The Nine New Jerseys

Shortly after I returned home to New Jersey last spring, the low-brow reality TV network MTV released an extremely low-brow reality show named "Jersey Shore." On "Jersey Shore", I'm assuming, a handful of Italian-American kids (mostly from Staten Island, NY) invade a beach house in Seaside Heights, NJ for a summer, go clubbing, get into trouble, engage in a bunch of in-fighting and drama, treat themselves and others with complete disrespect, and do a reasonably good job of setting the legitimate Italian-American culture backwards a decent 15 to 20 years.

I say "I'm assuming" in the paragraph above because I've never seen "Jersey Shore," and I don't really want to. I don't even have to watch the show in order to write the above paragraph -- all I had to do was read a half-dozen articles on the Internet to figure out something I already should have known. Most of the native New Jersey-ans I've spoken with about "Jersey Shore" find the show nauseating, but everyone agrees that the show is not untrue.

This is why I think "Jersey Shore" is destined to fail. It's reality TV that is too real. These people don't have the mystique of a real Guido - say, for instance, the "Dapper Don", John Gotti - because they aren't that interesting. They're the type of obviously narcissistic, attention-grabbing idiots who succeed only in that you look at them a bit longer than usual when you see them at the bar.

But I mentioned something else in the first paragraph of this post that I want to return to - these reality TV show characters are not from New Jersey. They represent a distinct, but very limited sub-culture who sometimes visits New Jersey, and as a result, misinformed people from all over the country now think this is who New Jerseyans, by and large, actually are. This is completely incorrect, and in this blog post I intend to explain to you exactly what I think New Jersey is.

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How am I qualified to do this? Well, I was born some place else. I moved here at the age of nine (ironically, there are Nine New Jerseys, as you'll see) and moved to a relatively typical New Jersey town (an example of the Second New Jersey). 

I went to high school there, and then I went to the New Jersey state school (Rutgers University). RU was a melting pot of the Nine New Jerseys, and I learned a bunch about all of them. Then I worked for a year in the Fourth New Jersey (you'll see).

Then I moved away, to Massachusetts, a place known for its own unique brand of douchebag provincialism (i.e., the "Masshole"). After a couple of years experiencing that, I moved home.

So, to meekly paraphrase Johnny Cash, I know a whole lot about a few places, I know a little about a bunch of different places, and I don't give a damn about anything else. That's why, maybe, I am qualified to explain to you what the Nine New Jerseys are.

Let's get started....

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The First New Jersey - Oil Refinery Country

If you've ever flown into Newark Airport, you know this part of New Jersey. If the only part of New Jersey you've ever seen is the 10 mile radius surrounding Newark Airport, this is all you think New Jersey is.

The good news is, you're wrong about New Jersey. (The bad news is, I may not be able to convince you that the rest of New Jersey is any better, but I'm at least going to try. Honestly, this blog post could be a non-fiction book - but I'm not talented enough nor devoted enough to my hobby to make this happen. Good for all of us.)

There are a bunch of oil refineries in a very tight cluster around Linden and Elizabeth, NJ. This makes Linden and Elizabeth not the most fantastic places to live (although these are actually surprisingly live-able towns - wait until you hit the Ninth Circle of New Jersey to experience places that aren't live-able).

These oil refineries pollute the air (probably) and make driving on the NJ Turnpike between Exits 12 and 13 extremely smelly (definitely). However, they supply hundreds of high-skilled jobs to the state and thousands of middle-class jobs, as well. They also help drive the cheap price of gasoline in the state. Even though New Jerseyans have to let someone else pump their gas (and these gas pump attendants have to get paid by somebody), we routinely enjoy some of the lowest fuel prices in the nation. (*NOTE: In case you were curious, other places with really cheap fuel include Oklahoma and western Texas. The highest fuel is traditionally in Alaska, Hawaii, and parts of California. The more you know...)

 The Second New Jersey - "Jersey Shore" (North)

For purposes of separation, here I'll describe the "northern" part of the Jersey Shore (which is actually in the central part of the state, encompassing Monmouth and northern Ocean counties). 

This is where I grew up, and it's hard for me to be impartial about this part of the state. I'll be honest - this area is pretty damned awesome. There's an excellent demographic mixture of people, there are arts, fine dining, and a considerable amount of high culture - but it's an area that also identifies with working-class guts and toughness and anything else that Bruce Springsteen wrote about between 1973 and 1978.

