Lenox, Walter Scott (b. Mar. 29,1859; d. Jan. 11, 1920). Pottery manufacturer and designer. Walter Scott Lenox was born in Trenton. In 1875 he apprenticed to Elijah Tatler, an English china decorator then working for the Trenton Pottery Company. After several years operating his own decorating firm, Lenox became art director first for Ott and Brewer and, later, for Willets Manufacturing Company. At both companies he developed a line of exquisite art ware. In 1889 he founded Ceramic Art Company, which later became known as Lenox China. He gradually became blind beginning in 1896, but continued to run his company with the aid of others. Lenox died in Trenton in 1920.
Lenox China. Headquartered in Lawrenceville, with its principal factory in Pomona, Lenox China is the premier fine china tableware and giftware manufacturer in the United States today. The company was founded in Trenton in 1889 as the Ceramic
Service plate made by Ceramic Art Company, Trenton, and decorated by Bruno Geyer. The plate is one of a set of eighteen made for Gov. Franklin Murphy, c. 1903. Bone china, d. 10 3/4 in.
Art Company by Walter Scott Lenox, Jonathan Coxon, and several investors. Lenox founded the company to prove that an American pottery could survive with art ware as its only product. Until that time, imported ceramics had prevailed as artware, while American potteries were content to produce utilitarian, sanitary, and common tableware. Lenox’s enterprise attracted some of the finest craftsmen from America and Europe. The earliest wares were primarily ornamental, including vases, tea sets, dressing table paraphernalia, and the like. The china body was similar to the ivory porcelain that is called "Trenton” and it was decorated with elaborate painted, enameled, and gilded ornamentation. China painters identified with the Ceramic Art Company include William and George Morley, Hans Nosek, Sigmund Wirkner, and Lucien Boullemier.
About 1900, Charles Fergus Binns, later director of the School of Clay working and Ceramics at Alfred, New York, developed for Lenox a white bone china body for tableware. The first product in this new body (called Lenox China) was fancy service plates with elaborate hand-painted decoration made on special order for elite customers, such as New Jersey governor Franklin Murphy. In 1906, the company decided to embarkon a new product line, changing the company’s name to Lenox China and shifting production emphasis to tableware. In anticipation of this change, Frank Graham Holmes was hired as chief designer in 1905. Educated at the Rhode Island School of Design, Holmes continued to design for the company until his death in 1954.
In 1910, the first stock pattern, "The Virginian,” was introduced. Well-known patterns from this era of the company’s production include "Ming” (1917) and "Autumn” (1918), which is still made. The commission to make a large service for the White House in 1917 ensured the company’s worldwide reputation, and the pottery continued to make table services for the White House throughout the twentieth century. After World War II, the company began aggressive national advertising and greatly changed production and marketing of its dinnerware. A standard place setting was reduced to five pieces and adoption of the bridal registry meant that the purchase of a dinner service was divided among many wedding guests. As a result of these changes, production expanded greatly and a new factory was built in Pomona in 1954. Manufacturing continued in Trenton until 1964. Executive offices and design facilities were moved to Lawrenceville in 1978. Today, the company also maintains two china factories in North Carolina.
Lenox China now boasts the largest share of the American dinnerware market. However, artware (now called giftware) has continued to be made throughout the company’s history. The most significant artware was a line of delicate figurines designed by Patricia Eakin and made from about 1940 through the early 1950s.
