Haunted Houses, Nobel Laureates, and the Statue of Liberty: A Journey Through New Jersey

People of different nationalities, religions and views live in New Jersey, hundreds of world famous artists, writers and musicians come from here. Each town - as a separate little America with its own traditions and characteristics, tells "Voice of America".

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It's a stone's throw from here to Manhattan. Home to about 9 million people, it is the most populous, most diverse, and one of the most economically successful states in the United States.

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Seaside vacations are what many Americans living on the East Coast think of first when you say “New Jersey.” Atlantic City with its casinos, amusement parks and roller coasters, sun loungers and striped umbrellas on sandy beaches, and in the very south - not just a resort, but a real piece of old America, where time seems to have stopped.

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The legendary Cape May is the southernmost point of New Jersey, a fabulous town with preserved Victorian architecture. And, according to legend, the oldest resort in the United States of America. How is this the oldest resort? Haven’t people gone on vacation to the seaside before?

Nobody went anywhere for a week, and even more so on a weekend. Even from the nearest major city, Philadelphia, one had to get here on horseback for three days. However, in 1863, something changed. A railway was laid in Cape May, and in a couple of years it has become the most fashionable and crowded resort on the east coast.

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In 1878, Cape May survived a terrible five-day fire in which almost the entire old city burned down. It was then that on the site of the destroyed houses, it was decided to build elegant villas in a single Victorian style.

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Thanks to the efforts of the local historical society, these houses are still considered architectural monuments, and interest in the past is fueled by all means. For example, ghost fishing.

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And if the mysterious Margaret lives in the museum, then, for example, high-ranking spirits can live in the Congress Hall. Indeed, the presidents of America once stayed in this huge old hotel: Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Ulysses Grant and Benjamin Harrison. A room in it costs from $ 859 per day plus tax.

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They say no one knows Cape May better than the historian Harry Belange.

“My grandfather worked in the post office and was also a barber,” says Harry. “My family settled here in Cape May back in the 18th century. I am one of those people who are called descendants of the Mayflower people.

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The old theater, the main street - exactly the same as in the photographs a century and a half ago, the wonderful smells of oysters, crabs, buns and pancakes with maple syrup. Cape May also symbolizes the state's smart economy, as the resort town earns $6,5 billion a year in tourism, attracting about 10 million tourists. Restaurants and wineries, fishing, history and culture, eco-tourism, beaches and waterfront - the southern point of the state and today one of the most sophisticated and expensive vacation spots in the entire country.

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Ocean, beach, boardwalk, restaurants serving fresh fish and white wine, somewhere in the distance - an abandoned casino and an old carousel.

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The city of Asbury Park is the guardian city of one of the oldest American cultural traditions: it was here that the so-called New Jersey sound was born. And this is about music.

The recipe for the New Jersey sound is simple: a little blues, a dash of jazz, a pinch of R&B and the image of a simple guy in a shirt and jeans, singing his simple rock 'n' roll songs about joys and sorrows. The kings of the genre are Americans of Italian descent, including Jon Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen. The latter even has an album called “Greetings from Asbury Park.”

Bruce is especially warm in New Jersey: he, the son of a local driver and secretary, has become a symbol of the American dream. He started as an ordinary yard guy with a guitar. Now he is collecting stadiums, and the world circulation of his drives amounted to 135 million.

“I think one of the most important qualities of Bruce is that he is a regular guy. He is very talented, famous all over the world, but here in New Jersey he is our hometown. He's someone who came out of the small world of local musicians and became successful,” says music archives director Eileen Chapman.

Eileen is not just the director of the Bruce Springsteen Archives, she is also one of the founders of the Asbury Park Music Foundation. This organization develops the city's unique cultural traditions and helps children from low-income families study music.

New Jersey owes more than just good music and the tomato-basil flavor of the local cuisine to Italian-Americans—nearly 20% of them here. He also owes them a huge layer of mass culture, without which it is difficult to imagine modern America. Danny DeVito, Travolta, Sinatra, Germanotta (this is the real name of the singer Lady Gaga) - they all have Italian roots.

