Jun
18
Confession of a Reformed New Jersey Hater
Filed Under Miscellaneous | 4 Comments
I was born in New Jersey. My family moved to New York when I was two. I lived there until I was twenty two. That’s twenty years spent living in the Empire state, right on the edge of the greatest city in the world. It would be a monumental lie to claim that I had anything but contempt for New Jersey for most of that two decade span. But after graduating college, I found myself back in New Jersey for the simple (and expedient) reason that this is where I got a job. In the last five years I’ve come to realize one incontrovertible truth: I was a real jackass when I lived in New York. The corollary that has come with this knowledge is that most people that live in New York (and even some that don’t, you know who you are) are still jackasses.
A New Yorker’s hatred, disdain, outright dismissal, etc. for the Garden state stems from a couple of factors. First, most New Yorker’s have only ever seen one piece of New Jersey: the stretch of New Jersey Turnpike between the George Washington Bridge and exit twelve. This is without doubt one of the ugliest strips of real estate in the known world. Second, New York beaches are disgusting, and the fact that the Jersey shore is superior is galling. Let’s examine these egregious reasons for New Jersey hating.
New Jersey is a small state. However, the “petrochemical and refinery strip” encompasses less than .01% of New Jersey’s almost 9,000 square miles. To make the claim that New Jersey is ugly because of that one small section is the equivalent of saying New York is ugly because you’ve driven on the Cross County Parkway (what it lacks in ugliness it makes up for in crime rates). Anyone whose driven further south than exit twelve knows that most of central and southern New Jersey is comprised of forest, farms, and hills. Quite a bit of it, especially in the southern part of the state, is empty. Areas like Princeton and Red Bank and portions (although certainly not all) of the Jersey shore are even picturesque. And that brings us to the second reason I mentioned above.
The Shore, as it is known in New Jersey, is vastly superior to almost all of New York state’s beaches. Now I know that someone is going to throw out the Hamptons as a rebuttal. Yes, the Hamptons are beautiful, but they are off limits for the vast majority of New Yorkers. Only two kinds of people are welcome in the Hamptons: people that own homes there, and guests of people that own homes. You will notice the conspicuous absence of people that actually live in the Hamptons. That’s not an oversight, those people aren’t welcome in the Hamptons either. So before anyone says something about how great the Hamptons are, remember that unless you fit into one of the aforementioned groups, you’re defending a region of New York that wants nothing to do with you.
Instead, let’s talk about the beach that a large portion of New Yorkers have actually been to: Jones Beach. Jones Beach is a wasteland. I think T.S. Elliot had it in mind for his poem of the same name. (This is called hyperbole. It’s not intended as a statement of fact, so please don’t make a comment to that effect.) It’s not a particularly beautiful beach. In fact, it feels kind of unwelcoming. Perhaps the biggest issue with Jones Beach is the people that frequent it. At least at the Shore I can laugh at the muscle-bound idiots with fake orange tans and hair out of a Dragonball Z episode. At Jones Beach, well, let’s just say I’m happy I’ve had a hepatitis vaccination. On occasion, I’ve felt that I could actually benefit from a bout of temporary blindness. Quite frankly, the Jersey Shore, including Jenkinson’s (many a fun evening has been had at Martells and if someone has the temerity to suggest Water Taxi Beach as an alternative they clearly suffer from brain damage), is superior, at least in comparison to what New York has to offer.
I’m sure that this entire post will be roundly ignored by most New Yorkers and will have zero impact on their opinion of the Garden state. I’ve come to recognize that while New York City may be the greatest city in the world, the people that populate it can be anything but. So, this entry is my apology for all my many years of Jersey hating. The notion that New Jersey is called the Garden state for a reason may have taken me along time to arrive at, but I got there eventually.