Jehovah’s Witnesses To Jersey City Medical Center

Jehovah’s Witnesses. This religious denomination, which lays heavy stress on the Second Coming of Christ, has had a congregation in Newark since 1881. Adherents share a central concern regarding the end of this world, a battle of Armageddon wherein angels of Jehovah-God will destroy Satan and establish a millennial Kingdom on earth. Consequently many Witnesses have dissociated themselves from most forms of ecclesiastical, political, and commercial power in order to prepare themselves for the imminent return of divine order. Such convictions have resulted in refusals to salute national flags, register for the military draft, bear arms, or accept blood transfusions.

Witnesses call their places of worship Kingdom Halls, where all their services, led by unsalaried ministers, are open to the public. Central headquarters of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society is in Brooklyn, New York, where publications such as The Watchtower and Awake! are printed for worldwide distribution. New Jersey has been the scene of numerous legal battles over the rights of freedom of speech and religion. Jehovah’s Witnesses gained wide public attention in 1906 at a general convention at the Asbury Park Casino, and generally negative reactions to the group’s ideology grew alongside resentment of such aggressive evangelical tactics as house-to-house visitations and sale of literature. Public hostility led to political opposition and police harassment in attempts to impede large rallies, notably one held in Plainfield during the summer of 1933, with arrests and charges of disorderly conduct. Several U.S. Supreme Court decisions have upheld Witnesses’ rights, and social antagonisms have subsided in recent decades. Official statistics for 2001 indicate 28,000 active members worshiping in seventeen languages in over three hundred congregations throughout the state.


Jelliff, John (b. July 30, 1813; d. July 2, 1893). Furniture designer and manufacturer.

John Jelliff was a cabinetmaker and furniture designer in Newark from the mid-1830s until his retirement in the late 1860s. He was born and raised in Saugatuck, Connecticut, the son of Hezekiah Jelliff, of Huguenot ancestry, and Nancy Bennett, a Quaker. John was apprenticed to Alonzo W. Anderson, a carver in New York City in i828. Two years later his apprenticeship was transferred to Lemuel M. and Daniel B. Crane, cabinetmakers in Newark. John was made a freeman in Newark in 1835, and married Mary Marsh of Elizabeth the next year. Of their ten offspring, three sons died as children, and seven daughters lived to adulthood.

Jelliff opened his factory in 1836, with Thomas L. Vantilburg as his partner. They advertised in the Newark City Directory as "Manufacturers and Dealers in Cabinet Furniture, Mahogany Chairs, Sofas, Mattresses, etc.” The great Newark fire of i836 and the national financial panic of 1837 strained the partnership, which was dissolved in 1843. From that point on John Jelliff and Company operated on Newark’s Broad Street.

In the 1840s and 1850s Jelliff and Company produced rosewood, mahogany, and walnut furniture in the romantic fashions of the pre-Civil War era: rococo (modern French), Elizabethan, Gothic, and Renaissance. In 1854 Henry H. Miller joined the firm, and would remain as a business partner until the firm closed. In Jelliff and Company’s early period the firm’s clientele was probably local. A large collection of pencil sketches and drawings in Jelliff’s hand survives, showing that he was the firm’s chief designer, and also suggesting the range of styles and forms the firm produced in this period. By the end of the i850s John Jelliff and Company had become the leading furniture manufacturer in New Jersey.

Furniture warehouse of Newark cabinetmaker John Jelliff, 301-303 Broad Street, Newark, 1850.

Furniture warehouse of Newark cabinetmaker John Jelliff, 301-303 Broad Street, Newark, 1850.

Jelliff and Company’s furniture probably began to gain national currency after the Civil War, when eastern products were shipped west and south by railroad in ever-increasing quantities. Jelliff undoubtedly took advantage of New York City’s many wholesalers and their distribution system. Jelliff rosewood parlor suites in the newly fashionable "neo-grec” style of the late i860s were purchased for upscale houses all across the country—probably as "New York” furniture. In his 1874 The Industrial Interests of Newark, N.J., William Ford reported that "fully one half of the sales (of Jelliff and Company) are made outside of Newark, and largely to citizens of New York City. … In addition, sales are made in Washington, Richmond and farther South.”

By 1874 the Jelliff factory in Newark had trebled in size. It covered 40,000 square feet, and employed a staff of forty-five men doing an annual business of $100,000. Because of a stomach disorder, Jelliff began to withdraw from active furniture-making in the i860s. He did not retire completely until i868, and then remained an active advisor until 1890. In 1893, aged eighty, Jelliff died at his Italianate villa on Johnson Avenue in Newark.

Jennings, Samuel (b. date unknown; d. 1708). Politician. Samuel Jennings was an English Quaker farmer and merchant who took up residence in West Jersey in 1680. He initially served as deputy governor for Edward Byllynge, but then sided with the colonists in a dispute over who had the right to control the government, even accepting election as governor by the assembly. Replaced by John Skene in 1685, he was active in the West Jersey Council of Proprietors, and served as speaker of the West Jersey assembly. He became embroiled in the bitter politics of the 1690s, and defended his actions in a pamphlet, Truth Rescued from Forgery and Falsehood. After 1703, when West and East Jersey were reunited, he was first a member of the council, then speaker of the assembly and bitter opponent of Lord Cornbury.