One of the most famous movie locations in all of New Jersey is the home of the fictional Italian-born mobster Tony Soprano, the main character of the television series The Sopranos. Those who watched probably remember very well that in literally every episode he went down the path in front of the house, in a white robe, to pick up a newspaper that the postman carefully left for him on the border of private property.

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The Nuggers Patti and Victor Retcha lived in it for 32 years, including 8 years of filming. And recently reported that they decided to sell the property. Although experts valued the property at $ 1, the owners are confident that they will be able to sell the legendary house at least twice as expensive.

The longer you travel around this state, the deeper you immerse yourself in the history of his people, the more surprising his heterogeneity. New Jersey has many faces, it is full of contradictions, paradoxes and contrasts.

Camden is a city that has acquired the status of not just the most dangerous city in New Jersey, but also the most criminal in all of America. They say things have gotten better now, but 5 years ago they were selling heroin and crack at every intersection. But once upon a time it was a cozy American town.

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“In the early to mid-'70s, we had Campbell's soup here, we had an Orsey recording studio, and people lived just a block or two from work,” said Brian Morton, a youth basketball coach. — Life was in full swing, it was a prosperous city for the middle class. And then at one moment everything seemed to turn off.”

Everyone knows and respects Brian Morton in Camden.

“When I was about 9 years old, in the early 80s, the whole country was going through an economic depression. And cities like ours suffered the most,” says the coach.

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Many factories closed, nearly half the population lost their jobs, drugs poured into Camden. At the age of 9, Brian tried, at the age of 12 he began not only to consume, but also to sell, at 20 he was already sentenced to 20 years in prison. But who could know that this would be the beginning of a much brighter story.

Having been released from prison 12 years early, Brian returned to his Camden determined to do something for a city where teenagers have little choice between drugs and crime. His wife came home one day and said that they were moving: they were using and selling drugs in the city. And Brian said, “Let’s start a baseball league here!”

Today his sports organization, Little League Baseball, is no longer small. We started with a few dozen kids, and now there are almost a thousand of them. As a result, his area, which was one of the most criminal in the city, became the safest.

Next stop: Princeton.

By the way, Princeton University at first was simply called College of New Jersey. It was founded in 1746 as one of the first colleges in the British colonies. It is hard to imagine that the first classes took place simply in the house of the founder of the educational institution, priest Jonathan Dickinson.

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Today there are 75 research institutes, two national laboratories of geophysical hydrodynamics and plasma physics. Names associated with the university include Paul Krugman, John Nash, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Haruki Murakami and Michelle Obama.

35 Nobel laureates - and Albert Einstein. He lived in this unremarkable-looking house from 1933 until his death in 1955.

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It is especially interesting to keep track of new generations of graduates. Izzy Kassdin graduated from Princeton and at 24, still a child by the standards of business America, led the local historical society.

“I had only been working as a curator for 9 months and agreed to take this position, although I was not ready for it,” says Izzy. — One wonderful woman, my mentor, told me: “Stop thinking like a woman!” According to Harvard Business School, a woman only applies for a job when she is 100% confident in her qualifications.”

But this did not scare Izzy, but rather became a challenge for her: “Women often miss out on good opportunities because they don’t think their resume meets all the requirements.”

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Under Izzy’s leadership, the collection of Einstein’s belongings was eventually turned into a small museum. They say that it was in Princeton that the scientist met his last love - the Russian aristocrat Margarita Konenkova. Local residents, who found the genius still alive and were incredibly proud of their neighborhood with him, said that, experiencing periods of separation from his beloved, he sat for days on end in this chair and wrote love notes and even sonnets to her. At the same time, he smoked his famous pipe - it is also now kept here in Princeton.

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New Jersey is also called the Garden State. Indeed, sometimes you drive through its expanses and it feels like there are only greenhouses and farm fields around.

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The small blue highbush blueberry is the official state symbol of New Jersey. Firstly, the plant was actually discovered here on the east coast of North America, and secondly, blueberries are included in probably a hundred local recipes. Third, New Jersey consistently ranks among the top five bluest states in America.

Harvesting such a crop is manual labor. Each berry is removed from the bush with your fingers. During the summer, when the blueberries ripen, thousands of seasonal workers come to New Jersey.

