USS Akron To Utopian communities (New Jersey)

USS Akron. In 1928, contracts were signed with the Goodyear-Zeppelin Corporation for a scouting airship capable of launching and retrieving airplanes. In the i930s, the naval problem was to find enemy forces. The lighter-than-air "carrier” was an at-sea instrument of very long-range reconnaissance. Commissioned in October 1931 at Naval Air Station Lakehurst, USS Akron (ZRS-4) was then the world’s largest aircraft. The first commanding officer was Lt. Comdr. Charles E. Rosendahl. Unfortunately, the Akron logged only two strategic exercises before she foundered off Sea Girt on the night of April 3-4, 1933, in severe storm conditions. Seventy-three men were lost with her. The crash helped undermine political support for large dirigibles—the beginning of the end for the rigid airship in the United States.

Unity Concerts of New Jersey. For decades the preeminent presenting series in northern New Jersey, Unity Institute, as it was known, was established by the Unitarian Church of Montclair in i920. Its first season included performances by legendary violinist Fritz Kreisler, cellist Pablo Casals, and pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff. Top soloists, including Metropolitan Opera singers in recital, instrumentalists, chamber groups, and international orchestras performed in Montclair school auditoriums. In i982, Unity Concerts separated from the church and became an independently run, nonprofit group. In the late 1990s, with audiences siphoned off by several new presenters in the state, the Unity Series became more education-oriented and jazz friendly while continuing a more modest classical performing series.


Universal Negro Improvement Association. The largest worldwide mass movement of persons of African descent, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) was founded in 1914 in Jamaica by the Jamaican black nationalist Marcus Mosiah Garvey. He brought the UNIA to the United States in 1916. By 1920, the organization was incorporated in New York and had established its official organ, the Negro World, a weekly newspaper, and the Black Star Line, a steamship company for facilitating travel and commercial ties between Africa and its diaspora. At its peak, the UNIA had many thousands of members and sympathizers in more than fifty countries in the Americas, Europe, and Africa. Under the theme "African Redemption,” the UNIA emphasized racial pride and unity, self-reliance, and Africa’s development through the repatriation of some descendants.

Garvey’s arrest in 1922 for mail fraud helped to precipitate the UNIA’s decline. In 1925, on questionable evidence, Garvey was convicted and sentenced to a maximum five years in jail and a $1,000 fine. President Calvin Coolidge commuted his sentence in 1927, and Garvey was deported immediately to Jamaica. In 1935 he relocated to London, where he died in 1940.

The navy airship USS Akron in front of a mooring mast at Lakehurst Naval Station, Lakehurst, 1932.

The navy airship USS Akron in front of a mooring mast at Lakehurst Naval Station, Lakehurst, 1932.

New Jersey was a major center of UNIA activity, with chapters in Asbury Park, Atlantic City, Bayonne, Burlington City, Camden, Cliffwood, East Orange, Egg Harbor, Elizabeth, Glassboro, Hackensack, Jersey City, Ken-ilworth, Milmay, Montclair, Newark, Perth Amboy, Pleasantville, Rahway, Roselle, Scotch Plains, Trenton, Vauxhall, Westwood, Whites-boro, Wildwood, Woodbine, and Woodbridge.

University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. The University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ) was established by the Medical and Dental Education Act, signed into law on June 16, 1970. The legislation created the College of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (CMDNJ). Stanley S. Bergen Jr., M.D., was appointed its first president the following year. In 1981 the name of the institution was changed to the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.

Today UMDNJ consists of eight schools-New Jersey Dental School, New Jersey Medical School, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, School of Osteopathic Medicine, Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, School of Nursing, School of Public Health, and School of Health Related Professions. These schools operate around the state on campuses in Camden, Newark, New Brunswick-Piscataway, Stratford, and Scotch Plains.

UMDNJ also houses a host of centers, institutes, and other units, including University Hospital, University Behavioral Healthcare, the Cancer Institute of New Jersey, the Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine, the Center for Applied Genomics, the Child Health Institute of New Jersey, Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute, National Tuberculosis Center, University Headache Center, and Violence Institute of New Jersey. UMDNJ has major affiliation agreements with Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, Cooper Hospital-University Medical Center, and Kennedy Hospitals-University Medical Center, which act as core teaching hospitals.

