New Jersey Transit and LCOR, a company developing the area around Hoboken Terminal, have announced a sea wall will be built to protect the terminal from future storms.
The Jersey Journal reported the new project. Here is the link: http://www.nj.com/hudson/index.ssf/2013/02/nj_transit_and_developer_lcor.html
Just found and read the article…interesting…I won’t be around to see it or get the benefit I’m sure…but in the long run it sounds as if it will provide protection and safety to the area…so who am I to say nay?
Many years ago I used to do outreach work in Hoboken Terminal, Henry. I met the lay who was in charge of maintenance of the station. She told me that the building does not really have a solid foundation because it is in such a swampy area and as a result there are constant maintenance problems. This was about 15 years ago. Even then bad storms would flood the tracks. But of course what happened then was nothing like Sandy.
I think the developer is paying for the sea wall. As you know, this part of Hudson Country gets a spill over of a lot of people who work in Manhattan so there is a lot of upscale housing in the area.
John
Interesting and so different than back inthe 50’s when my father had a silk screen operation on Clinton St. there and I’d ride in and out of town on DL&W , on the Tubes, or across the River on the Ferry. Flooding happened back then on the Passaic and Rockaway Rivers but never did I see the Tubes flooded or water on the rails under the Busch trainshed. The guys my father hired were the blacks and Puerto Ricans and a few Jewish boys. The Germans were over on Washington and the students at Stevens. Great bakery there on Washington, too…and the nut factory across the street where they salted nuts in shells, the boiler house where steam heat was generated and pushed around the block to heat the factory buildings, the plastic toy factory upstairs where they made breastplates and swords for knights and breast forms for Maidenform (we silk screened the brand Maidenform and Lollybra on them), and the Jewish delicatessen who tried to make pizza and floundered so that my father was able to buy the ovens to bake early Davey Crockett tee shirts for McCrory’s. The Tootsie Roll factory, Todd’s Shipyards, and LIpton Tea to the north and east and a vast forest of apartment buildings back to the Lackawanna yards. Quiet, peaceful, and somewhat slummy in places. So different from today.
My time in Hoboken was in the 70’s and 80’s Henry so it was well after you time. The Tootsie Roll factory and Lipton Tea Company had moved away but Maxwell House was there until the end when it closed down. Of course Stevens is still there. As I recall the bakery was Schoenings and it was excellent. When I left it was sold and became Carlo’s City Hall bakery and is still excellent. Your father’s silk screening companies sounds like a lot of Hoboken companies, small places that have a niche and do OK for themselves. But the kids don’t want to take over the business. But I’m sure those kinds of places can no longer afford Hoboken rents. Or even Jersey City rents these days. Maybe there are some in Paterson.
When you were there were the bar rooms and houses of ill repute still on Hudson Street for the sailors?
And of course there was a day when Robert Stevens built what was really a toy steam engine and circular track on his Hoboken estate.
The square mile city keeps re-inventing itself.
John
My father’s silk screening shop usually employed three or four at a time…my mother’s father was the artist, one or two of her brothers were involved in some way or another at different times and there was another financial partner who left early on for his own business, a guy whose name just hit me after 60 years…Herman Friedman! We made signs for virtually all the real estate agents in North Jersey and some even in Mid and South Jersey t the time. My father invented the sign bracket on which most all being used today are based…but he never patented or licensed it; just made for himself as needed. Bumper stickers became the rage and he did many a political and other styles introducing Dayglo paints and 3M reflecting papers to the area. The shop opened in 1948 or 49 on lower Clinton St. then moved “uptown” in the early 50’s. The plastics toy manufacturer needed more space in the building so he was forced out in the early 60s going to Carteret before retreating to a garage as my father moved toward retirement. It was a steady business that kept the wolf away from the door. But the three of us kids could not accept it as a way of life for us and have gone our separate ways…
I should add that my father, as owner, etc. of the company, was also its chief salesman. So it was not uncommon for him to take me or my brother or both of us with him on his daily rounds during vacations. He was not a railfan like me but did do some modeling…so there were always railroad venues on these sales trips…most notably was to take a bag lunch and sit on the LV platform in Easton, PA to watch the westbound Black Diamond and eastbound Maple Leaf. Got to see lots of NJ railroads and in various locations…one of the reasons I do the “Ridewithmehenry” trips…to see where I used to go and what is there today…
Don’t stop boys, I’m really enjoying this!
Wasn’t the Brando movie, “On the Waterfront” filmed in Hoboken? Any recollections of it?