Leon, "Southside” Johnny (b. Dec. 4, 1948). Singer and songwriter. Born John Lyon, Southside Johnny Leon grew up in Ocean Grove. He gravitated to the Asbury Park club scene in the late 1960s, where he began a lifelong musical association with other Asbury Park mainstays Bruce Springsteen, Little Steven Van Zandt, and Gary Tallent. The first version of the Asbury Jukes came together in 1974. Drawing as much from R&B and soul as traditional rock, the band’s sound revolved around Southside Johnny’s passionate lead vocals and its high-powered horn section. Springsteen’s success helped the band land a record deal with Epic, and its Van Zandt-produced debut album, I Dont Want to Go Home, came out in 1976. The band received radio airplay with songs like "I Don’t Want to Go Home,” "Talk to Me,” "Trapped Again,” and the Sam Cooke cover "Havin’ a Party.” The Asbury Jukes developed a reputation as a top live act, but never reached an E Street Band level of popularity. The lineup has changed many times over the years, with key players including guitarists Billy Rush and Bobby Bandiera, keyboardists Kevin Kavanaugh and Rusty Cloud, trombonist Ritchie "La Bamba” Rosenberg, saxophonist Ed Manion, and trumpeter Mark Pender.
Leonia. 1.5-square-mile borough in eastern Bergen County. First settled by Dutch and English farmers in the seventeenth century, the community benefited from its proximity to the Hudson River. Washington’s army retreated through Leonia on November 20,1776. Three pre-Revolutionary War homes still remain. The town was known as the English Neighborhood until formally named Leonia in 1865 and remained primarily a farming community until it became a borough on December 4, 1894. At that time artists, academics, and business professionals built fine homes in the town. Between 1895 and 1920, the population quadrupled as the introduction of subways, trolleys, and ferries facilitated the commute to and from New York City. A substantial number of academics settled in the town, accounting for its nickname "the Athens of the East.” Five Nobel Prize-winning scientists have lived in the borough. It is home to the state’s oldest theater company, the Players Guild of Leonia, which performs in a former Civil War Drill Hall. Leonia has seven parks and a sixteen-acre Green Acres forest.
The community is primarily residential with single-family homes predominating. Over forty languages other than English are spoken by residents. In 2000, the population of 8,914 was 66 percent white, 26 percent Asian (primarily Korean), and 13 percent Hispanic (Hispanics may be of any race). The median family income was $72,440 (2000). For complete census figures, see chart, 133.
Lesbians, gays, and bisexuals. The lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) population in New Jersey is spread throughout the state, in every city, town, and hamlet. Although larger concentrations can be found in a few towns, there are no gay neighborhoods as such. For the organized LGB community, the main political association is the New Jersey Lesbian and Gay Coalition. Founded in 1971, this umbrella organization is composed of local LGB groups and individual members, and functions as a political advocacy and unifying force for the community. The Personal Liberty Fund, the coalition’s tax-exempt arm, concentrates mainly on education projects, such as voter issues, a religious directory, and a youth resource directory.
The oldest LGB organization in the state, the Rutgers undergraduate group, was started in 1969. The oldest nonstudent local group, the Gay Activist Alliance in Morris County (GAAMC), has been meeting weekly at the same location in Morristown since its inception in 1972.
Between 1990 and 1992, the LGB community in New Jersey made important strides in the area of civil rights, gaining protections that nongay citizens have long possessed and often take for granted. For example, LGB people were specifically protected in legislation on bias crimes (1990) and domestic violence (1991). An amendment in 1992 to New Jersey’s antidiscrimination law added the words "affectional and sexual orientation” to the list of characteristics that cannot be used to discriminate against individuals in employment, public accommodations, and credit services. The phrase "affectional orientation” protects those who may not be, but are perceived to be, gay. On other fronts, the amended Rules of Professional Conduct (1990) for the courts made it improper for judges, lawyers, and other court personnel to engage in discriminatory conduct based upon sexual orientation, and police academies began to include training to help officers overcome myths about the LGB population. In 1991 Governor James Florio signed the first proclamation declaring June to be lesbian and gay pride month.
Lever, Richard Hayley (b. sept. 28,1876; d. Dec. 6, 1958). Painter and lecturer. Hayley Lever was born in Adelaide, Australia, and studied art in Cornwall, England. He immigrated to the United States in 1911 and lived for a number of years in Caldwell. Lever was best known for his postimpressionist marine scenes, such as Belleville, New Jersey (1930). His work won a number of awards, including the Carnegie and Edwin Palmer prizes of the National Academy (1914), and the gold medal of the Panama-Pacific Exposition (San Francisco, 1915). His marine paintings were noted for their vibrant color and their sense of movement. Lever was an instructor with the Newark Arts Club and the Art Students League in New York City. He died in Mount Vernon, New York, at the age of eighty-two.