In sum, UMDNJ is the largest freestanding health science university in the nation, with 19,000 alumni, 4,700 currently enrolled students, and 2,120 full- and part-time faculty.

This is a remarkable accomplishment for a state where medical education in general, and publicly supported medical education in particular, was late in starting. In 1954 voters defeated a state referendum authorizing publicly funded medical and dental education. With the failure of that measure, Seton Hall University and the Archdiocese of Newark established a College of Medicine and Dentistry, the first in the state. But the lack of public funding made it impossible for Seton Hall to maintain the program, and in 1964 the state assumed control of the college, renaming it New Jersey College of Medicine and Dentistry (NJCMD) and renaming its constituent units the New Jersey Medical School and the New Jersey Dental School.

The NJCMD administration decided to move the medical school from Jersey City to Newark. Residents in Newark’s Central Ward feared that the new campus would take away homes and businesses, and this concern contributed to the Newark riot of 1967. Following the riot, a series of meetings held between local residents, community organizations, and state officials resulted in the formulation of the Newark Agreements. The agreements outlined the state’s responsibility to provide primary health care to Newark residents and to offer significant educational and employment benefits to the local community.

For use as a clinical teaching facility for the relocated medical school, Martland Hospital, formerly Newark City Hospital, was purchased from the city and renamed University Hospital, becoming part of the Central Ward campus. The New Jersey Dental School followed the medical school in its journey from Jersey City to Newark, arriving in 1976. The school is noted for its pioneering work in bringing a dental care network, believed to be the first of its kind in the nation, to low-income individuals throughout the state. The Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences was relocated to the campus in 1970, and in 1976 a School of Allied Health Professions, later named the School of Health Related Professions, was established in Newark. The school offers certificate programs and bachelor of science degrees.

While all of this was happening in Newark, parallel events were taking place in the New Brunswick-Piscataway area, where another of the original components of UMDNJ was located—the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School (RWJMS). RWJMS originated in 1966 when it opened its doors as Rutgers Medical School, a two-year institution within Rutgers University that awarded the master of medical science degree. Students who completed two years of study at the RMS had to complete their clinical training at four-year medical schools. In 1970 Rutgers Medical School was removed from the control of Rutgers and became part of the new CMDNJ.

Rutgers Medical School became a four-year, M.D.-granting institution in 1972, and in 1986 changed its name in honor of the health care pioneer Robert Wood Johnson III. Middlesex General Hospital, which was the core teaching hospital for the medical school, followed suit, becoming Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital.

By the mid-1970s, medical education was readily available to students in north and central Jersey through NJMS and RWJMS and their affiliates, but development was slower in southern New Jersey. In 1976 the state legislature authorized the establishment of a medical school in the region—the School of Osteopathic Medicine (SOM). But it was not until seventeen years later that the SOM was brought together into a single location at a campus in Stratford.

The University of Medicine and Dentistry opened its seventh school, the School of Nursing, in 1992. The school operates in Newark and Stratford, and has joint programs with several New Jersey colleges. The School of Public Health, the eighth and newest school, was approved by the UMDNJ board of trustees in 1999.

Upper Deerfield. A 31.8-square-mile township in northern Cumberland County, set off from Deerfield Township in 1922. Locales within the township include Husted, Orchard Center, Seeley, Deerfield, Woodruff, and Seabrook. Deerfield, referred to by locals as Deerfield Street, was settled in the early eighteenth century by residents of Fairfield Township. Woodruff, once a railroad station, was named for John S. Woodruff, its first postmaster. Orchard Center, a grain storage site in the 1980s, was formerly the site of a series of warehouses used to store the products of peach and apple orchards, as well as seasonal housing for migrant agricultural laborers. The township is notable for the Seabrook Educational and Cultural Center, housed in the Upper Deerfield Municipal Building, a museum dedicated to preserving the cultural history of the region. The center recounts the history of the Seabrook Farms Company, and the internment of hundreds of Japanese Americans in western states between 1944 and 1946. Artifacts, photos, and oral histories focus on the settlement and community life of Seabrook (especially at its height in the 1940s and 1950s), its diverse ethnic groups, and important cultural institutions. Into the late twentieth century, the township remained largely rural, characterized by forests, swamps, and farmland.