Jensen, Alfred (b. Dec. 11, 1903; d. Apr. 4, 1981). Painter. Born in Guatemala and raised mostly in Denmark, Alfred Jensen’s early career was spent as an art consultant to Sai-die Adler May, a collector with whom he toured Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, buying works by the modern masters. Jensen did not start painting seriously until the 1950s, and emerged in the 1960s with his brightly colored geometric paintings composed of signs, numbers, or symbols. A contemporary of the abstract expressionists, his richly textured paintings aspired to the same sublime message. Embedded in his numbers or hieroglyphs was the notion that underlying the chaos of the visual world lay a powerful, unrelenting universal order.

Alfred Jensen lived in Glen Ridge from 1972 until his death in 1981.

Jersey barrier. The tapered concrete barrier that is used in many narrow highway medians to prevent vehicle crossovers into oncoming traffic is called a Jersey barrier. The tapered design redirects a vehicle hitting it: the vehicle’s wheels and sheet metal on the impacting side ride upward to prevent vehicle rollover. The barrier was developed over fifty years ago by the New Jersey state highway department to minimize the number of out-of-control trucks penetrating the median and eliminate the need for costly and dangerous steel guardrail median barrier maintenance in high-accident locations with narrow medians.

Jersey Blues. New Jersey infantry troops have been referred to as "Jersey Blues” since at least 1747, the year Col. Peter Schuyler of Newark brought his regiment home from upstate New York and a year’s service in the French and Indian War. In 1769 the Jersey Blues were reviewed by Gen. Thomas Gage in New Brunswick. A Civil War correspondent from the Philadelphia Inquirer described the Jersey Blues in May 1862 as "worthy descendants” of Revolutionary heroes. There is even a song called "Jersey Blues,” the authorship of which is attributed by some to Richard Howell, New Jersey’s third state governor.

No one can agree about the origin of the nickname. Various theories maintain that the troops were named for Blue Mountain, or that their courage was "True Blue,” or that the color of their uniform made them distinctive.

Uniforms of the New Jersey Regiment, the "Jersey Blues'' (1755-1764).

Uniforms of the New Jersey Regiment, the "Jersey Blues” (1755-1764).

Jersey Central Power and Light Company. More than 980,000 customers in northwestern and south-central New Jersey are provided with electricity by Jersey Central Power and Light Company (JCP&L). It is a subsidiary of GPU Energy, which is a subsidiary of GPU. JCP&L originated in 1925 from the consolidation of numerous small utilities within speculator Howard Hopson’s Associated Gas and Electric Company. After Hopson’s conglomerate went bankrupt, JCP&L was united with two Pennsylvania utilities (Metropolitan Edison and Pennsylvania Electric) to form General Public Utilities in 1946.

The nation’s first commercial nuclear power plant, the Oyster Creek Generating Unit, was constructed by GPU within JCP&L’s service territory at Lacey Township, near Toms River. GPU was also the owner of Three Mile Island Unit 2, the site of the nation’s worst nuclear accident, which occurred on March 28,1979.

After the enactment of federal and state legislation authorizing utility deregulation, GPU organized unregulated subsidiaries to use various assets (such as consumer information databases and utility right-of-ways) of JCP&L and its sister utilities to engage in data processing, real estate investment, and other unregulated activities. In early 2001, JCP&L’s affiliate GPU Telecom announced its "strategic plan of becoming one of the telecommunications infrastructure providers of choice in the Eastern United States.”

Jersey City. 14.9-square-mile city, the seat of Hudson County. Originally part of the Dutch colony of New Netherland, Jersey City is situated on a peninsula between the Hudson and Hackensack rivers, directly opposite lower Manhattan. After conflicts with Lenape on the lowland shore, in 1660 Dutch farmers established on Bergen Hill (the beginning of the Palisades) the first local government, school, and church in New Jersey. The 1804 purchase of land and ferry rights at Paulus Hook, the point of land closest to Manhattan, by a group of New York real estate investors prefigured Jersey City’s historic and ongoing role as an adjunct to Manhattan business interests. In 1838 Jersey City (Paulus Hook) was incorporated independent of Bergen Township, but by 1873 Jersey City, Bergen, and three other villages, Van Vorst, Hudson, and Greenville, had consolidated into the present Jersey City. Attracted by its proximity to New York markets, in the second half of the nineteenth century, three major railroads (Pennsylvania, Jersey Central, Erie) built down to the Jersey City shoreline, slicing or tunneling through Bergen Hill, filling in underwater lands, spreading railroad yards, shops, warehouses, terminals, and piers along the entire waterfront.

