Insley, Albert Babb (b. Apr. i, 1842; d. 1937). Painter. Albert Insley was born in Orange. After practicing photography, architectural drawing, and becoming an accomplished player of the cello, organ, piano, and viola, Insley found himself as a painter. An artist of the Hudson River school, the self-taught Insley was admittedly influenced by two American painters—Jasper F. Cropsey and George Inness.
Through the 1860s and early 1870s, he worked his landscapes in the American Barbizon style. In the early part of the twentieth century, his paintings reflect impressionistic landscapes and marine scenes of northern New Jersey, the Hudson River, as well as scenes of New York Harbor, the Palisades, and Brooklyn.
Institute for Advanced Study. The Institute for Advanced Study’s primary purpose is the support and facilitation of advanced learning in a wide range of fields through research and scholarship. The institute has no formal routine, and is free of all teaching and degree-granting obligations. Founded in 1930, it is home to a small number of permanent faculty and welcomes more than 150 visiting members each year. The visiting faculty members come from across the United States, and one-third come from Europe and Asia. Originally, the institute supported only the fields of pure mathematics and mathematical physics, but now other disciplines within natural science, historical studies, and social sciences are also studied.
Newark department store mogul Louis Bamberger and his sister Caroline Bamberger Fuld endowed the institute, and both the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation made important early contributions. The institute provides housing for visiting fellows, who spend up to one year pursuing their intellectual interests. The environment also encourages interaction among the scholars from a variety of disciplines. All the work is of a theoretical bent; the institute has no significant laboratory facilities. Noted educator Abraham Flexner was its first director, serving from its inception in 1930 until 1939. J. Robert Oppenheimer filled the position from 1947 to 1966.
Fuld Hall, Institute for Advanced Study, c. 1949.
Among the many noted mathematicians and physicists who have served on the permanent faculty are Niels Bohr, Freeman Dyson, Kurt Godel, John von Neumann, and Oswald Veblen. Other faculty members include cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz and diplomat and Soviet specialist George Kennan. The institute faculty has hosted more than a dozen Nobel laureates and many Wolf, MacArthur, and Fields Medal winners. Most of the faculty are members of the National Academy of Sciences or the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Though it is administratively distinct from Princeton University, there have been close ties between the two institutions since the institute’s founding. The institute’s first home was within the university’s Fine Hall, where Albert Einstein, perhaps the most famous faculty member to serve at the institute, worked until the construction of Fuld Hall in 1939. The institute now occupies several buildings on a largely wooded square-mile tract a short distance from Princeton’s Graduate College. Institute faculty members have library privileges at the university, and in 1948 the institute donated its Gest Oriental Library, one of the world’s largest collections of rare Chinese books and manuscripts, to the university. More recently, the university has financially supported efforts to protect the institute’s large tract of woods from development. The Institute Woods are crisscrossed with trails that are open to the public, and are widely known for their bird-watching opportunities, with nearly two hundred species observed during spring migration.
Institute of Jazz Studies. In 1952 jazz scholar Marshall Stearns founded the Institute of Jazz Studies in his Greenwich Village apartment. Before he died in 1966, he designated Rutgers University to be the permanent home of the collection. Since then, Stearns’s collection has grown into what is believed to be the largest jazz archive and public-access jazz research facility in the world. The institute boasts a collection of more than one hundred thousand sound recordings, from piano rolls and cylinders to compact and laser discs; it owns recordings in every format and everything from the Victrola to the most modern technology to play them on. Jazz artifacts at the institute include a manuscript by Louis Armstrong, which became part of his biography, plus saxophones of the great horn players Lester Young and Ben Webster. Also included are Miles Davis’s green trumpet and a fake gardenia that Billie Holiday wore in her hair, as well as research files on individual performers and related topics, and more than thirty thousand historic photos. In addition, the institute is the home of the personal collection of the great jazz composer and arranger Mary Lou Williams.
Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences. The Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences (IMCS) at Rutgers University, established in 1989, provides education, research, and service in estuarine, coastal, and ocean environments. IMCS is dedicated to developing, communicating, and understanding change and sustainability in marine and coastal ecosystems, and to shaping future directions for the use and protection of vital marine and coastal resources. IMCS offers an undergraduate major in marine sciences, a graduate program in oceanography, and a pre-collegiate program to enrich science education in New Jersey classrooms. In addition to the major center in New Brunswick, facilities in Tuckerton, Bivalve, New Lisbon, Cape Shore, Cape May, and Sandy Hook extend activities throughout the state.