Levittown. The Levitt brothers created the prototypical post-World War II suburban housing development, consisting of inexpensive dwellings mass-produced in an assembly-line fashion. This method was economical but provided little variety, prompting critics to equate architectural with demographic homogeneity. The 7.60-square-mile development in Burlington County was the last of three Levittowns, following Long Island, New York, and Bucks County, Pennsylvania. By 1955, the Levitts had purchased nearly all of Willingboro Township, a sparsely settled agricultural area. Unlike earlier Levittowns, which overlapped municipalities, this development comprised an entire town. The Levitts constructed eleven thousand homes in ten neighborhoods, each served by an elementary school, playground, and swimming pool. They also built community-wide facilities, including shopping centers, a library, a high school, and parks. Instead of providing only one house style, which had drawn much criticism, the Levitts offered three house styles. Levittown opened to buyers in 1958. By 1959 the population was ten thousand. In 1959 a referendum vote renamed the township Levittown, but in 1963 the name was changed back to Willingboro Township. Originally restricted to whites only, Levittown was successfully integrated in i960, and thus avoided the anti-integration violence that plagued the Pennsylvania Levittown. In 2000 the population of 33,008 was 66 percent black and 25 percent white. In 1999 the median family income was $62,662.
Lewis, Carl (b. July i, 1961). Athlete. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Frederick Carlton Lewis moved as a boy to New Jersey, where both of his parents became track and field coaches as well as teachers in Willingboro. Before he graduated from Willingboro High School in 1979, Lewis gained wide notice for performances in the two events that would make him legend: the 100-meter dash and the long jump. Lewis entered the University of Houston on an athletic scholarship and qualified for the 1980 Olympics, but great expectations were foiled when the United States boycotted the Moscow games over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Nonetheless, a profusion of Olympic gold medals followed: four in 1984 in Los Angeles, two in Seoul in 1988, two more in Barcelona in 1992, and a ninth in Atlanta in i996. That final gold medal came when Lewis, at the age of thirty-five, leaped nearly twenty-eight feet to become only the second competitor in history to triumph in the same event in four consecutive Olympiads. Some reporters in his own country perceived "King Carl” as brash, but fans abroad cheered him enthusiastically, as when he set a record of 9.92 seconds in the 100-meter run in Seoul to confirm his status as "the world’s fastest human.”
Lewis, Henry Jay, Jr. (b. Oct. i6,1932; d. Jan. 26, 1996). Conductor and double bass player. Henry Jay Lewis, Jr., the only child of Henry J. Lewis, an automobile dealer, and Mary Josephine Lewis, a registered nurse, was born in Los Angeles and studied at the University of South Carolina. Drafted into the army in i954, he conducted the Seventh Army Symphony Orchestra in Stuttgart, Germany, until 1957, when he joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He was the first African American conductor to win a major conducting post (New Jersey Symphony Orchestra [NJSO], 1968-1976) and to conduct at the Metropolitan Opera (LaBoheme in 1972). Also one of the first black instrumentalists (double bassist) to play with a major American orchestra (Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1948), Lewis was a co-founder of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra in 1958. He returned to the Metropolitan Opera to conduct, among other operas, Carmen fifty-nine times (many with mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne, to whom he was married 1960-1979, and with whom he had one daughter). In New Jersey Lewis was vital in repairing the orchestra’s relationship to Newark by offering free concerts in the park, touring the orchestra throughout the state, and speaking from the stage. His tenure was marked by artistic growth, but also labor upheaval, including several musicians’ strikes. He was first to take the NJSO to Carnegie Hall (1970) and the Kennedy Center (1971); under his baton, the orchestra grew from having a $75,000 budget and twenty-two concerts per year, to a $1.5 million budget and one hundred performances each season. He maintained a notable international conducting and recording career, particularly in opera. Henry Jay Lewis, Jr., died in New York City.