There is lots of beach, and for three months out of the year, it's warm enough to actually get a suntan there. Most the immediate beachfront area is pretty expensive to live in, but there are still a few free beaches (and even more that will let you in on a Saturday for less than 7-10 bucks). There are lots of bars and clubs in the area; some notable ones are as follows:

• Dublin House in Red Bank - easily my favorite Irish pub in New Jersey. The only bar I've ever been asked to leave (in my defense, we were very drunk and very much in the wrong, and I'll leave it at that), and they still let me in. Thanks for not blacklisting me!
• Ashes in Red Bank - great place to smoke a cigar and drink Scotch. Gets a little too crowded and town-y sometimes, but still one of my favorite places.
• Jenkinson's in Pt. Pleasant Beach - great Jersey Shore cover bands, somehow seems less douche-y than the other places in that area. I've had a few really really good nights there.
• Bar A in The Town That Was Re-Districted to Only Include Bar A - I don't even like Bar A, but I need to tell this story. It used to be that Bar A was located in the town of Belmar, NJ. But Belmar is kind of a nice town, and Bar A is prone to such routine acts of legal/moral/sexual depravity that at some point around 2005, the Belmar town council got together and said, "Wait, we can't have this place advertised as being in our town anymore. Let's create a new little sub-town, put Bar A there, and all our public urination/drunkenness/God knows what else problems will be solved!" Thus, Bar A is now in Lake Como, New Jersey, population: Bar A.

I'm too young to remember the horror stories from the '70s and '80s about syringes and condoms and all kinds of filth washing up on the Jersey Shore. I do feel that in the last ten years are so, the ocean's become a lot cleaner, for whatever reason. Regardless, of all the places I've ever lived, the Second New Jersey is my home, and if I ever become famous in any way, it will always be my home.

The Third New Jersey - "Jersey Shore" (South)

I'll roughly define this area as the southeastern part of Ocean County, as well as the shorelines of Atlantic County and Cape May County south to Cape May Point. (NOTE: I just realized it would be helpful if you read this with a map of New Jersey nearby. If you're not geographically inclined, just Wikipedia "Counties of New Jersey" and you'll get a sense of what I am talking about.)

The Third New Jersey includes Long Beach Island, where I've spent some time every summer since 2005. LBI is a fantastic place that gets a bad rap because so many people who summer there are smug, self-important douchebags who like to put "LBI" stickers on the back of their smug, self-important douchebag hybrids and SUVs. I've posted (poorly) before about how beautiful I think LBI is, so I won't belabor the point, but I do think that if everyone who watched "Jersey Shore" spent a few days on LBI and saw how nice it was... they wouldn't assume that everyone from New Jersey was such a Guido.

Let's move south to another place I love... Atlantic City. (NOTE: AC also marginally qualifies for the Ninth Circle of New Jersey, which I'll describe below. I think it best fits here, though.) People identify Atlantic City nowadays as a poor man's Vegas - cheaper, more easily accessible without having to fly somewhere, definitely seedier, and kind of a scary place to drive through.

Until the 1960's and 1970's, however, Atlantic City was a ridiculously popular resort town. Lots of people know that the streets in "Monopoly" were based there, but AC was also home to Democratic National Conventions and a bunch of other important historical events. The next time you drive through the city, try to look past the boarded-up houses, possible crack dens, and "We Buy Gold" stores and try to find an old building that looks like it used to be really classy. You will most likely find one. It's a city with a really interesting history, and that history becomes more and more faded the more we think of the place as a gambling venue/shithole.

Even further south is Cape May. My girlfriend and I occasionally spend weekends there (at a Bed and Breakfast, where we make awkward small-talk with couples in their fifties while we eat delicious homemade food). There are also lots of cool shops, ghost tours/haunted houses (which are a cool spectacle regardless of whether you believe in ghosts), really nice beaches, and the best lobster in New Jersey.

Now, I eat one lobster every year - that's kind of my thing. I really like lobster, but it's expensive and hard to eat and, partly, it's kind of fun to make myself wait for something. (NOTE: In that same vein, maybe I should start smoking one cigarette every year.) Cape May has a bunch of really good restaurants that are happy to offer lobster (even off-menu), and often this is where I have my annual large marine crustacean.

