Striped bass To Surf City (New Jersey)

Striped bass. Mirone saxitilis, deemed the king of saltwater fish, is a member of the perch family and a successful, historic part of New Jersey’s fisheries in coastal areas, estuaries, and rivers leading to the ocean. Stripers are easily adapted to freshwater and can be found in the upper reaches of the Delaware and Hudson rivers, and the Division of Fish and Wildlife has successfully introduced them into several New Jersey lakes.

Ranked as a number-one sport fish, stripers are actively sought by sportsmen and women for their excellent food value. New Jersey does not have a commercial season, a management decision to help stripers return to their optimum population potential. Conservationists have played a key role in reestablishing populations to sustainable surplus levels, reversing a decline brought on by a general change in habitat and water quality. Stripers are an excellent indicator of the quality of the aquatic environment. They reproduce and grow well in the state, and they will eat anything smaller than they are.

Stuart, Gilbert (b. Dec. 3, 1755; d. July 9, 1828). Painter. Considered the nation’s finest early portrait painter, particularly of America’s founding fathers, Gilbert Stuart was born in North Kingstown, Rhode Island. In 1769, he was apprenticed to Scotsman Cosmo Alexander, who took Stuart to Edinburgh, where he found himself stranded after Alexander’s 1772 death. After working in his own studio in Newport, Rhode Island, for a couple of years, Stuart traveled to London in 1774 to study with Benjamin West. In 1786, he married Charlotte Coates of Reading, Berkshire, and seven years later, reportedly to evade creditors, the Stuart family returned to the United States. In his Germantown, Pennsylvania, studio, Gilbert Stuart began to paint important Americans, including George Washington, who sat for the artist in 1795. By December 1803, in need of commissions, Stuart settled his family in Bordentown, New Jersey, and set up a studio in Washington, D.C. During visits to New Jersey, he secured some portrait commissions; among them is a portrait of Anne Pen-nington (c. 1805, Philadelphia Society for the Preservation of Landmarks). Soon, however, the family moved again, this time to Boston, where Stuart remained for the rest of his life.


Stuyvesant, Peter (b. c. 1592; d. Feb. 1672). Director general of New Netherland. During his stabilizing seventeen-year tenure, Peter Stuyvesant—often under pressure from the community—invigorated New Netherland after the mismanagement of his predecessors by granting charters to both English and Dutch towns, establishing local courts, and (reluctantly) tolerating religions other than the Reformed faith. He encouraged schooling, regulated taverns and rowdyism, enforced laws regarding marriage, breach of promise, paternity, adultery, fornication, and prostitution; and thus he fostered family formation. He calmed boundary disputes with New England, neutralized Swedish outposts on the Delaware, reduced conflict with the Indians through negotiation rather than retaliation, and opened the land west of the Hudson in present-day New Jersey to settlement. Despite his accomplishments, he is often maligned for his authoritarian nature, which caused friction with the colonists.

Subaru of America. Founded in 1968 by entrepreneurs Harvey Lamm and Malcolm Bricklin, Subaru of America was established as the U.S. distribution firm for cars built by Fuji Heavy Industries of Japan. A parts and distribution warehouse opened in Pennsauken in the early 1970s; that then became the company’s headquarters. By 1976, Subaru was the sixth-largest Japanese brand in the U.S. market. Repeated years of record sales led to construction of new corporate headquarters in Cherry Hill, in 1986. In 1989, the firm opened a jointly built assembly plant in Lafayette, Indiana, with Isuzu. Fuji acquired Subaru of America in 1990. The firm now builds and sells more than one hundred thousand cars annually in the United States, and sells more all-wheel-drive passenger cars than all other manufacturers combined.

Suburbanization. What began in the nineteenth century as a quality-of-life movement continues into the twenty-first as the quest for the American Dream. Suburbanization has made New Jersey the most densely populated state, with well over one-third of its land developed.

Until the middle of the nineteenth century, most people lived and worked in the same neighborhood, and depended upon their immediate and extended family network to help out in their businesses. They resided as close as possible to the city center. The area beyond the city, what we now refer to as the "suburbs,” hosted industries that typically made poor neighbors, such as tanneries or slaughterhouses. Such land was also used for farming and grazing. As the horse and carriage gave way to advances in transportation, railroads and streetcars made it possible for successful merchants and industrialists to build stately single-family detached homes along tree-lined streets. Communities such as Merchantville (Camden County) and Montclair (Essex County) began as places to spend weekends and summers, and then evolved into year-round domiciles, far away from the congestion, noise, crime, disease, and smells of the city. City dwellers looked for cleaner air and a safer place to live. Similar issues drive home buyers today.

