A visual chronicle of suburban NJ
The Chatham Community Band had a concert yesterday!
The theme of the concert was “A Tribute to the Movies” (which is, incidentally, a recurring joke on one of my favorite podcasts. [FYI, they get to it within the first 3 minutes of that particular episode.] They enjoy mocking the multitudes of ways that Oscar ceremonies can waste time.)
For the whole movie tribute, they played songs derived from movies, and played clips from those movies on a projection screen in front of the band.
Pretty fun!
In the Frelinghuysen Arboretum, there’s a display with an old stump. It has numbers to point out which rings are associated with what years, and why those years are historically relevant— much like the famed Giant Sequoia in NYC’s Museum of Natural History, but on a much smaller and more local scale.
“19,” for example, is for 1968, when the Great Swamp was officially called a National Wilderness Area.
Almost all of the associated history is of local interest only, and even some of those local interests are questionable. (Since when does Morristown care about Atlantic City?) Here’s the complete list, in case you have some burning curiosity:
- 1738 – Morris County is created by the state legistlature
- 1738 – Colonel Lewis Morris of the province of colonial New Jersey becomes first governor
- 1755 – The Morristown Green is first used and constructed to serve as the town courthouse and jail
- 1777 – George Washington spends 5 months in Morris County with his troops
- 1787 – New Jersey becomes the third state to join the Union
- 1790 – Trenton is selected to become the state capital
- 1816 – The First Presbyterian Church is founded in Morristown
- 1835 – Morris and Essex Railroad Company chartered
- 1861 – The Civil War begins
- 1865 – The sixteenth President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln is assassinated by John Wilkes Booth
- 1879 – Thomas Edison invents the first light bulb
- 1887 – Matilda Felinghuysen is born in New York City
- 1891 – “Whippany Farms,” now known as Frelinghuysen Arboretum, is built as a summer home for the Frelinghuysen family
- 1915 – Alison Turnbull Hopkins, Officer of the Women’s Political Union, campaigns for New Jersey’s suffrage referendum in Morristown
- 1926 – Bell Laboratories converts a dairy barn into experimental radio station to develop high power broadcasting
- 1929 – The Seeing Eye is originally incorporated into Morristown
- 1930 – Charles B. Darrow develops the game Monopoly. Names in the game originate from Atlantic City street names
- 1939 – More than 50,000 New Jersey residents join the WWII effort
- 1968 – The Great Swamp is classified as a National Wilderness Area; it is a landmark event
- 1969 – Matilda Frelinghuysen dies at the age of 82
- 1971 – The Frelinghuysen Arboretum is dedicated
- 1978 – New Jersey legalizes gambling in Atlantic City. One of four casinos opens to an enthusiastic response
- 1975 – “Branching Out!,” the children’s gardening program, is started by the Garden Club of Morristown in conjunction with the Morris County Park Commission
I went geocaching!
For those unfamiliar with the concept, geocaching is kind of like a year-round Easter egg hunt for grown-ups. There is a website and a map; you get the coordinates for a cache that interests you (ex. N 40° 41.979 W 074° 24.220), plug those coordinates into your GPS, and start hunting. The caches themselves are often(?) little boxes tucked away unobtrusively so that non-geocachers won’t mess with them; they usually contain a log book (which you sign to prove you found it) and little trinkets. Ideally, you take one of the trinkets, replace it with one of your own, tuck the cache back where it came from, and go about your merry way. There are more complicated ones, too, with clues and puzzles you need to solve in order to find subsequent caches.
My friend Kyle (shown above) has been trying to get me to do this for a while; as he says, with all my random photographic explorations, I’m probably tripping over geocaches and don’t even know it!
This one in the Frelinghuysen Arboretum was supposed to be super-easy.
…Yeah, that didn’t happen. In part, we were using a car GPS, which was probably less exact than a hardcore geocaching GPS. And in part, I’d never done this before, so I didn’t really know what I was looking for. But we found it eventually!
So if you’re looking for things to do in New Jersey, there are geocaches everywhere! If you have a family, a lot of these are appropriate for kids, too! Go see what’s in your area!
I went to the Frelinghuysen Arboretum in Morristown this past weekend. I was expecting the arboretum to look like this, with cleanly manicured grounds and labels for all the plants and so forth. But no! Most of the site looks like a county park, with hiking trails and rivers and skunk cabbage and everything. It was an unexpected surprise!
…Incidentally, the website of the grounds is Arboretum Friends (Dot Org), which has nothing whatsoever to do with Happy Tree Friends.
This particular CVS in Chatham (literally across the street from where my jazz band practices) made news last week for its two-month medication mix-up.
From December 20, 2011 to February 20, 2012, kids who were prescribed fluoride tablets were instead given a drug used to treat breast cancer (tamoxifen).
Experts are saying it probably won’t hurt anyone, but it’s still scary to know that this kind of mistake still happens.
For more information, here are some links to articles for your reading pleasure:
Nutt, A.E. (2012). “Chatham CVS gives children breast cancer medication in accidental pill mix-up.” The Star-Ledger. http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2012/03/chatham_cvs_gives_children_bre.html.