Liberty. 12-square-mile township in Warren County. Formed in 1926 from sections of Oxford and Hope townships, Liberty shares many physical and historic features with neighboring townships. In the mid-twentieth century the skeleton of the Bojak Mastodon, carbon-dated to 9045 b.c.e, was found in Liberty. It has been speculated that this was the big game hunted by the people of the Paleo period, which predates the Lenape Indian Woodland period. Shades of Death Road leads to Marble Hill where rose quartz was mined. Townsbury was settled by the Town brothers around 1780. This former farming community straddles the Pequest River. The Pequest Trout Hatchery and Natural Resource Education Center lies within Liberty and adjoining Mansfield, Oxford, and White townships. Mountain Lake, once a popular resort area, is located on a plateau section of Jenny Jump mountain range. The lake is a natural spring-fed body of water that was surrounded by a community of summer homes and resort hotels at the end of the nineteenth century. The hotels are now gone and the summer cottages have turned into year-round homes. The community is residential with the people earning their living outside the community. According to the 2000 census the population of 2,765 was 97 percent white. The median household income in 2000 was $62,535. For complete census figures, see chart, 133.
Liberty Hall. The country estate built in 1772 by William Livingston—New Jersey’s first state governor, a member of the First and Second Continental Congresses, and a delegate to the Constitutional Convention—began as a fourteen-room Georgian-style manor house and served as Livingston’s home until his death in 1790. The house was later expanded and rebuilt as a fifty-room Victorian Italianate mansion by Col. John Kean and was known as the Livingston-Kean House until 1995.
Designated a National Historic Site in 1974, Liberty Hall, in Union near Kean College, is now a public museum of New Jersey history. The site includes the mansion and twenty-three acres of grounds and gardens, which contain many species of plants and trees, including one of the oldest trees in the state.
The Central Railroad of New Jersey terminal, now part of Liberty State Park.
Liberty Science Center. a science museum, located at Liberty State Park in Jersey City, this center is dedicated to the exploration of nature, humanity, and technology.
Sparked by a series of 1977 Star-Ledger articles, the Liberty Science Center (LSC) was incorporated in 1980 after intensive study by the Research and Development Council of New Jersey. Encouraged by a $68 million capital campaign, receiving funds from corporations such as Exxon and Warner Lambert and foundations such as Geraldine R. Dodge and Victoria, and with the donation of state acreage at Liberty State Park, the facility opened its doors to visitors on January 24, 1993. In 1997 a Partnership Program with urban school districts was launched to help New Jersey schools in meeting the new core standards. By spring 1999, Liberty Science Center welcomed its five-millionth guest, making it one of the tristate region’s most visited family attractions.
Within its towers and domes overlooking New York Harbor are contained three hands-on exhibit floors that provide learning experiences on the environment, health, and invention. The Kodak Omni Theater, a giant screen production, and the J. D. Williams Science Theater offer vivid views of innovations in science. LSC has become a popular attraction for schoolchildren in the region, offering a direct exploration of textbook knowledge.
Liberty State Park. Among the attractions of Liberty State Park, located east of Jersey City on 1,200-plus acres, are the Central Railroad of New Jersey Terminal, which houses exhibits about the history of the railroad and the park; an interpretive center, which has an auditorium and offers educational programs to the public and school groups; a thirty-six-acre natural area of marshes; the Liberty Science Center museum; a two-mile waterfront Liberty Walk promenade and picnic area; an eighty-eight-acre green park of lawns and flowers; a Columbus monument; a flag plaza; bike paths; and boat docks and ferry service to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. The park opened to the public on Flag Day, June 17, 1976.