I went to Stevens (class of "64) and I remember that it had a very busy waterfront. Both Holland American and American export Lines had docks there with passenger service. It was a big event when either the “Nieu Amsterdam” or the new “Rotterdam” came in to port. Eventually Stevens acquired a American Export ship to use as a dormitory.
I also remember the Houses of ill repute with the inmates hanging out the windows enticing customers during lunch time.
The Clam Broth House was rather famous and I think some scenes for the movie, “On The Waterfront” were filmed there.
Hoboken was the location of Kueffel & Esser makers of drafting equipment as well as slide rules that was the first thing we learned how to use as freshmen.
I didn’t follow in my father’s footsteps either, Henry. It’s a good thing. He was a tool and die maker and I don’t begin to have his skill and manual dexterity.
I’ve known people who manufacture things and have to go all over selling them. I can understand why that was not the career for you. But you did get to see all the old railroad stations before they closed down.
A few weeks ago I visited the Paterson museum in the old Rogers Locomotive Works. Unfortunately they have very little in the way of railroad exhibits – two rusting away locomotives in front of the museum and a model train set is about it. And the Paterson station has a few ghosts of its past but that is about all.
John
Describing a similar district in Chicago Carl Sandburg wrote:
"They tell me you are wicked and I believe them
For I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys."
By the time I got to Hoboken K&E was gone but the Clam Broth House was still there. You could get fish and chips with beer, a filling meal, for $5. But it closed down as I left. Now it is sort of a food court.
I used to go up to Stevens to issue social security numbers to foreign students. It was a pleasant duty.
John
I don’t, I was young and in school about 30 miles west into the hills. My father claims he was “in it” as being part of a park crowd one day…I remember seeing the movie in Brielle on a rainy Saturday afternoon. I did recognize the settings, of course, but was not aware my father had been in the crowd so never looked.
Mentioned above are the ships and companies the ships belonged to. North German Lloyd Lines was one back in the teens; my to be grandfather, my father’s father, was a German and Steward for the company on the day Wilson declared war on his country…so my grandfather reportedly went to the ships and opened the cocks in their engine rooms to scuttle them, rendering them useless to the US government. Somebody caught him before too much damage was done and he was taken to a camp in North Carolina…
Yes, the DL&W brought me in and out of Hoboken many times over the years…likewise the ferries and the Tubes from the other direction. The summer of '57 I worked for my father’s company and usually commuted on the 7:06AM out of Denville to be to work by 8:30. About 9 years before that the trolley line up to Union HIll was torn out…the yellow cars came down on a trestle and stayed above ground and looped adjacent to Hoboken Terminal’s track 1; the Hoboken street cars and buses looped at ground level under the other line and above the H&M terminal where the bus terminal is today.
I never got to Hoboken all that often, but there was an indoor shooting range on Madison Street I used to visit called the “Hudson County Pistol Range and Gunshop”, a fun and very colorful place to go. It was owned by a fellow named Carl who was a detective with the Hoboken PD. I’m told it closed in 2006. I suppose Carl was ready to retire and move on to other things.
I was in the Lackawanna Terminal during the 90’s for one of the C&O 614 excursions on NJ Transit. What an interesting place that was/is! Just oozed history from every pore.
and now it is flooded with memories!,I loved when it was a ferry terminal…when the NY Society of Model Engineers had their layouts and displays upstairs and how the area later became a USPost Office sorting center…I remember the tour I got of the place that included the Train Dispatcher’s office and meeting “Peggy” O’Niel doing the honors on the main line. The rest of the day took in all the yards, terminal tower, wash track, Pullman yard, coal rotary dumper.
You are right. “On the Waterfront” was filmed in Hoboken.
I assume your grandfather got out of that camp in North Carolina, Henry, because you are up here and not down there.
And of course one of Hoboken’s big claims to fame is that it was the port of embarkation for US troops going of to WWI.
The buses still run where the streetcars once ran except that there is no longer a trestle up Bergen Hill. There is a road up the palisades but it is steep to to point of being scary.
A story I read about seizing the German liners in WWI was that when the police (the precursors to the FBI, I suppose) came aboard, the first question asked of the Germans was would they like to become American citizens? A lot of them did and they were taken to Ellis Island for processing like any other immigrant. The ones that didn’t were interned at the Greenbriar Hotel. What hardship!
My grandfather was held at a camp in North Carolina…I even have a picture of him and a few others sitting around a table. The long and the short of it, he was released and became a chef in the Poconos for a while and later a building superintendent in a wealthy complex in the City and retired as a machine maintainer at then Acme Standard in Dover, NJ.
Your Grandfather sounds like he had an interesting life. When he shipped out did he intend to stay in the US?