“Loom” is an often overused word. But it’s the right word to describe how I remember the Pulaski Skyway, a three-plus mile elevated road that connects Jersey City and Newark and crosses the Hackensack Meadowlands.
In my memory, we often drove underneath the looming skyway and through the Meadowlands, which, were full of signs of industrial decay. (For those who don’t know it, some of this landscape was used in the opening credits for The Sopranos.) And while I don’t recall often driving on the skyway itself, I have a vague memory of at least one trip and having a foreboding feeling that the road was too narrow, too crowded, and too high off the ground.
I did know that Pulaski, who is pictured on today’s #stampoftheday, was a Polish army officer who played an important role in the Revolutionary War. But I don’t think I had any sense of the details.
The basic facts are that Pulaski, who is pictured on a 2-cent stamp issued on January 16, 1931, was a Polish nobleman, soldier, and military commander, who has been called “the father of the American cavalry.” Born in 1745, he became a leading military commanders for a group of Polish noblemen who went into exile after he fought, unsuccessfully, against Russian domination of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from 1768 until 1772. While in exile, he was recruited to help in the American fight for independence by the Marquis de Lafayette and Benjamin Franklin, who wrote George Washington, that Pulaski “was renowned throughout Europe for the courage and bravery he displayed in defense of his country’s freedom.”
Not long after his arrival in the US in 1777, Pulaski wrote to Washington: “I came here, where freedom is being defended, to serve it, and to live or die for it.” He impressed Washington, particularly when he led a charge that early that fall likely saved the general’s life. In late 1777, he and Michael Kovats, a Hungarian nobleman who was also fighting for the Americans, created reformed the American cavalry as a whole. In late 1778, Pulaski was killed at the Battle of Savannah from wounds suffered while leading a cavalry charge.
Pulaski was hailed as a hero when he died but was largely ignored until the early 1900s, particularly the late 1920s and 1930s. This is probably due to the fact that immigration from Poland surged at the turn of the 20th century. Exact numbers are difficult to come but it’s estimated more than 2 million Poles had immigrated to the US before the 1924 Immigration Act greatly restricted immigration from eastern Europe.
Many, if not most, those immigrants moved to growing industrial cities and nearby communities such as Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Milwaukee, Detroit, New York, and Cleveland. There they found jobs in factories, steel mills, slaughterhouses, and foundries and lived in tight-knit communities that often celebrated Polish language and culture. In this context, Pulaski (along with Tadeusz Kosciuszko, another Polish soldier who was critical to American success in the Revolutionary War) became the focus of public celebrations (notably, annual Pulaski Day parades which are held on October 11th, the anniversary of his death), public monuments, including the Pulaski Skyway, and, of course, today’s stamp.
Designed by Sigvald Johannesson, the skyway was the last part of one of the nation’s first controlled-access highways, the Route 1 Extension, which connected the existing Route 1 with the recently opened Holland Tunnel. It high profile, which peaks at 135 feet above the ground, supposedly was shaped by the need to both provide enough clearance for shipping and the demands of long-time Jersey City Mayor Frank “I am the Law” Hague, who wanted to minimize open cuts in his city. Hague also ensured that the project included an access ramp to Kearney, a town near Newark where he wanted to spur industrial development.
Construction was marred by bitter labor disputes fueled by a dispute between Hague, who also was the longtime political boss of Hudson County, and labor leader, Theodore Brandle, a one-time ally, who was known as one of the state’s “labor czars.” These ultimately led to at least one death and a show trial where 21 union members were acquitted of charges related to the death. These fights were just a start: in the late 1930s, Hague turned Jersey City into a virtual police state as part of his efforts to stop the Congress of Industrial Organizations from organizing workers in the city. Hague and his allies also prevented Norman Thomas, a well-known socialist, from giving speeches in both Jersey City and Newark. Hague was finally forced from office in 1947.
At least dozen other workers died in construction related accidents on the skyway, which opened in November 1932. The following May, the state legislature passed a bill, sponsored by a representative from Jersey City, naming it the General Casimir Pulaski Memorial Skyway. This name proved to be too long so when the official renaming ceremony took place on October 11 (the anniversary of Pulaski’s death, which is when Pulaski day is celebrated), the official signs shortened the name to the Gen. Pulaski Skyway.
Though I saw the road as a looming hulk, others hailed its design. In 1932, the American Institute of Steel Construction declared the structure the “most beautiful steel structure” among the nation’s long-span bridges. And according to Mardges Bacon, author “Le Corbusier in America: Travels in the Land of the Timid,” the famed Swiss-French architect called it “a road without art because no thought was given to it. But what a wonderful tool. The Skyway rises up over the plain and leads to the ‘skyscrapers.’ Coming from the flat meadows of New Jersey, it reveals the City of Incredible Towers.”
On the other hand, my fears of the road were well-founded. In the early 2000s it became clear that the skyway, which handled about 75,000 cars a day (but no trucks, which have been banned for decades) was structurally deficient. The state launched a major rehab program that supposedly is almost done. Moreover, in 2011, the Texas Transportation Institute reported that the road, which was handling about 74,000 cars a day, was the nation’s sixth most unreliable road (meaning its traffic conditions were particularly variable and unpredictable).
And, most notably, in May 2019, nj.com named it as the state’s third most terrifying road, noting “it’s Jersey’s greatest thrill ride, 3.5 miles of non-existent shoulders and no practical speed limit arcing over a blasted landscape worthy of a modern-day Hieronymus Bosch.”
It’s nice to know that some things haven’t really changed.
Be well, stay safe, drive carefully, fight for justice, and work for peace.