Like many who grew up in the Northeast, I rarely thought about the New Jersey Turnpike, other than to joke about its ugliness. When I was a kid, the turnpike felt synonymous with the nothingness and boredom of New Jersey — a “nonsite,” as the artist Robert Smithson once called it.
The turnpike, an express toll road covering 117 miles, connects some of the state’s suburbs to New York, Philadelphia and other major cities on a gargantuan concrete highway. When completed in 1951, it was celebrated as a marvel of engineering, the third-longest of its kind in the United States, and academics called it “the embodiment of American pragmatism.”
This pragmatism can end up having comic effects. What is one supposed to make of a rest stop populated by a Starbucks and Popeyes and named for Walt Whitman? Why is the road managed by an entity ominously named “the authority,” as if it were an alien or a paramilitary organization? I remember an urban legend going around my high school, that the New Jersey Turnpike Authority was a secret government plot to turn all of New Jersey into turnpike.
But the more time you spend on this highway, the more otherworldly it does feel. The turnpike’s tollbooths heighten your expectations from the start. Payment of the fee then grants you access to a long, flat amusement park, which funnels you into a dizzying number of random worlds along its spine. I’ve taken wrong turns and ended up wandering through Little India, on Oak Tree Road off Exit 11, or Newark’s Brazilian neighborhood off Exit 15E. These immigrant enclaves are not far from the ludicrously named American Dream Mall, off Exit 16W.
All roads go from one place to another, but some do much more, transforming riders as well as transporting them. As a kid, I most dreaded taking Exit 8 to Manalapan. At home in Richboro, I was a regular American teenager, but after just 40 minutes on the highway, I was a Burmese child at the Manalapan Buddhist Temple, being poked and prodded by my relatives, sneaking glances at the clock in meditation sessions. When I graduated from college in Princeton, we took Exit 9 and ate at Wonder Seafood in Edison, and it was like taking a portal to the south of China. Though college was supposed to be a melting pot, it was the turnpike that flung me into true diversity. Now, when I go from my parents’ home to mine in Brooklyn, I travel through its most famously hideous portion: a 33-mile strip flanked by the flames of oil refineries on one side and giant shipping crates on another. The ugly, raw vistas usher me out of suburbia, quickly turning me from my parents’ baby into a taxpaying adult — as if the refineries also refine me.
Could Robert Smithson’s “nonsite” have been a compliment rather than a criticism? In 1951, the sculptor and painter Tony Smith took a joyride down the not-yet-completed turnpike, and as he flew down the dark, abstract asphalt, that liminal road “did something for me that art had never done,” he later told Artforum. “Its effect was to liberate me from many of the views I had about art.” Afterward, he began making the terse metal sculptures for which he’s best known, beginning the North American minimalism movement. The highway’s ability to warp and transform people has even been honored in fiction: In the cult-classic movie “Being John Malkovich,” the main character continually tumbles through Malkovich’s brain, spat out afterward into a ditch along the turnpike — a detail that inspired the real-life town of Elizabeth to proudly erect a tourist destination near its Exit 13A off-ramp.
But driving along this highway doesn’t just feel as if you’re falling down the “Alice in Wonderland” rabbit hole. You’re also in “Back to the Future”; one moment you’re gliding past Jersey City’s gleaming towers, spires that feel as if they belong to some speculative tomorrow, and the next, you’re skimming by the 1683 colonial streets of Perth Amboy, one of the oldest settlements in the country. The very form of the turnpike can be like teleportation: Within seconds you go from an elevated highway of sky and concrete to swamp level, an alien planet of marshlands.
Last fall, for three days, I stayed in a hotel next to the turnpike, right off Exit 9. I was there for a meditation retreat that my mom organized. We would occasionally go outside for fresh air, breathing in the whirring fumes of cars. Experiencing the highway as a stationary person and not a passenger in a fast-moving minivan, I suddenly saw this ethereal science-fictional thing as very real and grounded. I stood looking at the incongruous businesses of the so-called Turnpike Plaza: so many disparate people, worlds, ideas, all crammed in strange, nonsensical, nonoverlapping ways. The road was a 117-mile microcosm of modern America. Our hotel, I noticed, abutted a Hooters.
We could have been anywhere, but we were emphatically here: in a hotel built under a rattling highway, three minutes from the swampy Raritan River, 11 minutes from Miss Flower Hot Pot in Edison and 50 minutes from the Walt Whitman service area. My mom was concerned that our retreat’s conference room was too close to a Nigerian meet-Jesus-experience rock concert set to take place next door. The Indian manager, the Russian facilities manager and my Burmese mom sparred in their respective Englishes. I listened, humbled by the vastness of the worlds along this concrete portal.
Simon Wu is a writer and artist. He is the author of the essay collection “Dancing on My Own.”
The post What’s to Love About the New Jersey Turnpike? Everything. appeared first on New York Times.
