Terminal 3, which opened in the 1960s as the Pan Am Worldport and managed to escape the following five decades with only minimal improvement, is now festooned with kite-like leak catchers and a complicated system (series?) of rubber tubes that divert rainwater from the terminal’s crumbling ceiling (a couple of them are shown in the photo below).
Terminal 2, which is connected to Delta’s other building by a sequence of broken moving walkways, has likewise avoided any major upgrades since it was built for some other long-defunct carrier in the middle of the last century (Eastern Airlines? I’m writing this on my phone from a worn seat in a threadbarely-carpeted waiting area, so research is difficult).
Over the last decade, JFK has gone through an impressive modernization process; the pleasant-enough Airtrain whisks me to the airport from the thrillingly-rebuilt Jamaica Station in less time than it takes a bored TSA agent to find a rogue yogurt container. The airport’s other terminals have been rebuilt: first the terminals that serve a motley assortment of foreign airlines, then American’s complex, and then JetBlue’s. If LOT Polish Airlines gets to use a terminal that’s not an embarrassment to New York City, why can’t one of the airport’s hub carriers (and now the largest airline in the world) have one that’s somewhere above Soviet bloc standards?
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 lighting the day that I made this trip didn’t favor photos of the riverfront park that has replaced the Lackawanna’s freight piers, so I’ll spare you. These are pictures of the commercial area near Washington Street and the railroad terminal.
From Hoboken, I hopped back on the light rail to move up the river.
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This photo, from the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) at the Library of Congress, suggests the magnitude of the facility. The passenger terminal is at the bottom of the photograph, with its trainshed on the left, waiting room in the middle, and ferry terminal on the right. Off the bottom of this photograph were more large docks for unloading coal and produce.
Today, Hoboken Terminal serves several of NJ Transit’s commuter lines. The waiting room was renovated several years ago, to great effect. Photographs from the Library of Congress suggest that, until this room was renovated, its ornate Tiffany skylight sported blackout paint from the Second World War.
The exterior of the terminal is sheathed in copper. This is the main entrance; to the right is the trainshed, and to the left is the ferry terminal. Like the CRRNJ terminal featured in the Jersey City page, this terminal was built primarily to move passengers from their trains onto ferries that went to Manhattan, not to directly serve the town in which it was located, so the exit to the city is a bit awkward compared to the smooth rail-to-boat flow.
The entrance has “Lackawanna R.R.” over the door because this was built as the terminal of the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad. It merged with the Erie Railroad in 1960 to form the Erie-Lackawanna, and, following a bankruptcy declaration, the E-L was folded into the Federal Government’s Conrail. Portions of the former Lackawanna are today operated by Norfolk Southern.
From just south of the terminal, we can see what has become of the Erie Railroad’s terminal, which was abandoned in the 1960s as its functions were merged into the Lackawanna’s facility. The group of tall buildings on the right hand side of the following photograph are part of the Newport development, built from the 1980s onwards on the site of the Erie’s terminal. (The PATH station now called “Pavonia/Newport” still has ornamental “E”s on the tops of columns from when it served the Erie.) A large mall sits on the waterfront (it features all of the shopping options available elsewhere, but in more depressing surroundings). The last tall building on the left in the photograph is the Goldman Sachs building in Jersey City, and the squat tan building near the middle of the photograph is a ventilation tower for the Holland Tunnel. In the foreground is a pile field left over from one of the Lackawanna’s dismantled freight docks.
Even though Hoboken Terminal’s waiting room has been refurbished, the ferry terminal has not; it is closed to the public and has been replaced by a smaller new facility adjacent to the trainshed. The doors to the ramps leading to the ferry area were open when I was there, and I got a few pictures that hint at the enormous ferry concourse that lies beyond in disrepair.
Hoboken’s city center is very close to the terminal.
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Jersey City has been substantially redeveloped in the last decade or so. Exchange Place was the site of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s New York terminal before it built the famous Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan (predecessor to the current one). The PATH station at Exchange Place was originally built to shuttle mainline railroad passengers from the PRR’s terminal into Manhattan, but it now serves an attractive district of high-rise office buildings, including this one, built by Goldman Sachs in 2004. Rumor has it that many of its floors are empty, the result of Goldman’s staff balking at the idea of working in New Jersey. At 42 stories and 781 feet tall, it’s apparently the tallest building in the world outside of a central business district.
The PATH train has additional local interest: it’s responsible for one of the many layers of complication involved in figuring out who is responsible for rebuilding the World Trade Center. The World Trade Center was built on the site of the Hudson Terminal, an office building and train station complex owned by the Hudson & Manhattan Railroad. When the H&M began to falter financially in the 1950s, the Port Authority brought it under public ownership and the railroad became the PATH (Port Authority Trans-Hudson). The Hudson Terminal, along with many blocks around it, was demolished and replaced by the World Trade Center in the late 1960s. Through it all, the Port Authority retained ownership of the land on which the complex sat, though development rights were leased into private hands.
In front of Goldman’s building is a pleasant promenade along the river.
Jersey City’s transformation is ongoing, and there are some unexpected brownfields among the glassy office towers. Across the street from the Goldman Sachs building is a forlorn, debris-strewn lot with the famous Colgate clock that marks the former location of a toothpaste factory. The clock is a landmark and will remain through whatever redevelopment goes on here.
The clock used to sit on the roof of the factory. This photo is from the Historic American Engineering Record at the Library of Congress.
Looking downriver from the Colgate clock, three landmarks appear. On the right are the Statue of Liberty and the main building at Ellis Island. On the left is one of only two big railroad terminals that remain on the New Jersey waterfront. This one served the Central Railroad of New Jersey, and like all of the other old terminals, it had a ferry port (now demolished) that permitted passengers to walk off of their trains and onto ferries swiftly and efficiently. The head house has been renovated and is now a visitors’ center. The train shed sits derelict, and the yards leading into the station have been turned into Liberty State Park.
New Jersey has lately been at the forefront of light rail development, and the most substantial of the state’s three light rail projects connects Jersey City to Bayonne, Hoboken, Weehawken, and Union City. The lines mostly travel on abandoned or little-used freight trackage, but it runs in the street in downtown Jersey City, lending a sort of European feel to the whole thing. Everything is brand new; the first stage opened in 2000, and the line assumed its present form in February of 2006.
I leave Jersey City on the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail line and head for Hoboken.
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