Silvius, L. (2012). “Chatham CVS May Have Mixed Cancer Drugs with Fluoride Pills.” Madison Patch. http://madison.patch.com/articles/chatham-cvs-may-have-mixed-cancer-drugs-with-fluoride-pills.
According to this PDF, Chatham’s Milton Avenue School was built in 1948, with an addition completed in 2001.
That’s all I can tell you about the history, but here’s a link to their website, if you have questions about calendars or enrolling your kid or something.
It’s also right in front of the Chatham Borough Mulch Area, in case you were wondering.
This is probably a good fishing spot in the summer. I stumbled into some fishers last year right here (but I didn’t have the guts to ask for or take a portrait), and there are signs posted all over the area about trout fishing regulations. So. Apparently you can fish the Passaic River for trout, when the season is right.
I am not 100% sure how old this railroad bridge over the Passaic River is, but I’d guess late 1830s, since this branch of the Morris & Essex railroad was completed in 1838.
Because of all the trees, it’s hard to get a clear shot of the bridge nowadays, but the “enduring town landmark” (Cunningham 1997, 34) has long been a popular subject for local photographers:
c. 1900
c. 1916
Date unknown, probably c.1950-1990
References:
Cunningham, J.T. (1997). Images of America: Chatham. Arcadia Publishing: Dover, NH. ISBN 0738545619.
Treese, L. (2006). Railroads of New Jersey: Fragments of the Past in the Garden State Landscape. Stackpole Books: Mechanicsburg, PA. ISBN 0811732606.
(Submitted to Sunday Bridges.)
As continued from yesterday… in case you’ve forgotten, I’m talkin’ about this mostly-completed cloverleaf interchange/ overpass that doesn’t connect to any roads.
Once you find the little gravel-tracks that were clearly supposed to eventually be paved roads, you can just follow them up and find yourself on top of Route 24.
The cloverleaves, though not paved, have been curbed and graded.
From the tire tracks, my preliminary guess was that Triborough Rd. is currently being used as some kind of service road, since it’s really close to some PSE&G power lines, and this would be a convenient way to get trucks across Route 24.
But I had a conversation with a nearby resident (Steve!) who was taking his dog for a walk; he assured me this was pretty much publicly accessible land, and apparently the locals are really into driving their ATVs through here. (I saw one too, and Wikipedia mentions it, so it must be true.) I dunno. It could be service vehicles AND all-terrain vehicles.
Why do I refer to the overpass as “Triborough Road” if there isn’t actually any road associated with it? Apparently, as you drive along NJ 24, there is a sign posted on the bridge that labels it as such.
Aaaaaand that’s all I know about the abandoned Triborough Road overpass.
Sources:
Alpert, S. (n.d.). “New Jersey Roads – NJ 24.” Alps’ Roads. http://www.alpsroads.net/roads/nj/nj_24/ and http://www.alpsroads.net/roads/nj/cr_609/s.html.
Anderson, S. (2006). “NJ 24 Freeway.” The Roads of Metro New York. http://www.nycroads.com/roads/NJ-24/.
Ca3ey. (2007). “Abandoned ‘highway’ in Morris County.” Weird U.S. Message Board. http://theweirdusmessageboard.yuku.com/topic/1137/abanonded-highway-in-morris-county#.TyXo7mM9naI.
Wikipedia. (2012). “New Jersey Route 24.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenhower_Parkway and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Jersey_Route_24.
At some point in the early-to-mid 1970s, construction began on a cloverleaf overpass for a road that was intended to connect NJ 24 to NJ 124. (124 is a main street through Chatham and Madison; 24 is a major freeway that runs parallel to 124; 24 wasn’t finished until 1992.)
But locals raised a fuss; apparently the plans for the new “Triborough Road” ran uncomfortably close to the Passaic River, so environmental concerns (as well as budgetary concerns) prevented the road from ever being constructed.
BUT THE INTERCHANGE WAS BUILT ANYWAY.
Thus: there is a mostly-constructed cloverleaf exchange, totally unused, totally unconnected to any roads, sitting in the middle of basically nowhere. (It’s on the border of Chatham and Florham Park, not far from Millburn’s Short Hills Mall.)
For all the trouble it took me to get to this thing, I’m going to stretch this out into two days, so… stay tuned! I’ll continue this tomorrow. (Click here for the next Abandoned Overpass post.)
Sources:
Alpert, S. (n.d.). “New Jersey Roads – NJ 24.” Alps’ Roads. http://www.alpsroads.net/roads/nj/nj_24/ and http://www.alpsroads.net/roads/nj/cr_609/s.html.
Anderson, S. (2006). “NJ 24 Freeway.” The Roads of Metro New York. http://www.nycroads.com/roads/NJ-24/.
Ca3ey. (2007). “Abandoned ‘highway’ in Morris County.” Weird U.S. Message Board. http://theweirdusmessageboard.yuku.com/topic/1137/abanonded-highway-in-morris-county#.TyXo7mM9naI.
Cunningham, J.T. (1997). Images of America: Chatham. Arcadia Publishing: Dover, NH. ISBN 0738545619.
Wikipedia. (2012). “New Jersey Route 24.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenhower_Parkway and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Jersey_Route_24.