The 2000 population of 7,556 was 76 percent white and 16 percent black. The median household income was $47,861.

Upper Freehold. 47.45-square-mile township in westernmost Monmouth County, organized circa 1731 from Freehold Township. The township is located only a few miles from the Delaware River at Bordentown, which made the area appealing to Pennsylvanians. It is obscure, however, to most of the rest of the county. The township remained rural and sparsely settled to the end of the twentieth century. Small villages dot agrarian areas. These villages include Imlaystown, built around Saltars Mill in the 1690s, now a National Register Historic District, and one that has changed little in more than three-quarters of a century. A second village is Walnford, the seat of the former vast estate of Philadelphian Richard Waln. The operating mill and house are now the historic center of the Monmouth County Park System’s Crosswicks Creek Park, which interprets mill life around 1900. A third village, Cream Ridge, named for the range of hills across the center of the township, developed a dairy industry in the 1870s. Other communities include Hornerstown, Ellisdale, and Arneystown, the latter on the former provincial dividing line between East and West Jersey provinces, and on the Burlington County border. Upper Freehold is near a four-county confluence also embracing Ocean and Mercer counties. A demand to develop challenges the township at the start of the twenty-first century, although active participation in farmland preservation is helping retain its rural character.

The 2000 Upper Freehold population of 4,282 was 95 percent white. The median household income was $71,250.

Upper Pittsgrove. 40-square-mile township lying along the Gloucester County border in southeast Salem County. Upper Pittsgrove was initially formed in 1846 from Pittsgrove Township. In 1893 parts were annexed to Elmer Borough and Pittsgrove Township, and the following year additional land also went to Pittsgrove. In 1913 a final boundary adjustment was made, by annexing territory back from Pittsgrove. Settlements within the township include New Freedom, Shirley, Swing’s Corners, Whig Lane, Slabtown, and Daretown. It is the location of the Old Pittsgrove Presbyterian Church, established in 1767; of Fox’s Mill, the last water-powered mill in Salem County; and the present-day meeting place of area Boy Scouts. Pole Tavern marks the location of the first regularly equipped military barracks organized for defense in New Jersey. Many of the early eighteenth-century homes are of Dutch and Swedish architectural styles.

Today the towns are largely residential, with about 21 percent of land used for farming. The 2000 population of 3,468 was 95 percent white. The median household income was $53,812. For complete census figures, see chart, 137.

Upper Saddle River. 5.29-square-mile borough in Bergen County, bordering New York State to the north. Upper Saddle River was formed from land taken from Orvil and Ho-Ho-Kus townships, and incorporated as a borough in 1894.

Upper Saddle River is named for the river that runs through the community, with various explanations for the origin of the river’s name. It was most likely named by the seventeenth-century explorers Capt. Matthew Nicoll and Richard Stillwell for Saddle Burn in Argyleshire. The first European settlers were Dutch and French Huguenots. A farming community until the turn of the twentieth century, its primary crops were apples and strawberries. The borough was also a popular vacation and summer home for wealthy New Yorkers. The population declined in the early part of the century, until a post-World War II increase.

One of the most affluent communities in the nation, Upper Saddle River is zoned for single-family residences on one-acre plots. Much of its commercial area is limited to Route 17, which runs through the borough. One of the few stores in Upper Saddle River, Elmer’s Country Store, serves as a central meeting place. The 2000 population of 7,741 was 91 percent white. The median household income was $127,635. For complete census figures, see chart, 137.