The Fourth New Jersey - New York's Bedroom Communities

New York City is a fantastic city - as Frank Sinatra sang, if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. The problem is, it's really difficult to "make it" in New York City. If you want to own a townhouse in Manhattan, you're more or less paying a million dollars for it. Want a parking spot to go along with it? It's another hundred grand up front, or you can spend almost a thousand dollars a month in "rent". For a parking space!! While the food is fantastic, the overall cost of living in NYC prohibits all but the ultra-rich, financially foolish, or those willing to live in college-like (or worse) situations until middle age from living there.

That's why a lot of people who work in the city choose to live in New Jersey. New York's bedroom communities encompass a half-moon (geographically speaking) surrounding the city of Newark to the north, west, and south. Some of these suburbs are extremely wealthy - here's an interesting New Jersey fact: the town of Essex Fells, which has a ridiculous per capita income of over $77,000 (meaning the average, hypothetical family of four earns over $300,000 a year) is less than ten miles from Newark, one of the country's most impoverished, crime-infested cities. 

The point is, you're never far from anything in New Jersey, and because there are so many New Jerseys, that helps make New Jersey awesome. This point is artistically demonstrated in the final ten seconds of the opening credits of "The Sopranos", where Tony (driving in his SUV) leaves the hard-scrabble, industrialized world of the First New Jersey and pulls up to his McMansion, in the Fourth New Jersey.

The state of New Jersey was always a character in "The Sopranos", and every resident/fan of the show can point out that moment when their neck of the woods was mentioned on the show. Mine was in Season 3, in the episode "University", when a coked-up Ralph Cifaretto screams at Tracee the naive hooker: "We'll get a farm together in Colts Neck", before killing her outside the Bada Bing! and leaving her dead body in the parking lot.

(Sorry if that was too graphic. That was the show, like it or not.)

The Fifth New Jersey - Philadelphia's Bedroom Communities

This area, which is another half-moon, this time surrounding the city of Camden to the north, east, and south, is pretty similar to the Fourth New Jersey except there are lots of Eagles fans near Philadelphia. (NOTE: I really like that "I am drunk" McNabb jersey. It's almost as good as the "Lombardis: 00" Eagles jersey I saw online a few weeks ago.)

I'll admit that I always had kind of a soft spot for this part of New Jersey. I've always done a bunch of driving down there, either for my current job or to visit Philadelphia. There are great radio stations in Philadelphia - better than New York City, consistently for the past 12 years, at least - and there's very little traffic or congestion (NOTE: completely unlike Fourth New Jersey here - the direct NYC suburbs are the most horrendous, constantly congested, annoyingly-designed roads in the entire country. No, seriously, the excellent 2009 book Traffic was inspired by a Pulaski Skyway traffic jam).

Interestingly, people I've met from this area uniformly seem to insist there are only TWO New Jerseys - North and South. I'm not sure what inspires this logic but I obviously could not disagree more. I'm not a South Jersey kid, and there's no way I'm a North Jersey kid. Just no way.

The Sixth New Jersey - "The Dakota Territory" aka An Ambiguous Section of Central New Jersey

The idea for this blog hit me when I overheard some coworkers discuss what in marketing research is known as a "segmentation study". The idea is that a thousand or so people take a survey on their attitudes toward some product, and their responses are then subjected to a statistical analysis that determines the relative "belonging-ness" (sorry, there's no better word for this) to all the other survey respondents. Over hundreds of iterations, the analysis determines how closely alike some people are to some others, and then it's up to the researcher to determine what these groups of individuals mean. (NOTE: Marketing research is an extremely postmodern profession. All we do is construct meaning out of the abstract -- I've never taken an academic course in marketing research, but if I ever taught one, I'd make students read some Chuck Klosterman as an extra credit assignment.)

Anyway, I have no idea where this part of New Jersey fits in to the grand picture of what I'm trying to describe. It's kind of a horizontal belt over the middle of the state, encompassing towns like New Brunswick and Princeton. (I currently live in the Sixth New Jersey.) It's a fun, middle-to-upper class, extremely ethnically diverse region. There's a lot of work to be had, some good-to-excellent places to learn stuff, delicious food and nice housing. I enjoy specifically that heat and hot water is included in my Sixth New Jersey apartment lease.