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The owner of the family business Paul Galetta proudly shows his field. His father and four brothers started a business in 1935, immediately after the Great Depression, to make ends meet. And by 1969 it was already the largest blueberry farm in the world. Business has been run by one family for 85 years. Now it's Paul, his cousin and two of their nephews. Only now the farm occupies 5,5 square kilometers. Boxes with simple fresh berries, selected and frozen, are scattered around the country for shops throughout the country.

“I always remember my parents handing a box of blueberries to friends, and they would beam with joy, as if they had been given a million dollars,” Paul says. - But it was like that before. Our business has become very tough and competitive in the last 5 years.”

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Out of 50 states, 31 now grow blueberries. And also Canada and South America.

It's time to move on. A little further north and inland, Flemington County is home to one of New Jersey's most unusual places. 22-year-old Chase Brickman is the product of a typical New Jersey blue-collar worker. Chase works in an amazing place that has turned his life into a fairy tale in the spirit of Pixar cartoons. He is a civil engineer at Northlandz Park and Museum, the longest toy railroad in the United States, 13 kilometers of never-ending childhood.

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This surreal plasterboard world mesmerizes modern kids who are used to gadgets. It was built by another Nuggets, now a 96-year-old eccentric and dreamer Bruce Willem.

“Bruce always said that if you have a gift, it doesn’t matter what it is - maybe you’re a good electrician, or maybe an excellent mechanic, or maybe an artist, as he was - in any case, you are obliged to share this gift with the world ' says Chase.

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You say “industrial state” - and your imagination immediately pictures factories to the horizon, powerful factory machines and cities that grow inside production facilities. But New Jersey also witnessed another period of US industrial history. It would be more correct to call it romantic.

The great inventor or entrepreneur, in general, the same Thomas Edison, the legendary scientist who became a symbol of progress of the twentieth century, whose fortune in old age was $12 million, moved to New Jersey in 1876. Then there was a continuous village around, and he himself was little a well-known young enthusiast. It was like an explosion - invention after invention. Edison registered 1093 patents—a comparison can be made with Silicon Valley in terms of the number of ideas.

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Not far from modern Newark, Edison actually founded his own research institute. Life began to boil. What has not been invented here - the telegraph, the telephone, the movie camera, the phonograph. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, an ideal environment for intellectual work was created here, hundreds of people worked here and hundreds of ideas were polished.

In 1877, in New Jersey, Edison came up with a phonograph. The invention has become an incredible sensation. It is interesting what Edison would say if he had admitted that only about 100 years later it would be possible to listen to the same music using a mobile phone by pressing just one button. But we would never have this record, if not for the invention of the phonograph.

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New Jersey has for many years been the most populous state in all of America. It attracts people like a magnet. Flocking here are young families who want to move from a cramped apartment to a country house, Wall Street brokers who want to pay less taxes, retirees, students, and those who have longed for life to be themselves.

“My husband said we needed to have a pride parade, that he couldn’t live in a city that didn’t have LGBT pride festivals,” says artist Miguel Cardenas. “And then we organized it.” And now 19 years have passed.”

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The founder of Jersey City Gay Pride, pop art artist Cardenas, is a descendant of Cuban immigrants. He once built a career as an architect in Manhattan, made good money and lived, as he says, in the endless stress of New York. Then he dropped everything and moved to the other side of the Hudson, became a teacher for children with autism at a local public school, and moved into a former 19th-century stable that is now being converted into apartments. And he finally became happy.

This year, Jersey City was given the status of the LGBT-friendly itself, that is, the city most friendly to the LGBT community in the whole state. Same-sex couples live here in something freer than even in free New York, some laws are softer here: for example, paid surrogate motherhood is allowed, which means that same-sex and barren couples can have children.

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New Jersey, one of the oldest states in the United States, seems to have absorbed all stages of the history of the country’s development, from the War of Independence through the golden age of industry to the present day, when the future belongs to startups, bold ideas and competent understanding of the past.

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By the way, the famous Statue of Liberty is not located in New York at all - formally it stands in the state of New Jersey. This state with its small towns, each of which is like a separate country, resembles America itself, in which there is a place for every person, as long as he has his own version of the dream. Even if this is a children's railway that lasts a lifetime.

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