The first suburbs spread out from city centers, forming fingers of residential enclaves hugging newly laid transportation lines, while the balance of the countryside remained in agrarian use, or as undeveloped land. Shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, the automobile made suburbs accessible to a larger population. Since 1920, but especially after World War II, the "Garden State” has been transformed into wide swaths of suburban single-family housing tracts. To service such growth, arterial and limited-access roadways such as Route I-295, the Garden State Parkway, and the New Jersey Turnpike were built. Furthermore, suburban zoning regulations segregated residential and commercial uses, while keeping densities relatively low. This has created widespread dependence upon the automobile. Combined with increasing family (and often dual) incomes, low mortgage rates, and the affordability and availability of inexpensive new housing, the growth of the suburbs increased dramatically.

In addition to its influence on housing, the car also affected the low-density design and development of commercial and industrial building types. Traditionally, suburbanites did business in the city. However, newly acquired automobiles required vast areas of parking, often not readily available in the city. Thus, new stores and commercial services began to take new forms: the suburban strip shopping center and the shopping mall were created to provide shopping and service opportunities along with expanses of easy parking. Large retail shopping malls like the Cherry Hill Mall in Camden County (the first indoor, climate-controlled mall along the East Coast) developed.

Simultaneously, as jobs became decentralized, new industrial parks and office centers were built in suburban locations. While the suburbs initially developed along transportation corridors, the new freedom afforded by the automobile encouraged development of the land in between these original suburbs, roadways such as U.S. Route 1 (Princeton corridor), I-287 (Somerset County), and U.S. Route 130 (Camden and Burlington counties through to Middlesex County).

The most rapid rate of suburbanization immediately followed World War II. Picturesque mass-produced homes marketed the American Dream. These new suburbanites knew the hardship of the Great Depression and the sacrifices made in order to win the war. Upon returning from military service, veterans were entitled to subsidized housing loans under the GI Bill of Rights. As they married and started families, the shortage of affordable housing in cities became apparent. Few young home buyers wanted to "reward” themselves by living in attached row homes in industrialized cities such as Trenton, Camden, or Jersey City. In turn, they moved to communities built just for them like Livingston (EssexCounty), Levittown (now called Willing-boro; Burlington County), Hamilton Township (Mercer County), and Wayne (Passaic County). Newly developed low-density suburbs were growing and expanding into adjacent open space and farmland at a rate one thousand times greater than the growth in adjacent cities.

Suburbanization is often blamed for the decline of New Jersey’s cities and their older inner-ring suburbs. Mobility, subsidized financing, and the desire for something new made out-migration from the city easier and cheaper, permitting the abandonment of older urban centers in favor of new suburban communities. Major populations in urban areas such as Camden, Trenton, Perth Amboy, and Paterson moved to nearby suburban communities like Cherry Hill, Hamilton, Woodbridge, Edison, and Wayne. The cities responded with efforts to create parking lots and to "suburbanize” buildings’ distinctive architectural details. This often destroyed much of the urban historical fabric, the characteristics that made the city center a unique place.

Job loss in the cities soon followed, further eroding the urban tax base and robbing neighborhoods of economic vitality. Declining educational systems and housing stock, industrial job loss, and an antiquated infrastructure created an exodus out of the city. Droves of city dwellers relocated to the "burbs” to live in a house surrounded by open space, while enjoying better schools and local government services.

Part of both the New York and Philadelphia metropolises, New Jersey is home to some of America’s pioneer suburban communities, including Riverton (Burlington County) in the 1860s, Radburn in Fair Lawn (Bergen County) in the 1920s, and Levittown (now Willingboro, in Burlington County) in the 1950s.

What began as a quest for improved quality of life has severely impacted the statewide environment. The suburbanization of New Jersey and its increased development have resulted in higher levels of pollution, greater traffic congestion, and a continuing loss of natural resources.

Superfund Law. New Jersey, though one of the nation’s smallest states, enjoys the dubious distinction of having more Superfund hazardous waste sites (111) than any other state. California ranks second, with 95 sites. New Jersey has suffered from its proximity to former manufacturing centers in New York and Pennsylvania, which historically used New Jersey as a dumping ground for industrial wastes. New Jersey has also been home to petrochemical, chemical, and pharmaceutical manufacturing firms whose waste streams, at least prior to the enactment of modern environmental laws, contained many toxic and carcinogenic elements. During the last half of the twentieth century, New Jersey became the nation’s most densely populated state, largely because of those very industries, which attracted workers with well-paying jobs. These industries also generated unwanted byproducts—hazardous wastes and pollution— which remained even after plants closed down or moved out of state. Because of this legacy of environmental degradation, New Jersey became one of the first states to enact a comprehensive antipollution statute. In 1979, the New Jersey legislature amended the state’s Spill Compensation and Control Act (originally concerned only with oil spills) to address all discharges of hazardous substances. The federal Superfund Law was enacted one year later.