I will say this, though: people around here definitely identify with where they're from. I live in a town called North Brunswick, for instance, and for many of the people in this town, do not confuse it with South Brunswick. That will get you punched - seriously. (Weirdly, North Brunswick is itself south of New Brunswick, and South Brunswick is south of North Brunswick. Really we should just re-name New Brunswick North-North Brunswick and get on with things in an orderly fashion. But no...)

Oh, and another thing for you House, M.D. fans out there - they are actually building a Princeton-Plainsboro hospital on Route 1 in Plainsboro. As soon as it opens, I am going to slowly develop a tolerance to Sterno (like that old guy in The Andromeda Strain), walk in to the real-life Princeton-Plainsboro Hospital complaining of strange stomach pains, and watch Dr. House go to work. I hope he demeans me; I like it when House demeans people.

The Seventh New Jersey - Rural West Virginia, aka the "Deep South" of New Jersey

I'm now speaking about the extreme southwest and south-central parts of New Jersey.

This is where I may get a little xenophobic. I'm sorry; it's hard for me to write this without getting a little uppity about stuff. And this particular part of New Jersey brings it out of me. So I'd like to make two points now before I get started on describing our friends to the South: (1) I have blood relatives down there; no, seriously, I'm pretty sure I have relatives in like Millville and Vineland. I don't know them, but they're there. I visited them once when I was a kid. Hi, um... Aunt Mary! (I have no idea what their names are.) (2) You can blame me for being a jerk, but you should also blame them for making it so easy to be made fun of.

 

To be generous, I'll begin by saying there's not a whole lot going on in this part of the state. What lots of people who aren't from New Jersey don't understand (double negative alert) is that most of New Jersey serves no purpose at all. With no close proximity to an industrial or commercial center, a highway, river, ocean, or other means of transport, half the state consists of something known as the "Pine Barrens National Reserve". However, this does not prohibit people from choosing to live there.

Economically, politically, and socio-culturally speaking, residents of this part of the state differ from the state as a whole in every meaningful way. Land is cheap, education is scarce, guns and pickup trucks are plentiful, and - besides maybe fishing in a marsh somewhere - I'm not convinced there's anything at all to do.

In my opinion, all those who live in New Jersey should spend a day driving through these parts of the state. (Make sure your car is filled with gas, and if you happen to have progressive/liberal political beliefs, keep them off the outside of your car on that day.) 

It's really interesting because it's the purest demonstration of what an arbitrary construction states are. The '88 Plymouth Duster you're driving behind has New Jersey license plates; the gun shops are New Jersey gun shops; and the general store has to deal with the same food and safety inspections as an Italian bakery in, like, Maplewood. It doesn't feel like New Jersey, though, because it steadfastly isn't.

Keeping all political issues aside (smart people can have any set of political beliefs, and I think it'd be easy to characterize what I just wrote pretty clearly on a left-right spectrum), why would anyone ever choose to live in such a backwards, poor, useless place? The only reason I can think of is because it never struck them to leave. They're fine where they are, and if you don't like it, you can take your high-falutin' ways and git on out of here. Git!

The Eighth New Jersey - Bizarre Vermont, aka the Skylands

The Eighth New Jersey consists of the extreme northwestern part of New Jersey, which is mountainous, rural, and extraordinarily beautiful.

I remember being in fourth-grade Social Studies class and the year-long topic was "The History of New Jersey." I learned about the Native American tribe that settlers gave smallpox blankets to (the Lenni Lenape), the colonial history of the state, and such. But because I was a huge nerd even then, I really liked the map of the four (I think it was) regions of New Jersey. My favorite region was "The Skylands," an area that seemed so far away and so different from where I grew up that I really wanted to move there. I think what I really liked the most was the idea that it got significantly more snow in an average winter than the rest of New Jersey. 

(NOTE: It absolutely does. I haven't mentioned this yet, but different parts of New Jersey have strikingly different climates, especially with regard to winter weather. If you're in the Skylands, you get approximately the same amount of snow per winter as Boston or Hartford, CT. If you're in Region 3 - the South Jersey Shore - you get about as much snow per winter as Richmond, VA. Two people from the same, relatively tiny state can get together and discuss winters from their childhood, and have completely disparate experiences to report. I find this incredibly awesome.)