Upper Township. 65-square-mile township in Cape May County. In 1798 the upper precinct of Cape May County, formed in 1723, became Upper Township, a collection of distinct communities scattered over the inland, northern portion of the county. Descendants of whalers settled the area, and dominated business and political decisions for generations. The Leamings, Townsends, and other Quaker families were among the founders of the Society of Friends who built the Friends Meeting House in 1727. It is still used for First Day services, and is a historic site in Seaville. Shipbuilding and sawmills along the Tucka-hoe River were important industries. During the Revolutionary War bog iron was mined in Tuckahoe, and in the 1800s Marshallville had a thriving glass factory. Today, many of the oldest homes in the county are located on the stretch of Route 9 in Upper Township.

The 2000 population of 12,115 was 98 percent white. The median household income was $60,942.

Upsala College. Now defunct, this church-affiliated four-year college was located in East Orange. It was founded in 1893 under the auspices of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and named after Uppsala University in Sweden. The original campus was located in Brooklyn, New York, where sixteen students attended the first day of class on October 3, 1893. A year later the operation moved to Manhattan, where it remained until 1898, when the institute was incorporated and transferred to New Orange (present-day Kenilworth). By 1923 Upsala enrolled three hundred students on its recently acquired forty-five-acre campus in East Orange. Founded as a liberal arts college, Upsala offered more than twenty academic programs. Enrollment peaked at about two thousand during the 1960s and dwindled to 435 by the 1990s. Mounting financial debts brought on by increased operating costs and decreased endowment levels, combined with low enrollment perpetuated by competition from other local colleges and universities, contributed to Upsala’s official closure on May 31,1995.

Urbanization. Urbanization in New Jersey is a result of geography, industrialization, and changing transportation systems. These factors made New Jersey the most urban state in the nation, in the year 2000, with a population density of 1,134.5 persons per square mile. Ten years earlier, in 1990, the state had the nation’s second highest proportion of urban population with 89.4 percent, or 6,910,220 of the state’s 7,730,188 people.

New Jersey’s largest cities are small, and its smaller municipalities are many. The largest city, Newark, had only 273,546 inhabitants in 2000, after declining from a peak of 442,337 in 1930. A history of state legislative apportionment by county, rather than by township, along with permissive incorporation laws, have resulted in 566 independent municipalities. Such multiplicity stymied the annexation efforts of New Jersey’s growing urban centers and kept them geographically small. This combination of urban concentration, urban sprawl, small cities, and multiple municipalities has created a thickly settled area that stretches northward from Gloucester and Atlantic counties to the New Jersey-New York border, and eastward from the Delaware River to the shores of the Hudson River and the Atlantic Ocean.

Geography made New Jersey the shortest and easiest land route between New York City and Philadelphia, and inextricably linked the Garden State to the economies, peoples, and transportation networks of these cities. From the beginning, New Jersey became the place for whatever did not fit in either city, or whatever moved to and from each of them. Colonial towns were located on navigable waterways to facilitate commerce in farm and mining products. By the 1830s, as ferries, canals, steamboats, and railroads lessened the time and cost of travel, some towns became commuter suburbs linked by ferry and passenger trains to Philadelphia and New York City. Other towns began manufacturing goods for the growing markets of New York and Philadelphia and eventually the rest of the nation. Waterpower, steam, and railroads spurred development of new mills, factories, and transport facilities along the Passaic, Raritan, Delaware, and Hudson rivers. These resources attracted native-born and immigrant workers, transforming villages into factory towns, and towns into cities.

By the 1880s, urban and industrial concentration had spread down from Paterson on the Passaic to the Amboys on the Raritan, and outward from both Trenton and Camden on the Delaware, creating a combination of core cities and surrounding suburbs across the rivers from New York City and Philadelphia. In 1890, the "Big Six” cities of Newark, Jersey City, Paterson, Trenton, Camden, and Elizabeth had a total population of 576,715, or 39.9 percent of the state’s 1,444,933 people. Ten years later, New Jersey had an urban population of 1,329,162, or 70.6 percent of its 1,883,669 residents, and was well on its way to becoming the most urban state.

