“Where are you from?”
“New Jersey.”
“Holy Shatner! Bless your poor soul! I mean…oh, that’s cool.”
This is a typical conversation between a New Jerseyan and a non-New Jerseyan. But is the shock of the non-New Jerseyan valid? Is New Jersey a fusion of poisonous materials or is it littered with lovely gardens, as its motto would indicate?
The answer is both. New Jersey’s “Garden State” title stems from Abraham Browning’s 1876 speech in which he compared New Jersey to “an immense barrel, filled with good things to eat and open at both ends, with Pennsylvanians grabbing from one end and the New Yorkers from the other…the Garden State.”
Various gardens are spread out through New Jersey but not enough exist for the state’s motto to be legitimate. The agricultural industry is decent though, and if you ever get a craving to eat an eggplant, well hey, “The Clam State” (another apparently legitimate nickname listed on the state’s website) has got you covered. New Jersey is fourth in national eggplant production. And what’s that you say? You want 200 million pounds of blueberries to go with your eggplant? Well it’s your lucky day because that’s the Mosquito State’s (another listed nickname) exact blueberry production each year.
Now let’s get down to those horrific images that fill your mind and heart when you hear of New Jersey. You know that recurring nightmare you have—the one in which you and your friends are driving in New York City when you accidentally take the Holland Tunnel into Jersey. Noxious fumes cascade into your lungs and you all start to panic. One of your buddies in the backseat tries to close the window on his head but fortunately you’d switched on the child-lock. The dream mercifully ends when you see Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen walking hand in hand on the sidewalk with Queen Latifah perched on Bruce’s weary shoulders. But is the nightmare a silly farce or an actual possibility? The answer is that it depends on where you are.
Jersey acquired its other nickname “The Armpit of America” because of the stench from factories along the Turnpike. So it is likely that you will smell sulfur mixed with various other chemicals while driving along parts of N.J. But I would tweak the aforementioned nickname just a bit: a more apt title would be “The Armpit of America that Sometimes Uses Deodorant.” Some parts, like along the Turnpike, arguably smell worse than a sweaty armpit. Other parts, however, where factories exist but nasty odors are not diffused, smell more like an armpit with deodorant—not great, but acceptable. And some parts don’t smell like armpits at all—some, like beautiful Leonard J. Buck Gardens in Far Hills or the home of Raphael Gerraty ’09 home in Nutley, N.J., have a lovely aroma that any anti-Jerseyite should smell before generalizing about New Jersey’s B.O.
So if you still want to bash New Jersey, go right ahead. New Jerseyans have thick skin. Jersey’s state animal and dinosaur are respectively the horse and the Hadrosaurus foulkii, both of which I think have thick skin. But if you want to talk smack about New Jersey, remember that it has the highest population density, so every step you take another New Jerseyan will be there to yell in your face, “Whaddaya tawkin bout ya crazy whackjob—I know a guy who knows two guys, so you betta keep that trap a yours shut. Ya hear me?”
As Grover Cleveland (born in Jersey), the only president to serve two nonconsecutive terms, once proclaimed, “I would rather the man who presents something for my consideration subject me to a zephyr of truth and a gentle breeze of responsibility rather than blow me down with a curtain of hot wind.” So if you want to call New Jersey an armpit, I’d better hear some facts with it (e.g. two of the nations dirtiest electricity-generating stations are located in New Jersey).
I am proud to be from the Garden State, even if its combined pollutants could annihilate every organism in the world.
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