Anyway, every single one of these New Jerseys is at least a little weird, but this particular one is extremely weird. This is the part of New Jersey, for instance, where a rural couple was recently arrested and had their children taken away from them because they had the terrible idea of naming one of them Hitler. There is (of course) a Weird NJ magazine (and series of books) describing the different oddball houses, trees, and ghost stories surrounding the state of New Jersey. Although the Eighth New Jersey consists of approximately 10% of the land area of New Jersey (and about 2% of its population), about half of Weird NJ's content comes from here.

Strange enough for you? No? Okay, here's some more. The region's congressman is a Ron Paul-esque libertarian (one of five in the country) who serves on something called the "Liberty Caucus" and routinely ranks as the most conservative representative in the entire Northeast. At a "tea party" gathering in 2009, he demanded vocally that President Obama present a birth certificate to indicate he was indeed a native of the United States. (NOTE: Love or hate the Prez all you want; but stake your claim based on policy; the dude is from the U.S., and that's that.)

Finally, I'll leave you with this: Space Farms. Space Farms always struck me as odd, even when I was a kid and my mom would take us up there to pet lions. The place really has lions, bears, jaguars, and all kinds of crazy professional zoo stuff. I remember being scared because the lions were huge and Space Farms didn't strike me as a place with very strong security... or actual cages, for that matter. But at least after getting mauled by a giant feline, we could enjoy the classic cars and doll collection! And the general store!

The Ninth New Jersey - Major Cities to Avoid

For this final New Jersey, I leave you with the state's ultimate paradox. In the most geographically, ethnographically, and economically diverse state in the entire country (I'm serious), the three major cities - Newark, Camden, and Trenton - have all been riddled in abject poverty for at least the past 40 years.

It wasn't always like this. Newark was a bustling sister city of New York City well into the twentieth century. Paul Simon, Philip Roth, Ray Liotta (awesome), Joe Pesci (unsurprising), Ian Ziering (weird), Max Weinberg, and countless other famous people were born/grew up there. (NOTE: Since the above list was extremely white, I should mention that Newark also birthed Whitney Houston, Wyclef Jean, Redman, Shaq, and NBA player Randy Foye.)

Camden and Trenton, too, were bustling port cities until everything got irrevocably fucked up in the 1960's. In Newark's case, it was a bunch of issues that had probably been percolating for a long while; white flight; lots of housing projects being built by a corrupt government looking for a quick payday; the ridiculously-stupid idea (in hindsight) that superhighways could be built through existing, ethnically diverse neighborhoods without tearing them apart.

At present, one of the only places in Newark worth visiting (if only because it's a hidden gem for delicious Portuguese food and culture) is the Ironbound district. As you expect, this region is completely "Iron-bound" in the sense that it's nearly impossible to find on a map, it's surrounded by train tracks, and very few (let's face it) white people have the balls to venture around in order to find it. That's why I think the transportation issue was really important, at least with regard to the devastation of Newark. New Jersey was way too highway-happy, once upon a time, and the net result is a very successful state that doesn't have a single city to be proud of.

All you have to do is look at one of those lists of America's Most Dangerous Cities and you'll find Newark and Camden there, high atop the list. Parts of these cities are not like West Baltimore in "The Wire" - they're worse. There are parts of Camden where people will be pulled over by a police officer for their own safety. Even the relatively OK parts of Newark, like where PatentlyJersey currently lives, are kind of scary at times and don't have much in the way of commerce or ordinary gentrification. He's seen a murder or two over there; he'll tell you.

But maybe there's something to hope for in these cities. In Newark, at least, the murder rate in 2008 dropped 30% from the previous year, down to 65, which is actually 65 too many but at least a good starting point. With the opening of the Prudential Center, people are being drawn to the city at night, are eating there and so on. Maybe things get turned around; if so, it'd be the only city like this in the United States that's ever been saved. It'll make whoever the mayor is at that time a future governor. Or President? Who knows.

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So that's the nine New Jerseys. Each is unique, and some of them definitely suck more than others. But I like where I'm from, and I hope - at the very least - after reading this you've managed to distance yourself from the notion that the state consists of oil refineries and dudes who call their abdomen "The Situation".

Stay classy out there.