For National New Jersey Day: On The Joys of Jersey

July 27 is not only National Walk on Stilts Day, it also happens to be National New Jersey Day. I love that it’s not just “New Jersey Day” — the added qualifier is a suggestion that the entire country should celebrate this state, and as well it should. I lived in New Jersey for over three years (in Bayonne and Jersey City, commuting to NYC) and thereby acquired a special affection for it. I’ve also learned that I have some Colonial roots in the State, as I do in every Eastern seaboard state between Maine and South Carolina (with the exception of Delaware, I think, and that’s okay by me).

For some reason New Jersey became something of a punch-line for stand-up comedians in the 1960s and ’70s, but when you sit down to analyze it, the reasoning for such quickly dissolves. The most negative real thing you can say is that the stretch of I-95 which takes you from the Northeast down to places South like Baltimore and Washington D.C. can be unsightly, full of smokestacks, electrical transmission towers, malls, billboards, and so forth. There’s urban blight and suburban sameness, and mafia bodies are reported to be buried in the Meadowlands. But none of that is unique, and most of the state is, to the contrary, beautiful and interesting. So this a post about the enormous and crucial role that New Jersey has played in amusement and show business history, etc. Here are some things that ought to be acknowledged and celebrated:

Birthplace of Movies and Home Entertainment:

New Jersey is where Thomas Edison and his worthy assistants invented such things as cinema and the phonograph. The famous “Black Maria”, Edison’s movie studio facility still exists and can be toured, as can his workshops, where so many useful contraptions were invented. Hundreds of movies, like the landmark narrative film The Great Train Robbery (1903) were shot in New Jersey. And Edison wasn’t the only one. In 1907 David Horsely founded the Centaur Film Company in Bayonne. In the ’20s comedian Jimmy Callahan made his own independent silent comedies at a studio in Atlantic City.

Oceanside Amusement Parks and Beaches:

Atlantic City: I’ve had over 60 occasions to mention Atlantic City on this blog, and have long wanted to give it some kind of dedicated post as I have with Coney Island and San Francisco’s Sutro Baths. This will serve for now.

Atlantic City has a lot in common with Coney: located on an island, later connected to the mainland by a road over landfill, and the site of resort hotels since the mid 19th century. Both have an Elephant Hotel! Trains connect both resorts to nearby cities (Philadelphia, in the case of A.C.) Fans of Boardwalk Empire know that it boomed during the ’20s and Prohibition, and there were speakeasies and nightclubs there. Drag star Francis Renault opened one there in 1926. Many Broadway shows had their out-of-town tryouts there. The Miss America pageant was started there over a century ago. There is still an amusement park on the famous Steel Pier. Back in the day George C. Tilyou opened a branch of his Steeplechase Park there. It, too, had its own pier. There were several other amusement piers there back in the day.

Acts we’ve written about that performed at Atlantic City amusement venues included W.C. Fields (from nearby Philadelphia), Gus Edwards and his kiddie acts, Vilma and Buddy Ebsen, Baby Rose Marie, the Three Stooges, Abbott and Costello, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Mae Clarke, Eleanor Powell, Margaret Dumont, lion tamer Captain Proske, horse diver Doc Carver, Burns and Fulton, Harry Carroll, Eddie White, Marcelle Earle, Ellen Corby, The Three Del Rios, Princess White Deer, Clarence E. Willard (“The Man Who Grows”), tattooed woman Betty Broadbent, Junior Durkin, Bob Merrill, Rosemary Clooney, Spike Hamilton, Henny Youngman, Ed McMahon, etc.

Some old time movies set there include The Cohens and the Kellys in Atlantic City (1929) with George Sidney, Mack Swain, Vera Gordon, and Kate Price; Convention City (1933) with Joan Blondell, Guy Kibbee, Dick Powell, Mary Astor, and Adolphe Menjou; Atlantic City Romance (1935) with Rose Hobart and Shemp Howard; and the all-star vaudeville extravaganza Atlantic City (1944) with Constance Moore, Charley Grapewin, Jerry Colonna, Paul Whiteman and his band, Louis Armstrong, Buck and Bubbles, Dorothy Dandridge, Adele Mara, Belle Baker, Joe Frisco, Gus Van, Gallagher and Shean (with a Gallagher substitute), Sam Bernard, Dell Henderson, Mildred Kornman, and Wilbur Mack.

Obviously when the casinos opened in 1978 the floodgates opened and famous Vegas style entertainers plied their trade in Atlantic City over the ensuing decades. The town was later bankrupted by the 45th President of the United States.

Amusement Parks of the Palisades:

It’s a sad fact of modern life that the impressive built environment of greater New York City obscures a spectacular natural beauty. From the art and letters of earlier centuries we can glean that Manhattan itself was gorgeous. To this day, on the West Side, you can stand and look across the Hudson and see the rocky cliffs of the Palisades on the Jersey Side. It’s too little captured in movies, but for a good chunk of the 20th century there was another sight over there: amusement parks! Can you imagine? That, to me, sounds even better than Coney Island: there was a VISUAL advertisement for the fun and splendor just across the river. Kids must have been bugging their parents to go there all the time. Baby Boomers surely remember the song about “Palisades Park”, performed by Freddie “Boom Boom” Cannon and written by none other than Chuck Barris, writer and producer of The Gong Show. For a time it was owned and operated by the Schenck Brothers, who’d started out at Fort George Amusement Park in upper Manhattan, later branched into nickelodeons and became major Hollywood movie producers. It was there from 1898 to 1971, and closed for many of the same reasons that Coney fell on hard times at around the same time.

