the original buildings. The 131-foot tower is topped by a 14-foot-tall bulb made of Pyrex segments.
New Jersey claims author Judy Blume because she was born and raised in Elizabeth. Blume’s third book, published in 1970, is Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, a young adult novel.
It’s about a pre-teen girl who moves with her parents from New York City to the suburbs of New Jersey. She must navigate the ins-and-outs of making new friends, but the book tackles much more – going through puberty, exploring religion, navigating complex adult relationships, bullying, learning who to trust, and those very mysterious creatures known as boys.
I don’t remember reading it as a child, but I gave it a listen recently, and I was really surprised how well-done it was. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, however, as it won Outstanding Book of the Year when it was published, and Time named it to its list of All-Time 100 Novels written in English since 1923.