Insurance industry. Since the nineteenth century, New Jersey has been the home state and Newark the home city of a great many insurance companies, including the largest in the United States, Prudential Insurance. In 1804, a group of stockholders met in a Newark tavern and organized the state’s first insurance company, the Newark Banking and Insurance Company. Elisha Boudi not was the company’s first president. The firm survived into the late twentieth century as the National Newark and Essex Banking Company.
Fire was a great risk in towns built of and heated with wood, and most of the early insurance companies in New Jersey (and the rest of the United States) provided fire insurance. New Jersey’s first fire insurance company was the Newark Mutual Assistance Fire Assurance Company, founded in 1810 with Joseph C. Hornblower as secretary. Hornblower, an attorney, operated the company out of his law office. The New Brunswick Fire Insurance Company and the Camden Fire Insurance Company were founded in 1826, followed by the Camden Fire Insurance Association in 1841, the American Mutual Insurance Company of Newark in 1846, and the Merchants and Manufacturing Fire Insurance Company of Newark in 1849. The Newark Firemen’s Insurance Company, founded in 1855, was one of only a few New Jersey insurance companies that used a "fire plate” or shield to mark covered properties. That company grew into Firemen’s Insurance, one of the state’s largest insurance companies. One of the state’s most specialized insurance businesses was the New Jersey Plate Glass Insurance Company, founded in 1868. The firm both sold and insured plate glass.
Life insurance was rare in America before the mid-nineteenth century. As religious objections subsided and more people moved away from their extended families and social networks into the growing cities, a boom in life insurance began. New Jersey’s first life insurance company, the Mutual Benefit Life Insurance Company (MBL), was founded in Newark in 1845. Robert Livingston Patterson, a New York merchant, traveled to England to study that country’s life insurance companies. He attempted to start a life insurance company in New York, but was halted by competitors and instead opened his firm in Newark. The company prospered and grew for well over a century. It was the eighteenth-largest insurance company in the United States when it collapsed in 1991 after a set of real estate investments went sour. MBL was placed under state supervision until its assets and policies were assumed by a subsidiary of SunAmerica late in 1998.
John Fairfield Dryden founded the Prudential Insurance Company of America in the basement of a Newark bank in 1873. The original name was the Widows’ and Orphans’ Friendly Society, but the company adopted its current name in 1877. Dryden studied the Prudential Assurance Company in England, which specialized in selling inexpensive policies to working-class people, and adopted the same concept for his American company. Until 1886, Prudential sold only what it called "industrial insurance.” Premiums were as little as three cents a week, and were collected personally by company agents. The company’s first death claim came to just ten dollars. Prudential grew quickly, expanding into New York and Philadelphia in 1879 and selling its millionth policy in 1885. By the 1960s, counting customers enrolled in group plans, it covered one in five Americans. In 1966, Prudential surpassed Metropolitan Life to become the largest insurance company in the United States.
A large number of fraternal organizations offer life or other forms of insurance to their members. Many of them were founded between 1880 and 1910 and originally were set up by members of particular ethnic groups.
The first hospital and medical insurance company in the state was Associated Hospitals of Essex County, incorporated in 1932. It is now known as Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey, the not-for-profit organization that is now the state’s largest health insurer.
Mandatory auto insurance was discussed by the New Jersey legislature as early as the 1920s. Controversies over New Jersey’s auto insurance rates, which are the highest in the nation, have preoccupied voters in recent years. The state’s high density of vehicles, large numbers of uninsured drivers, costs of no-fault insurance (passed into law in 1972), and high rates of automobile theft and insurance fraud, have all been cited as contributing factors to the high rates of motor-vehicle insurance in the state.
Until the 1950s, most insurance companies sold only one kind of insurance. New laws permitted some companies to deal in other lines of insurance, and "multiple-line” companies came to dominate the industry. Many companies, including some of New Jersey’s oldest insurers, disappeared during a trend of mergers and acquisitions later in the twentieth century. Five insurance companies incorporated in New Jersey are among the state’s top employers: Prudential, Chubb (founded in 1882), Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey, New Jersey Manufacturers Insurance Company (founded in 1913), and Selective Insurance Group (founded in 1926).
