Where am I?
Landed in Secaucus, thanks to the 190 line, in the Paterson Plank Road. No map, no plan, no ideas. I took the very first stop, once entered in Secaucus, without any reason. The I-95 on my very back. Secaucus in front of me. Started to follow the evident urban spinal trace, on which the planned commercial zones of the town are neatly set up. It is evident how the zoning has already decreed this has to be the commercial road. As European I expected to get into the main square. The center. Keeping to forget I’m in America.
Suburbian identity crisis
Crawled on top of the Cambrian ridge in Cedar ave, my eyes are besieged by the uneven suburbian grid. The Empire State behind my back is staring and overlooking stubborn as usual. It seems to say with biblical arrogance:
“Secaucus! Can anything good come from there?”
I find myself thinking how a metropolis like New York is able to oppress anything sneaking on its fringes. It seems establishing an economic and production dictatorship. Secaucus can not compete. New York is there. Economy, production, consumption, leisure, even the landscape. But the population that feeds in the metropolitan identity is not the same that lives in suburbia. Different rhythms and vibes. In Manhattan you take the best leisure you can in the least time you have. Fast. Quick. Dychotomic. And you don’t have the time to relate with it. You just feed New York while you’re consuming it.
A chopped out landscape
While descending Paterson Plank Road, I was unaware of the story I was stepping. I could just noticed how it is the urban spine along which the city is placed.
“The very early route of the turnpike that was to become the Paterson Plank Road was said to be slightly different from that which it now follows, coming up Paterson’s lane, following what is now Front Street to Hudson Avenue and then up to North End to cross the Hackensack river” | [REED GERTRUDE S., HENKEL ROBERT E., (1950), History of Secaucus – New Jersey, Secaucus Home News.]
The road was built in 1856 and actually it was the first toll road and the longest in New Jersey. It has been placed on the track of a former Indian trail form the Hudson River to the Great Falls, where cedar wood planks were put in place and covered with dirt and stones.
Once I got to the shopping mall I decided to leave the main road. I needed a map. Just to have a psychological safety net. Within a dérive the crossing line between exploratory boldness and recklessness is thin ice. A park, with skating rink and some playgrounds, is appealing. Just beyond here it zips the State Route 3. I’m surrounded. Secaucus is surrounded. Scarred. Chopped by infrastructural hypertrophy.
The whole city is like a child son involved in a never-ending quarrel among the parents. Environmental north-south oriented structure against the trasversal highways crossing all through the town. Secaucus is strongly embedded to the trade routes occurring between Hoboken and Paterson.
[to be continued…]
A.
WALKSCAPES FOR SECAUCUS 