Summit. 6.05-square-mile city in Union County. During the Revolutionary War, this community on the Passaic River occupied a key spot between the British advancing from New York and Gen. George Washington’s headquarters in Morristown. The town got its name in the 1830s, when the first train traveled over the Second Watchung Mountain to what was called "the summit of the short hills.” After the Civil War, the then-township became a resort for those fleeing the heat, dirt, and dust of New York in the warmer months. Summit, incorporated as a city in the spring of 1899, boasted three large hotels, two "fresh air sanitariums,”silk mills, and the U.S. headquarters of the Ciba-Geigy Pharmaceutical Corporation. Due to its proximity to Manhattan, Summit became a popular year-round residence for many of these summer visitors.

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Today, single-family homes representing diverse architectural styles stand on tree-lined residential streets. The modern downtown features shops, banks, businesses, restaurants, an original 1938 diner, a renovated 1892 municipal building, and a movie theater. In 2000, the population of 21,131 was approximately 88 percent white, 4 percent black, and 10 percent Hispanic (Hispanics may be of any race). The median household income in 2000 was $92,964. For complete census figures, see chart, 137.

Sunfish Pond. Glaciers that covered the northern third of New Jersey and other areas to the north during the Ice Age scoured out rock basins in the mountains by erosion. Lakes formed in these basins, such as Sunfish Pond and Lake Marcia on Kittatinny Mountain and Lakes Mohonk and Minnewaska in New York. Sunfish Pond is located in Warren County about four miles from the Delaware Water Gap, at an elevation of 1,370 feet. The surface area is forty-one acres. This part of Kittatinny Mountain is in the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area. The Appalachian Trail passes along the shores of the pond.

The Superfund statute, formally known as the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA), was signed into law by President Jimmy Carter on December 11,1980. One of the principal architects of the lawwas a New Jersey congressman, and later governor, James Florio. His interest stemmed, in part, from the existence of the Lipari landfill in Mantua Township, then the nation’s highest-ranked Superfund site.

The Superfund Law addresses the most severely polluted sites throughout the nation, which are ranked according to the level at which they pose "an imminent and substantial danger to the public health, welfare or the environment because of an actual or threatened release of a hazardous substance.” While both the federal and state Superfund programs are funded primarily by a tax on polluting industries (chemical companies and, in New Jersey, the petroleum industry), additional money comes from large, complex, and lengthy lawsuits filed to recover the costs of cleaning up Superfund sites.

A typical New Jersey Superfund site consists of a landfill, manufacturing facility, or commercial establishment at which hazardous chemicals have spilled, leaked, or were dumped. Landfills are among the most common, and most costly, Superfund sites in New Jersey. The standard remedial measure used at a landfill is the installation of an impermeable clay cap that prevents rainwater from infiltrating the debris beneath it, thus stopping or reducing the escape of liquid contaminants (leachate) into surface or groundwater. Because landfills generally cover many acres, these caps can be inordinately expensive. At Combe Fill North in Mount Olive Township, Morris County, the cap alone cost $10 million. Even after installation, there are yearly maintenance costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Also, when past releases of contaminants have rendered a local potable-water source unusable, remediation must include connecting local households to a municipal water supply and filtering out dissolved contaminants. Fortunately for New Jersey, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) pays 90 percent of these cleanup costs for sites on its National Priorities List (NPL) of seriously contaminated sites.

An example of an industrial establishment remedied under the Superfund Law is the South Jersey Clothing Company and Garden State Cleaners, two adjacent sites located in Buena, Atlantic County. South Jersey Clothing manufactured military uniforms, which were treated with trichloroethylene (TCE) prior to shipment. Toxic wastes from this process were routinely discharged behind the factory. Garden State Cleaners, like all dry cleaners in the 1960s and 1970s, used TCE in its business. (Today, use of TCE by the dry cleaning industry is outlawed in New Jersey.) Discharges from this shop were concentrated beneath a steam discharge pipe. In December 1998, the EPA completed construction of a groundwater remediation system capable of treating 550 gallons per minute, one of the largest such systems in the state. At South Jersey Clothing, a soil vapor extraction system is in operation that volatilizes solvents (mainly TCE) in the soil around the plant. The cost to install these systems, and to remove soil from the Garden State site, was approximately $15 million.

The Caldwell Trucking Superfund site exemplifies the third category of contaminated facilities: a commercial enterprise whose business practices resulted in the discharge of gasoline, motor oil, and other hazardous substances. The eleven-acre site in Fairfield Township, Essex County, lies less than one mile from the Passaic River, a major source of potable water. The chief contaminant at the Caldwell site was TCE. The remedy chosen for this site by the EPA featured a procedure to stabilize and redeposit 35,000 cubic yards of contaminated soils, and to dispose of a smaller amount of heavily polluted soil. Additionally, the cleanup required that local potable-water wells be sealed, and that a local tributary of the Passaic River be treated, at a total cost of over $32 million.

