Bingo has been called, and though you’re not the only one who’s said this, yours was the easiest to quote 
I grew up on (in?) LawnGuyland, always thought NJ was a hell hole. Then I moved there and found out you don’t get to see the nice parts easily, because, well, then it would become just like the places you tried to get away from in the first place
Hey, at least the C.H.U.D.'s can spell Hunterdon County.
I used to take the West Hunterdon Bus Company ride from Port Authority to Doyelstown, PA. In 1981, it cost me $ 4.50 one way. You could not do that ride for gas OR tolls for four fiddy and there I was, using it to get back home many a-weekend. It was a beautiful ride and though a lot of that farmland has become ticky-tacky townhouse bundles and McMansions, there is still a lot to enjoy on that ride.
Agreed- NJ is very lovely in many areas. I’m above the northern border, and crossing into it near Greenwood Lake, or driving out near Dover or Summit or Franklin Lakes, gosh, it’s gorgeous.
Cape May doesn’t suck either. 
Cartooniverse
It’s best viewed from the US1 bridge, and the Trenton Makes was free when I lived in Levittown. (15 yrs ago)
Trenton Thunder games are great-a wonderful ballpark, I’d add.
I once spent a summer in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey and thought it lovely. There was a forest and a stream that actually had fish in it. I think that it takes a bad rap because Connecticut is too hard to say properly…and the spelling is a nightmare. LOL
aL
Al Protzman was my father. I’d love to get in touch with whoever originally posted this. Yes, he was TV’s first technical director with NBC. He also was a cameran at one time. In the30’s he was head sound man for Fox Films.
Just click on Beware of Doug’s name and you can PM him.
He was active on the board as of this morning.
There’s nothing wrong with Jersey other than the Northeast corridor smells really bad, its major cities are hellholes, most of its drivers are clueless and dangerous, and my brother-in-law and his wretched family live there.
Hellholes? Boston? New York? Philadelphia? Bit of an overstatement, isn’t it? Given the contributions they’ve made to culture and society? Given the vibrant social and cultural lives that they offer now?
Staten Island also has a bad reputation if I’m not mistaken. I tend to think of it as having been called New York’s trashcan or something. I can’t quite remember.
That would probably have been due to the Fresh Kills Landfill — https://i.vimeocdn.com/video/344039858_1280x720.jpg
i was referring to the Northeast corridor of New Jersey smelling bad* and Jersey having hellholes for major cities.
Sorry for the confusion.
*fond (?) memories of driving the N.J. Turnpike and being gassed by the overhwelming industrial stench, with overtones of sewage and dead fish.
New Jersey mobbed up? Compared to New York City it’s a piker. Even in The Sopranos the NYC Mafia guys referred sneeringly to their neighbours as ‘the farmers’. The NJ mob was always minor league compared to the Five Families in NYC and The Outfit in Chicago. It’s odd that the state should have such a reputation but I guess that’s the power of television.
Nitpick but I’m not so sure about the pirates luring ships onto “rocky shoals”. I can’t think of any such shoals along the NJ coast. Sandy shoals? Sure, but the Garden State isn’t known for rocks along the coastal areas. Certainly not Ocean County.
I’m from Philly and my wife paretly grew up in southern Jersey. Her town of about 7000 is the county seat of a very rural county, SW (look at a map if you don’t believe it) of Philly. They grow tomatoes (wonderful tomatoes), asparagus, watermelons and other produce there. Oh, and mosquitos, zillions of mosquitos. Not to mention biting flies. Up to Trenton and Princeton, it remains quite rural.
For all that, Jersey remains a running joke in our house. Because I can! But it is not serious. For a lot of my life, Jersey (never pronounced Joisy, at least in the south of the state) was the road between Philly and NY.
There’s a lot of really nice places in New Jersey. But as it happens, two of the worst areas of the state are in the northeast corner of the state (right next to New York City) and the southwest corner of the state (right next to Philadelphia). So millions of people in these two cities judge the entire state by the bad areas they see right across the river.
If you’re just driving through NJ, you most likely are driving down the whole Turnpike, most of which looks and smells terrible. If you’re taking the Amtrak, you see pretty much the same. And when you’re landing at Newark Airport, you basically fly over the same areas most of the time. I think that’s pretty much the source of most outsiders’ perception of the state.
Where is the place where all the poor individuals who cross the mob end up with concrete feet in a lake or a river? Is that New Jersey?
Good for you. /not snark
Isn’t Menlo Park in Jersey?
Written from a fashionable chic East Village coffee shop, where we can’t abide Bridge-and-Tunnel people.
The other person as they clarified was talking about living in Manhattan v Hoboken or JC, but we live on the Jersey side and fairly seldom go to the City. I used to commute daily, now go to Brooklyn sometimes for a part time business effort, but pleasure trips to Manhattan not very often. The view of Manhattan from Hoboken is really nice though! And Hoboken is a terrific place in pretty much the same way as various nice parts of the City, and indeed it’s closer to key parts of Manhattan than most of Brooklyn or Queens. And then it’s got the additional advantage of a small town aspect, not just close knit neighborhood aspect (that’s beneath the surface to a lot of the young people who come and go, they never really see it). And it’s a not terrific place in mainly the same way as the City: it’s now very expensive; we were fortunate enough to move in and buy before that.
But it’s also just age/generation. My kids go to Manhattan all the time. And we’re not to the point of being too physically immobile, I sometimes walk for miles in the City when I do go. But we’re just more at the stage to mainly enjoy being home or eating out at familiar local places. It’s not as if we’re ‘clubbing’ anywhere and I’m from NY originally (for generations actually), so have ‘seen the sights’.
