The Garden State Parkway & the House on Stuart Lane

How We Meandered from Small Towns to Suburban Sprawl

Midsummer Musings

One of the joys and frustrations of summer travel, “down the shore”, from small town Pennsylvania to the old beach towns of South Jersey, was the trek over various highways and country roads in New Jersey.

After we got past Philadephia, a slog in itself (around Fairmount Park on East River Drive, now Kelly Drive) to the Tacony-Palmyra Bridge, (now using the Walt Whitman Bridge) it became a game to get there without taking too many wrong turns while we hankered anxiously after the smell of salt water.

Boathouse Row by Fairmount Park

My family's vacations were always brief-2, maybe 3 nights-I can't explain that as we were middle class. One of the oddities that might help explain it was that at some point, my father, a former traveling salesman, stopped going with us and made himself homebound.

My mother, a very bright woman and an award winning reporter, could not read a map with a gun to her head. And she had no sense of direction or memory of how to get anywhere outside of the short trip to her job at a local newspaper.

So every Sunday drive, much less, trip to the shore (we never said, “we're going to the beach”,) became an adventure. Arriving never seemed a foregone conclusion. But the little towns and country roads of Jersey's hinterland were not unattractive and one could sense the slow incursion of sand and the change in the landlocked air, ahh. When we finally crossed the bridge at Somers Point to Ocean City, our shore town of choice, the air became heavy with salt. I struggle to describe the feelings of anticipation which almost overwhelmed us as we neared the ocean. I couldn't imagine a place more special than that.

The Boardwalk in Ocean City, NJ

In the mid 50s, the Garden State Parkway was built to connect South Jersey to New York state. By the mid 60s, the Atlantic City Expressway connected the city of Philadelphia directly to Atlantic City or the Parkway to the smaller shore towns of Wildwood, Ocean City, and Cape May, each with its own special charm.

It made the journey simpler and faster so that by the time my family, in from California, along with a friend and her kids, had little to worry about on a visit to Atlantic City. Except, of course, for the overheating of my mother's old hoopdie on the Expressway-I have that special kind of karma or carma-especially on road trips.

Having grown up where I did, I always assert. “I'll never go back to the suburbs.” But I didn't grow up in the suburbs. I grew up in a small town surrounded by fields, horse farms and forests near a city with one of the largest and most beautiful parks in the world.

When I was a toddler, a street car still trundled by our house on the Bethlehem Pike (connecting center city to Bethlehem, PA). I remember vaguely when the streetcars had gone but the tracks still ran along the highway.

By the time the tracks were torn up, the fields across the street from my house had been slashed through for a new street where little cookie cutter houses were plopped down, Stuart Lane. By then we had also morphed into a separate town or truly, a burb with our own post office with only the highway in front of our house to separate us. But I never met a denizen of Stuart Lane and always thought of it as a faux neighborhood. At the same time houses were filling in all the fields I passed by on my walk to school-I really did walk 3 miles in the snow in those days.

[BTW, I have recently come upon an ad for a house on Stuart Lane but this one is of the type of suburban mcmansions Americans apparently dream of, not the 2 bedroom, one picture window faux cape cod of the 50s—and infinitely more expensive to buy and maintain.]

Stuart Lane 2011 vs Stuart Lane 1954

By the time I was a bonafide teenager, the first mall was opened about 15 minutes by car from my house. Us teens were thrilled. Before that we could walk to the movie theater, shops and a bakery that offered real cinnamon buns and buttercake- you don't even know what that is- do you? We didn't really need a car. [Discounting the immigrant Sicilian teens who laid in wait for us, of course.]

Ambler Theater by Donald Reese

But now, if we could borrow the car, we could cruise to the Hot Shoppe or promenade through the mall, with all kinds of trendy clothes and a record store!

The Abington Hot Shoppe, Paul Mc Gehee

My first job beyond camp counselor ( teaching horseback riding) was selling toys at the mall. I felt so grown up!

Now I live in a city, but since it's California, it's sort of a glorified but denser suburb where cars are almost a necessity.

It's nice to have a single family home with a yard but is it worth the devastation and expense of turning over much of our land with its trees and streams and fresh air, wholly to cars?

What if California built more multiple family residences and subsidized small neighborhood businesses in their midst, interspersed with parks for all? Would we still need Uber and Amazon, not to mention air purifiers in every room??

We may never know…Californians have come to believe that houses with lots of upkeep and cars for every interaction, are our birthright. It's not a vision that I believe in. From my childhood memories to my travels in humane cities, I have learned to want more….more for my elderly self, my car dependent adult children and my adventuresome grandchild. How about you?