New Jersey currently has 111 sites on the NPL; 16 sites have been cleaned up and deleted since 1986. New Jersey is leading the nation in the number of contaminated sites that have been completely remediated. One success story is the Chemical Control site in Elizabeth, where tens of thousands of drums of highly toxic chemicals caught fire on the tenth anniversary of Earth Day, April 21,1980, spewing toxins into the air and turning the Elizabeth River red. Chemical Control’s corporate officers were prosecuted, convicted, and jailed. The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection spent six months removing the chemical wastes and, in cooperation with the EPA and many of the parties responsible for the contamination, conducted long-term remediation of the soil and waters adjacent to the site. This cleanup was completed in 1993, with the EPA continuing to monitor its effectiveness.

Superior court. Until 1947, the New Jersey judicial system consisted of a hodgepodge of separate courts: the court of errors and appeals, supreme court, court of chancery, court of common pleas, circuit courts, and orphans court, to name the most prominent. The state’s 1947 constitution eliminated these courts, creating a streamlined judicial system composed of a supreme court, a superior court, and "other courts of limited jurisdiction.” The superior court has three main divisions: law, chancery, and appellate. The law division is subdivided into criminal and civil parts, the chancery division into family and general equity parts. The appellate division hears appeals from the other divisions of the superior court, as well as from lower courts and state agencies.

Supreme court. In its 1947 constitution, New Jersey replaced the unwieldy sixteen-member court of errors and appeals with a seven-member supreme court modeled on the U.S. Supreme Court. Under the strong leadership of Chief Justice Arthur Vanderbilt and his successors, this new judicial body has emerged as one of the nation’s leading courts.

The supreme court’s chief justice and six associate justices are appointed by the governor with the advice and consent of the senate. Prior to appointment, most justices have had careers in politics, and recent justices have been drawn primarily from the executive branch of state government. Once appointed, justices serve a term of seven years and, if reap-pointed and confirmed by the senate, remain on the bench until mandatory retirement at age seventy. Both the mode of selection and the justices’ long terms of office promote judicial independence. So, too, does the state’s tradition of bipartisan appointment, under which governors seek to maintain parity between Democrats and Republicans, even if that means appointing justices from outside the governor’s political party.

The New Jersey Supreme Court has broad discretion in choosing what cases it will hear, and it has used that discretion to target issues of statewide importance. Among its most significant rulings are those dealing with school finance. In Robinson v. Cahill (1973), the court held that the state had not met its obligation under the New Jersey constitution to provide a "thorough and efficient system of education” for all children. Over the next quarter century, the legislature’s efforts to meet this obligation and constitutional challenges to those efforts kept the issue before the court. This litigation transformed the state’s system of funding public education and indirectly prompted the adoption of a state income tax to underwrite increases.

The New Jersey Supreme Court has also sought to alleviate the racial and class segregation promoted by suburbanization. In the famous Mount Laurel cases, the court outlawed the use of restrictive zoning requirements to prevent the construction of low- or moderate-income housing in communities. This judicial intervention, like the court’s rulings on school finance, put the issue on the legislature’s agenda and led to the enactment of the Fair Housing Act of 1985.

Other prominent rulings have addressed controversies over individual rights. A few examples reveal the breadth of the court’s concerns. It has recognized the right of terminally ill patients to refuse nourishment and hydration and to disconnect life-support systems (the "right to die”). It has upheld Megan’s Law, under which residents are warned of sex offenders living in their communities. It has struck down surrogate motherhood contracts as inconsistent with state policy on adoption and parental rights. It has held that if the state provides funding for childbirth, it must also pay for medically necessary abortions. And it has upheld the discrimination claim of a gay scoutmaster against the Boy Scouts.

Surf City. 0.72-square-mile borough on Long Beach Island in Ocean County. Originally called Great Swamp, Surf City was settled as early as 1690 by whalers from Long Island and New England. All through the eighteenth century they were able to make a living hunting, from small boats, the schools of Greenland or "right whales” in the spring and fall migrations. Slain whales would be towed to the beach, cut up, and rendered into valuable oil. After a railroad bridge was built to the island in 1886 the community developed as a resort, becoming an independent borough in 1894 with the name Long Beach City. Repeated confusion, however, with the Monmouth County resort of Long Branch caused the U.S. Post Office to order a name change, and the borough became Surf City in 1899 at the same time that Long Beach was forced to become Long Beach Island. The resort expands greatly in summer and there is extensive commercial development along the main north-south boulevard, but all the side streets in the rest of the community are solidly residential.

Surf City’s 2000 year-round population was 1,442. It was 98 percent white. The median household income in 2000 was $38,190. The summer population reaches 15,000 to 20,000.

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