The enormous need for labor to build this railroad complex was filled by thousands of immigrants, some German but mostly Irish Catholics who flooded the city beginning in the 1840s. The native-born Protestant population strained to maintain its control over the city’s institutions, aided by Republican state legislators who in 1871 gerrymandered the city’s Democratic (mainly immigrant) voters into one horseshoe-shaped district. It was from this Irish enclave ("the Horseshoe”) that legendary Hudson County Democratic leader Frank Hague rose, working his way up from City Hall custodian to mayor by 1917. Hague’s thirty-year rule was criticized for its collection of kickbacks and repression of dissent, but he maintained the loyalty of voters by providing safe streets, city jobs even during the Depression, and free medical care for all in the landmark Jersey City Medical Center complex. He was able to do this with the help of WPA programs which rewarded Hague’s ability to deliver the state’s Democratic vote to Franklin Roosevelt. One of those WPA projects was Roosevelt Stadium, where Jackie Robinson broke the color line in professional baseball in 1946.

Hague’s defeat in 1947 was partially due to his refusal to give more than token recognition to other ethnic groups that, beginning in the 1880s, had built substantial communities (Polish, Italian, Slavic, Ukrainian, Russian) often around their parish churches and schools. A strong Catholic school system developed, topped by Saint Peter’s College, a Jesuit institution chartered in 1872, the same year the city established its first public high school. New Jersey City University (1927), which grew up out of a teachers’ college, and Hudson County Community College (1973) all offer higher education to a largely working-class student body.

After changes in transportation technology brought the failure of railroads, newcomers were still drawn by abundant factory jobs that Jersey City offered. Major industries like Colgate-Palmolive, Lorillard, Swift, and Emerson were attracted by easy access to land and sea transport and a plentiful labor supply. Descendants of Bergen County slaves had lived in the area since the seventeenth century, and significant migration of African Americans from the South followed both world wars. Hispanic and Asian immigrants came in growing numbers to this gateway city in the late decades of the twentieth century.

Beginning in the 1950s, the closing of factories and the departure of middle-class property owners to the suburbs eroded the city’s tax base; infrastructure and public spaces were neglected, and the city’s public image reached a nadir in 1971 with the conviction of top Jersey City officials for federal crimes. The quality of education in the city’s public schools as measured by test scores and truancy rates deteriorated to the point where the state carried out the first takeover of public schools in 1989.

But the major resource of the city—its shoreline a five-minute ride to Manhattan through the PATH (rail tunnel) or the Holland or Lincoln vehicular tunnels—revived the city’s fortunes in the 1980s and 1990s. Major financial institutions began to relocate their back-office operations to Jersey City, where rents and taxes were much lower than Manhattan’s. Office towers and luxury housing replaced abandoned railroad yards and rotting piers. The old Erie railroad yards became Newport, a city within a city with a shopping mall, restaurants, and hotels. At Exchange Place, where the Pennsylvania Railroad had discontinued its commuter services in the 1960s, skyscrapers and a waterfront park transformed the landscape, and ferries once again carried workers across the Hudson. Along with the new, something of the old was preserved: the giant Colgate clock, the four-block long Pennsylvania reel-to-keel terminal converted to the Harborside Financial Center, the remodeling of old factories into con-dos and coops, the painstaking restoration of brownstones for the thousands of new ur-banites who wanted Manhattan views for half the cost. Most dramatic of all, the Jersey Central Railroad property, desolate and garbage-strewn for decades, was reborn as Liberty State Park in 1976, an 800-acre site with unequalled views of the New York skyline. Visitors feel as if they can touch the Statue of Liberty, less than 2,000 feet away, and ferries take passengers from the carefully restored railroad terminal to the Statue and to Ellis Island.

In 2000, the first leg of the projected 20.5 mile Hudson-Bergen Light Rail Transit System began its north-south run along the coastline, linking ferries, buses, and rail passenger routes, and carrying thousands of commuters to work on both sides of the Hudson. The continuing vitality of the Jersey City waterfront links its past with the future of the metropolitan region.

In 2000, out of a population of 240,055, 34 percent of residents was white, 28 percent was black, 16 percent was Asian; 28 percent was of Hispanic origin (Hispanics may be of any race). In 2000, the median household income was $37,862. For complete census figures, see chart, 133.

Jersey City Medical Center. Purchased by the city in 1881, the site at Montgomery Street and Baldwin Avenue in Jersey City has been the site of three hospitals. The current Medical Center complex was begun in 1928 and completed in 1941. Mayor Frank Hague was instrumental in its conception and planning and architect John T. Rowland designed the majority of the buildings, which totaled over a dozen. In 1936, midway through the construction, President Franklin D. Roosevelt presided over the dedication ceremony of the Hudson County facility. In 1997 the Jersey City Medical Center became a teaching affiliate of Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Today, the Medical Center maintains a full complement of inpatient services and is one of the largest providers of ambulatory care in the region, with over 231,900 outpatient visits annually. This 603-bed facility serves the region as the Children’s Hospital of Hudson County, Regional Level II Trauma Center, Teaching Cancer Hospital, Regional Perinatal Center, and the Regional Open Heart Surgery Center. It also offers a broad spectrum of primary care, specialized pediatrics and adult outpatient services. The center is the Advanced Life Support provider for Hudson County and Basic Life Support provider for the cities of Jersey City and Secaucus.

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