Libraries. The state of New Jersey offers its citizens a rich array of well over one thousand libraries. This total includes school media centers, public libraries, academic and research libraries, archival collections, government and corporate libraries, historical societies, and many other specialized libraries in law, medicine, engineering, and art. State-supported cooperative networks provide wide public access to these resources and those beyond the state’s boundaries.
The history of New Jersey’s libraries closely parallels that of libraries elsewhere in the United States. In colonial times, library companies, paid for by private subscription, were established in Trenton (1750), Burlington (1758), and later in Shrewsbury, Haddonfield, Mount Holly, New Brunswick, and Newark. While these libraries catered to the reading interests of the privileged, popular reading was supported by commercially operated circulating libraries in Elizabeth and Newark as early as 1765. More libraries of both types were established after the Revolution, followed in the 1820s by more educationally oriented apprentices’ and mechanics’ libraries in Trenton, Burlington, Elizabeth, and Newark. The State Library was founded in 1796 and a state librarian was appointed in 1822.
Exterior of the New Jersey State Library, Trenton.
Princeton (the College of New Jersey, founded 1746) and Rutgers (Queen’s College, founded 1766) are among the oldest colleges in the United States. Libraries were established at each school soon after its founding. Initially, the collections consisted mainly of gifts, which were of rather limited usefulness. The college libraries were soon supplemented by the libraries of several students’ associations, which provided more popular books and periodicals. Today, both Princeton and Rutgers maintain major research libraries, with many subject collections of international significance.
A system of state colleges emerged from the founding of state normal schools in Newark (now Kean University) and Trenton (now the College of New Jersey) after 1855. They were followed by Montclair (1908), Glass-boro (now Rowan) (1923), William Patterson (1923), Jersey City (1927), Stockton (1969), and Ramapo (1971). Several private colleges were established as well: Seton Hall (1856), Rider (1865), Drew (1866), Centenary (1867), Bloomfield (1868), Monmouth (1933), and Fair-leigh Dickinson (1942). All the colleges created substantial libraries for use by faculty and students.
Public access to books was provided with the establishment of library associations in Newark and Trenton after 1845, but it was the recognition that libraries would need government support in order to provide wide public access to educational resources that created the impetus for substantial public library growth. State aid for school libraries was established in 1871, and the State Library Act of 1879 gave each municipality the right to start a public library. New Brunswick (1883),
Paterson (1885), Newark (1889), and Trenton (1900) were among the major cities to take advantage of the act, and Newark’s librarian, John Cotton Dana (1856-1929), provided invaluable leadership in the development of public library service in the state. Thirty-five libraries were constructed in New Jersey communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the philanthropy of millionaire Andrew Carnegie.
The New Jersey Library Association was founded in 1890. A Public Library Commission, headed by Sarah Byrd Askew, was established in 1901 to coordinate and support public libraries. In 1920 county libraries were established to provide additional library services. Major company libraries were established at Prudential (1903), Bell (1917), and Esso (1919), illustrating New Jersey’s early leadership in corporate research.
Librarian education in the state began with a series of summer programs in 1906; these programs continued until 1943. In 1927 the New Jersey College for Women, part of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, established a bachelor’s library degree program. The Graduate School of Library Service at Rutgers opened in New Brunswick in 1954; it offered a master’s degree in library science (M.L.S.) and began to offer doctoral degrees in 1961. In 1982 these programs were incorporated into the newly created School of Communication, Information and Library Studies at Rutgers University.
In 1945 the State Library and Archives became part of the state’s Education Department. State Librarian Roger McDonough provided leadership in statewide library development not only during his official tenure from 1947 until 1975 but well beyond that time. Major library legislation enacted in 1967, followed by the Library Network Law of 1984, provided a regional approach to multitype (academic, school, public, special, and corporate) library networks with strong financial support from the state. A decline in Education Department support for the State Library during the 1990s led to substantial staff and service reductions. In 1996 the State Library came under the administration of Thomas A. Edison State College.
