OLD BOOK - NEW READ



STORY LINE

After a brief stint as a widow, and seven years of a bad second marriage to a "stingy rat," Mrs. Ida Terhune runs away from her native Baton Rouge, leaving everything behind but her two small children, four large suitcases, and her 1970 Chrysler New Yorker. She is bound for the raw and alien world of Jersey City, where, her friend Betty Trombley assures her, Ida can get a job, because even a dead German shepherd could find work in the corrupt city government. As Betty describes her, Ida Terhune is over-sheltered and sanctimonious -- the kind of woman who honks punitively at people who commit minor traffic infractions. Although she settles into a new life at Betty's Grand Street apartment, Ida is horrified by Jersey City. Historic potholes deep enough to drown a mule threaten her New Yorker; members of the city school board are under investigation for extortion, bribery, and dispensing rotten food to elementary schoolers; and Betty's landlord, Rupert Dixon, refuses to do anything about the pool of sewer water flooding the basement and has hired his son, Chicken, to terrorize the Grand Street Tenants' Association. Although she would prefer to squirrel herself away in her own world, Ida is drawn unwittingly into an escalating conflict with Dixon, and into an unlikely association with Betty's friend Mike Ribeiro, "a criminal lawyer in both senses of the word." Eventually Ida finds herself at the center of a notorious homicide trail, under circumstances that threaten her sense of morality and decorum, and ultimately, her sense of self. Mike Ribeiro, Betty, and the Grand Street tenants come to her aid, with comic and heroic results.

An old city is new again
History of Jersey City looks at past and today
BY KATHY HALL
Correspondent

CHRISKELLYstaff Randall Gabrielan returns to his roots with his latest book, "Jersey City, A Monumental History."
While some view old photographs as mere aids to nostalgia, Monmouth County historian Randall Gabrielan sees them as essential components of his popular local histories.

Gabrielan, executive director of the Monmouth County Historical Commission, has written 31 books dealing primarily with the New York and New Jersey area, including a series on Monmouth County towns as part of Arcadia Publishing's "Images of America."

Gabrielan believes that local history has a broad appeal because most people are curious about their surroundings.

His most recent work, through Schiffer Publishing Ltd., takes him outside Monmouth County for a look at Jersey City, where he was born.

Like many of Gabri-elan's books, "Jersey City: A Monumental History" focuses on a specific town and features a colorful m?lange of vintage postcards and historical views along with some contemporary photographs by the author and others.

Gabrielan had previously written "Jersey City in Vintage Postcards" and said he felt that the town deserved another look.

"Jersey City needed something more in-depth," he explained, adding that his new publisher uses a different format.

"While this book is pictorial in format, there existed the opportunity to use longer and deeper text to get across more history.

"Jersey City is really on the move; there are some people who have not been back in 20 years that wouldn't recognize it," he explained.

"This book provides both the pleasure of nostalgic memories and a sense of what is going on in Jersey City today."

Gabrielan describes Jersey City as being in "the forefront of success in urban regrowth" and one of the few older urban towns in New Jersey that is gaining in population. Thanks in part to its proximity to New York, "Jersey City has a good chance of surpassing Newark either in 2010 or 2020," he predicted.

The book is organized into eight chapters that correspond to the eight distinct communities that combined to become Jersey City. While many historians see the 1660 Dutch settlement of Bergen as the origin of the city, Gabrielan disagrees, explaining that the Bergen township wasn't annexed by Jersey City until 1870.

For Gabrielan, the more significant date in Jersey City history was 1804, when the Associates of the Jersey Company first developed Powles Hook into the section he describes as Water-front Central.

According to the book, "While Bergen had been a village and rural town for nearly a century and a half, Jersey City was made out of a nearly empty riverfront, beginning in 1804.

"That date has been forgotten in Jersey City history," he lamented, "I felt like titling something '2004 - The Bicentennial That Never Happened.'

"Jersey City is often perceived historically as rural, old Dutch and Protestant, while a closer look at the real city on the river is industrial, new immigrant and Catholic," he observed.

Gabrielan attributes the "historical hegemony" of Bergen to Daniel Van Winkle, a loyal Dutchman and the president of the Hudson County Historical Society in 1910 when the 250th anniversary of Bergen was celebrated as a Jersey City event.

In keeping with its title, Gabrielan describes the book as having "a strong architectural bent" and explained that the visual format requires him to deal with some narrative limitations not found in other histories.

"There is a challenge with a picture format book," he explained. "In order to say something, you need to illustrate it, [but] if one is clever he can draw some threads."

"Within that [architectural] framework, I was able to install some social, spiritual and even a little political history, but one has to read carefully," he added.

For example, the caption for a fairly mundane photograph of several garages identifies one as having housed a car and a large amount of cash belonging to local bookie Joseph "Newsboy" Moriarty. This leads into a description of "Jersey City's favorite recreation and topic of conversation - 'playing the numbers.' "

The numbers was a betting game similar to today's Pick 3, according to Gabrielan. Players would bet their prediction of the last three digits of the total amount wagered at a designated racetrack each day.

At times, Gabrielan considered the caption to be more important than the image and included a contemporary photograph.

"For some historic buildings [such as the Jersey City Museum], a good contemporary picture was just as useful for illustration as an old postcard," he explained.

In the case of the two views of James Earle Fraser's 1930 statue of a seated Abraham Lincoln, the images demonstrate a larger point.

The first photo, taken in 1991, shows the statue with a beautiful green patina similar to that on the Statue of Liberty. In a second photo, taken after it was

cleaned in 2006, the now brownish-bronze statue resembles "a used penny." The author ends the caption with a plea for using "recognized conservation practice" when preserving outdoor sculptures.

Many of the images in the book were provided by Cynthia Harris, who is characterized by Gabrielan in his introduction as "perhaps the foremost collector of Jersey Cityana."

As manager of the New Jersey Room of the Jersey City Public Library, Harris was also able to make the library's extensive picture and postcard collections available to the author. Longtime Jersey City Planning Board member and urban landscape photographer Leon Yost is thanked both for his photographic contributions and for teaching "a generation of Jersey Cityites how to look at their urban landscape."

In keeping with the book's subtitle, Gabrielan provides background on some of the city's most prominent sculptures, including the bust of Leonard J. Gordon, which greets visitors to the Jersey City Public Library. Gordon was the driving force behind the new Jersey City Library and a longtime president of its board.

"We see these images, but we don't know much about them," he explained. By reviewing slightly obscure documents such as Gordon's obituary, Gabrielan discovered that Gordon spent much of his life working as a chemist for the Lorillard Tobacco Co.

"At the Jersey City Library when I revealed that aspect of Dr. Gordon's career, they didn't know it. Everyone sees [his bust] on entering. If people ask about him, they have an answer now."

Gabrielan is currently finishing a new work on Middletown and is working on new histories of Red Bank and Long Branch. No doubt they will continue to reflect the approach he describes in the introduction to "Jersey City: A Monumental History."

"History is happening all the time, and significant emerging developments need not age greatly to be viewed in the first draft of a historical context."

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