The New Jersey Department of Banking and Insurance (DOBI), founded in 1891, regulates insurance in the state. Before 1891, the New Jersey secretary of state served as an ex-officio insurance commissioner under an 1852 law. Regulation of insurance companies tightened after 1900. The legislature passed a Code of General Insurance Laws in 1902, and passed more laws after a series of hearings investigating abuses in the life insurance industry in 1906. In 1964, the department made New Jersey the first state in the Union to eliminate mention of race, color, or creed in application forms used by insurance companies in the state.
In 1970, the DOBI was split into separate banking and insurance components, but the two were combined again on July 1, 1996. The reorganization was touted as both a cost-saving move and an acknowledgment of the growing convergence of banking and insurance activities. At its reorganization, the department’s 547 employees were responsible for regulating 1,128 insurance companies with a premium income of $21.2 billion, and 76,800 insurance licensees. The governor appoints the department’s commissioner, who must be confirmed by the state senate. Banking and insurance each have their own division in the department, each of which is headed by a division director. The DOBI also regulates the real estate industry. Responsibilities of the Division of Insurance include licensing of insurers, reviewing and approving insurance forms and rates, monitoring the financial solvency of insurance companies, protecting consumers from unlawful practices, and rehabilitating or liquidating insolvent insurers.
Interlaken. 0.38-square-mile borough in Monmouth County on a peninsula surrounded by the Ironwell and Romaine’s Creek branches of the Deal Lake. Once part of a 500-acre tract purchased by Gavin Drummond in 1687 from the twenty-four East Jersey proprietors, Inter-laken was formed from 364 acres later purchased by Dr. Francis and Fannie Weld in 1888, who are credited with naming the tract "Interlaken” after the community in Switzerland. After initial attempts to raise cattle, Weld joined with a group of three partners forming the In-terlaken Land Development Company to begin the residential development of the tract. In 1905, large cement gates were erected to mark the eastern entrance to the community. A train station operated from 1895 to 1912 at the eastern end of Grasmere Avenue. In 1910 an air meet was held in the open field on the western end of the tract, featuring famous flyers of the day with Wilbur Wright in attendance. In 1922 the community seceded from the Township of Ocean, taking the borough form of government. The community is strictly single-family residential homes with businesses of any kind restricted by borough ordinance. In 2000, the population of 900 was 99 percent white. The median household income in 2000 was $82,842. For complete census figures, see chart, 133.
International Union of Electrical Workers. Chartered in November 1949, the International Union of Electrical Workers (IUE) dislodged the leftist United Electrical Workers (UE) as the dominant electrical industrial union in New Jersey. After a period of sustained growth through the early 1960s, national membership in the IUE has declined from 350,000 to 130,000—owing to the global economy and outsourcing of production. In 1965 the IUE consolidated New York and New Jersey into IUE District Three, headquartered in East Rutherford. New Jersey’s IUE membership currently stands at twenty thousand.
IUE roots in the Garden State are firm. Founding IUE president James B. Carey was born in Glassboro. The union established labor education programs and funded a labor library at Rutgers University during the 1960s and 1970s. New Jersey’s electrical workers held rank in the 156-day Westinghouse strike (1955-1956) and the GE national strikes of i960 and 1969. In 1959 IUE members occupied the GE plant in Bloomfield to protest the closing of the plant. The IUE has been a force in state politics. It has succeeded in electing members to the New Jersey state assembly and to prominent positions within the New Jersey State Industrial Union Council.
Public Service Corporation railway trolleys at Broad and Market streets, Newark, 1914.
Interurban railways. Although New Jersey was never the heartland of the electric intercity railway, it briefly became a popular form of transport. Near the close of the nineteenth century, Americans began to use electric-powered intercity railways (in reality, rural trolleys) as a transition between the horse and buggy and the automobile and bus. These upstart companies frequently installed track and overhead wire along a public road that connected several communities and perhaps served a cemetery, amusement park, or campground. In the mid-i890s one of these pioneer roads opened between Bridgeton and Millville in the south-central part of the state, and it later extended to Bivalve, an active oystering port. As replacement technologies made rapid, long-distance interurban railways fully practical, a transport revolution was at hand—interurban railways appeared to be the wave of the future. More ambitious projects followed in both the nation and the state; between 1900 and 1910 several important electric intercity railways appeared in New Jersey, including the Atlantic City and Shore Railroad Company, North Jersey Rapid Transit Company, and New Jersey Interurban Company.
It was the Public Service Corporation of New Jersey (PSC), however, that constructed the state’s most significant network. By the early years of the twentieth century this firm operated an array of street railways in Jersey City, Newark, and in other parts of North Jersey. Although some of these "car lines” were intercity and contained sections of private rights-of-way, they were never considered to be bona fide interurban railways, largely because of their cheap construction, inexpensive rolling stock, and overall trolley like qualities. Nevertheless, PSC arguably developed true in-terurban railways. Between i899 and i904 the company constructed the Camden and Trenton Railway, a distinctive feature of which was its nonstandard gauge of five feet, the wider gauge of the Camden city lines. When the Camden and Trenton Railway opened, it was possible for travelers to make a through trip between Camden and Jersey City with a change of cars in Trenton. Few people made such a trip, however, since it required nearly nine hours—much slower than the competing steam railways. Sensing the popularity of long distance service, PSC built a new line on mostly private rights-of-way between Trenton and the North Jersey area. On July i, 1913, what became known as the Fast Line opened, and soon connectors allowed the heavy steel passenger equipment to enter Perth Amboy and Carteret. The Fast Line failed financially, in part because of the growing popularity of the private automobile. In the 1920s and early 1930s the company reduced service, in places substituting buses, and finally abandoned the track age. A similar fate befell the other interurban railways in the Garden State; abandonments became ubiquitous. The New Jersey Interurban Company, for example, which connected Port Murray and Phillipsburg, folded in i925, nineteen years after it opened. What occurred in New Jersey happened elsewhere, with the exception of that small group of interurban railways, mostly in the Midwest and West, which established a profitable carload-freight business.
Intracoastal Waterway. often abbreviated as ICW, the Intracoastal Waterway allows boats to travel inside the barrier islands all along the East and Gulf Coasts of the United States. It is a joining of bays, sounds, rivers, estuaries, and man-made canals that provides an integrated waterway unequaled anywhere in the world.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the increase in commercial traffic on the water, as well as the heightening interest in pleasure boats, induced the state of New Jersey and finally the federal government to recognize the need for this inside waterway system between the mainland and the barrier islands. In i908 New Jersey began dredging a channel north from Cape May. By 1915 the New Jersey section of the Intracoastal Waterway reached iii miles from Cape May to the northern end of Barnegat Bay. That same year the state obtained a right-of-way for a land cut that would extend this waterway from Bay Head, at the north end of Barnegat Bay, to the Manasquan River and Manasquan Inlet. This man-made canal would be known as the Point Pleasant Canal. The state kept digging this canal until World War I forced suspension of the operation. Digging resumed after the war, and in February 1926, with appropriate ceremonies, the Manasquan River and Barnegat Bay merged; but within a few months after the opening of the canal, Manasquan Inlet had closed. Some blamed the unpredictable Atlantic Ocean; others blamed it on the canal, suggesting that the new waterway diverted so much water that there was not enough to keep the inlet open.
Finally a joint county, state, and federal program was undertaken to cut through the dunes and beach and create a 400-foot-wide inlet enclosed by stone jetties. The new inlet was completed and opened in 1931. The ICW proved its worth a few years later when, during World War II, it allowed oil barges and other commercial traffic to move inland, safe from the marauding U-boats that were hugging the New Jersey coast and the approaches to New York Harbor.
The New Jersey section of the ICW, from Manasquan to Cape May, is covered by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration charts #12324 (Sandy Hook to Little Egg Harbor) and #12316 (Little Egg Harbor to Cape May). On these charts the waterway is shown as a magenta line, with mileage markers at five-mile intervals. Aids to navigation on this New Jersey section of the Intracoastal Waterway are sequentially numbered from the Point Pleasant Canal south to Cape May. The ICW was never completed from the Manasquan River to Sandy Hook Bay. Although the Intra-coastal Waterway provides a protected thoroughfare for most boats, parts of the waterway have constraints for some due to water depth or mast heights, which are limited by fixed bridges.