After 1900, the automobile spurred urbanization in the Garden State, even though its larger cities declined. A ring of independent municipalities kept New Jersey cities within their borders, forcing their excess population and jobs out to the surrounding towns, and creating new automobile suburbs away from the railroads. World War I military production and the radio, automobile, pharmaceutical, and chemical industries of the 1920s fueled city economies until the Depression of the 1930s. World War II defense contracts revived the older cities for a while, but their decline continued after the war as manufacturing languished and urban dwellers left for newer housing, more space, and often employment in the suburbs. The housing vacated by former residents became homes for the next migrants to northern cities—blacks from the American South, the Caribbean, and Africa and Hispanics from the Caribbean and Latin America. By the 1970s, Newark, Elizabeth, Jersey City, Paterson, Camden, Trenton, and others had fewer jobs and higher tax rates than their suburbs, continuing the exodus of upwardly mobile white residents. By 2000, the total population of the "Big Six” cities decreased to 948,698—a mere 11.2 percent of the state’s 8,414,350 residents. By the late twentieth century, computer technology and the shift from industrial manufacturing to a service and managerial economy had lessened the need for urban centers. No longer vital to the state’s economy, Camden, Paterson, and even Trenton and Newark became keepers of the poor.

Sprawl continued beyond the urban core as more cars, highways, and river crossings to New York City and Philadelphia fostered another round of suburban growth. From 1950 on, the New Jersey Turnpike, the Garden State Parkway, and other federal and state highways opened up Bergen, Passaic, Union, Morris, Middlesex, Monmouth, Ocean, Mercer, and Camden counties to new homes, shopping malls, businesses, and traffic snarls, and intensified the urban density in Essex and Hudson counties. More immigration—this time including people from Russia, Asia, and the Middle East—and the economic prosperity of the 1990s filled in the older suburbs, increased the population in the older cities of Paterson, Passaic, Elizabeth, Hoboken, and Jersey City, and also revitalized Jersey City and Elizabeth. Development spread into Somerset, Hunterdon, parts of Burlington and Gloucester, and later Warren and Sussex counties. This created a continuous sprawl of bedroom and corporate communities across New Jersey, often with no clear distinction between urban and suburban. By the twenty-first century, urbanization in New Jersey had brought about a multicentered, ethnically diverse urban region, which encompassed the whole state.

Urner, Charles A. (b. March 29,1882; d. June 22, 1938). Naturalist and amateur ornithologist. Charles Urner’s early passion was "The Medders,” the great salt marsh lying between Newark and Elizabeth, an area that was rich in birds, mammals, and estu-arine plants. A businessman by profession, Urner became the leader of a small band of active, enthusiastic bird-watchers who explored and documented bird-life in the highlands and marshes of northern New Jersey. He was a member of the American Ornithologists Union from 1920 and founded what is now called the Urner Ornithological Club in 1937. He died of a heart attack in 1938.

Utopian communities. New Jersey’s favorable climate, soil, and proximity to New York and Philadelphia have made it an ideal location for various ideology-based communities. The earliest of these were the Fourierist North American Phalanx (1843) and Raritan Bay Union (1853) in Monmouth County. Smithville, the Burlington County manufacturing town, was designed by its founder to be a model community, as was Vineland in Cumberland County, which was begun in 1861 as a business investment. In 1869 Ocean Grove in Monmouth County was established as a Methodist resort.

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By the late nineteenth century, mass immigration, the pressures of industrialization, and the importation of radical ideas from Europe brought forth new types of communities. In 1882 Eastern European Jewish immigrants, inspired by the Am Olam back-to-the-land movement and supported by private philanthropy, settled Alliance, three miles from Vineland, in Cumberland County. It was soon joined by the nearby communities of Brotmanville, Norma, Carmel, and Rosenhayn, and by Woodbine in Cape May County.

In the early twentieth century, cooperative socialists founded Fellowship Farm in Pis-cataway, Middlesex County. Across the road, anarchists flocked to the Modern School and Ferrer Colony in North Stelton. The writer Upton Sinclair’s Helicon Home Colony (19061907) in Englewood was based on feminist and cooperative ideals. Free Acres, a single-tax colony, was established in Berkeley Heights in 1910. Other experiments in the twentieth century included Radburn in Bergen County, the first planned community for the automobile age (1928), and Roosevelt in western Mon-mouth County, created during the New Deal (1936).

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