From 1891 to 1894 there was also the Eldorado Amusement Park in Weehauken (the town where Burr shot Hamilton), run by burlesque’s Kiralfy Brothers through the Palisades Amusement and Exhibition Company. From 1894 to 1898 it presented vaudeville and boxing matches. Then, like so many structures of the time, it was destroyed by fire.

Other Places Down the Shore:

When I lived in North Jersey, I used to love to take those NJ Transit trains south along the shore. The entire way is a seemingly endless chain of charming seaside towns with beaches and boardwalks, seafood places, bars, ice cream parlors, village greens with bandstands, and so forth. Some of those towns got more serious about investing in tourist potential, and some of these also have amusement areas.

Asbury Park (named for Francis Asbury) may be the best known of these now, thanks to the exertions of its most famous resident Bruce Springsteen. Asbury Park also had its own branch of Steeplechase Park, hence the beloved examples of the Funnyface logo, known affectionately as “Tillie” (after Tilyou) that still grace the landscape. There was also an indoor complex known as Palace Amusements there through 1988. Check out the online museum devoted to it here!

Jack Nicholson’s mom was a chorus girl in the area; he was born in nearby Neptune City.

At the southernmost tip of New Jersey is beautiful Cape May, directly across from the similar Delware beach resorts of Rehoboth and Bethany Beach — so far South it is roughly at the same latitude as Washington D.C. Today it is widely regarded as America’s oldest seaside resort.

Long Branch also vies for the title of oldest seaside resort, but it is on firmer ground when it boasts of the Seven Presidents who stayed there (it’s now eight, but why emphasize the one who owns a golf club in Bedminster? Come to that, some may nowadays want crow a little less about the one who was President of Princeton, as well). Long Branch is also the birthplace of Dorothy Parker! It too had an amusement pier for many years, but it was destroyed by fire in 1988. Then, like all of these places, it got slammed again by Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

Seaside Heights, setting of the reality show Jersey Shore (2009-2012) also has a Casino Pier with amusement rides, which you may have seen Snooki throw up on. The one in Keansburg has the distinction of being closest to New York. There’s also Ocean City (a different one from the one in Maryland), and a bunch of others.

Some Notable Inland Locations:

Very selective! Just some I happen to have visited. Lake Hopatcong is where many vaudevillians and other theatre people used to summer. My post about that trip, with friend and facilitator Kathy Biehl, is here. I’d also like to give a shout out to Highland Lake, where there is a bit of an artists colony, and I was fortunate to spend some time at the summer home of painter Philip Pearlstein. There was a hot air balloon festival there when I visited!

New Jersey also ranks with Massachusetts and Philly in the number of historical Revolutionary War sites it possesses. The one in particular I’d recommend is Washington Crossing, where the General snuck his troops across the Delaware in the dead of winter to defend Philadelphia (after letting NYC fall to the British. Thanks a LOT, fellah!)

Notable Theatres:

The cities of New Jersey had lots of vaudeville and burlesque back in the day. Newark had a Proctor’s house; Jersey City had a Keith’s. I am a particular fan of the Loew’s Jersey movie palace in Journal Square, where my wife and I had our first date!

Some celebs we haven’t yet mentioned who live or lived or had places in New Jersey: Frank Sinatra (Hoboken), Joe (“Are You from Jersey?”) Piscopo, Eddie Murphy, Joe Pesci, David Copperfield, Uncle Floyd Vivino, Kevin Smith (of course), James Gandolfini, Danny De Vito, Ray Liotta (there are many more, hundreds for such a small state, but as you can see, I chose some of the biggest and Jersey-est ones to highlight.)

Paterson has a famous Lou Costello statue, but I revere it even more for its literary history, home of Allen Ginsberg, muse of William Carlos Williams, and Jim Jarmusch.

And while we’re on the literary topic I’d like to indulge in a shout-out to a fascinating obscurity I stumbled over once on TCM. It’s the 1947 Delmer Daves movie The Red House starring Edward G. Robinson. A creepy, weird, hillbilly story that takes place at a remote farm in the woods. I watched this movie, and I was like “Where the hell is this supposed to take place?” The answer was “Southern New Jersey”, the special territory of an obscure author and diplomat named George Agnew Chamberlain (1879-1966). Salem, where he lived, is New Jersey’s most rural county, and is just across the river from Delaware. I love discovering little known pockets of America like that. Turns out he’s a distant cousin of mine.

I’ll undoubtedly add to this post over time, as I think of things. In the name of mercy, I would ask you to please refrain from SUGGESTING anything, as important as you think your suggestion may be. The entire point of this post and this blog is to express what interests ME. As for YOUR ideas, they’re for YOU to express — someplace else. Thank you for your consideration.

For more on vaudeville and other amusement, please see No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, and for more on classic comedy read  Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube.