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Another bus ride brings me to Fort Lee, New Jersey, named for the Revolution-era fortifications from which the Continental Army defended the upper Hudson River. Today, the town is better known for hosting the western end of the George Washington Bridge and, I’m told, a substantial group of people affiliated with Columbia University who don’t want to pay Manhattan rents.
Fort Lee has a small-scale downtown area, complete with those indicators of prosperity, Starbucks and Borders. Many of the stores and restaurants serve the area’s large Korean population.
But in some sense the real center of Fort Lee shifted north after the George Washington Bridge was built and the convenience of driving across it was realized. Much of the city was built in what appears to have been one colossal belch of ill-considered, garage-based, post-war development.
But Fort Lee has one really, really huge thing going for it: Palisades Interstate Park stretches north from here, passing the New York state line. The southern tip of the park just south of the George Washington Bridge is called the Fort Lee Historic Park.
Entering the park from Fort Lee involves walking up a long set of stairs into a dark forest and emerging shortly to find a 1970s-style visitor center. It was here, the center explains, that George Washington defended the Hudson River (unsuccessfully) against the approaching British in 1776.
The museum includes everything you’d expect from a visitor center in a historic park, including lots of reproduction flags and big displays where small flashing lights show the positions of Washington’s troops. Classic.
Just a hundred yards or so beyond the visitor’s center, the woods open up and an overlook provides a spectacular view of the river, the bridge, and the city.
The Bridge’s sinewy construction is magnificently displayed from here. It was one of the first major works of Swiss engineer Othmar Ammann (whose last major bridge was the Verrazano-Narrows). The towers had been intended to be clad in stonework designed by Cass Gilbert, but cost considerations left the steelwork exposed.
Beneath the Manhattan tower is the lighthouse immortalized in Hildegarde Swift’s The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge.
From here, we can see two more major bridges: on the left in the picture below is the superstructure for the Hell’s Gate Bridge, a railroad bridge said to be one of the strongest in the world, on which Othmar Amman did some engineering work. To the right are the towers of Robert Moses’s great Triborough Bridge.
From here it’s easy to get to the sidewalks across the bridge.
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The local installment of Mitsuwa, the Japanese mini-mall, is located in Edgewater, New Jersey. Below is the main feature: a supermarket that sells Japanese ingredients, including excellent fish. It has a full food court that includes lots of basic Japanese food, but also some stands with hamburgers and Italian beef.
The supermarket is at the center of a small strip-mall that also includes a Japanese bookstore and stationer. The books there are beautifully printed, and their uniform dimensions make for a pleasing display.
The magazine section has Japanese editions of American publications, as well as Japanese periodicals. Included is “Wink Up,” a teen magazine.
From behind Mitsuwa, we get a great view of Morningside Heights, the neighborhood that includes Columbia University’s main campus and Riverside Church (right), which was built by John D. Rockefeller from 1926 to 1930. Its congregation remains prominent today, and is particularly famous for its leftist activism. The tower of the church contains the only carillon in the world that bests that of my alma mater, the University of Chicago. Both instruments are named for Laura Spelman Rockefeller, the wife of John D.
The colonnaded rotunda on the left-hand side of the photo is the tomb of Ulysses S. “Bury me next to my wife, but nothing too fancy” Grant. It was finished in 1897, fell into disrepair in the 1970s along with much of the rest of public New York, and was restored impressively in the late 1990s.
Getting back on the bus, I keep heading north.
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The ride has some other minor attractions.
Back between Jersey City and Hoboken, the light rail trains pass this stop, which really ought to be announced by a recorded pirate voice:
After leaving Hoboken Terminal, and just as they pull out of the Lincoln Harbor station, where I disembark, the light rail trains pass beneath the “Helix”, a curved causeway that brings Route 495 off of the Palisades and down into the Lincoln Tunnel. The views from the Helix are spectacular.
Lincoln Harbor is a drab, sterile development that includes a marina, a couple of strange housing/something-else piers, and a blue office complex that includes this gem of a food court:
But at least this is where the bus stops, and it’s on time. Route 158 follows River Road up the narrow plane between the Hudson and the Palisades. Good views of the west side of Midtown are off to the right the whole way:
The road has been developed quickly over the last few years, and there’s now a great deal of expensive, low-quality housing crammed in between it and the river.
Condos start at $600,000 in “Grandview II at Riverwalk”, and the developer, K. Hovnanian, promises “an enticing shopping promenade” in the neighborhood. But the commercial options in this area are bland strip malls like this one, which turns its back on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and the tower of Riverside Church.
But not to worry. There’s something pretty neat coming up.
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