Library Company of Burlington. Chartered by King George II in 1758, the Library Company of Burlington is the oldest continuously operated library in New Jersey and the seventh oldest in the nation. The original charter still hangs on the building’s interior balcony. It was also the first public library in that borrowing privileges were extended to nonmembers, and the first to print a catalog (1758), which listed the original 700 books in its collection. About half were donated by John Smith, a prominent Burlington Quaker. The library first opened in the parlor of Thomas Rodman, whose home was located on High Street. Daniel Bacon, the first librarian, was paid five pounds a year. The first book borrower was William Franklin, the last royal governor of New Jersey. In 1788, the library erected its first building on land donated by Gen. Joseph Bloomfield, later a governor of New Jersey. The one-story frame building opened in 1789 and served the town for seventy-five years until 1864, when the current sandstone structure was built at 23 West Union Street.
Lichtenstein, Roy (b. Oct. 27,1923; d. Sept. 30, 1997). Painter. Roy Lichtenstein was born to middle-class parents in Manhattan, and as a sixteen-year-old, he took classes under Reginald Marsh at the Art Students League. His art education at Ohio State University (19401943) was interrupted by U.S. Army service in Europe, where he redrew cartoons for Stars and Stripes. He returned to complete his BFA in 1946 and MFA in 1949, the same year of his first one-man show in Cleveland. In 1951 he was an engineering draftsman for Republic Steel in Cleveland, and held other commercial art jobs in the industrial Midwest. His paintings and prints of the 1950s were expressive abstract versions of mundane items such as dollar bills and machine parts. In 1957 he became an assistant professor of art at the State University of New York in Oswego.
In what would become an all-important move to New Jersey in i960, Lichtenstein relocated to Highland Park. He was an assistant professor of art at Douglass College, where he taught design. He met the innovative artists Allan Kaprow, Robert Watts, and George Segal, who already were known in the New York art world, and who wholeheartedly supported his explorations into the enlarged comic book imagery that would make him famous. Look Mickey (1961) was the first of many paintings that incorporated recomposed imagery predominantly from the world of commerce. His i962 sold-out show at the Castelli Gallery introduced a new artistic point of view and Pop art sensibility to the world. His statement from a i963 interview best explains the new concept. "Pop art is industrial painting. America was hit by industrialism and capitalism harder and sooner, and its values seem more askew. I think the meaning of my work is that it is industrial, it’s what all the world will soon become.”
After resigning from Douglass College in 1963, Lichtenstein moved to New York, where he continued to produce hand-drawn cartoon paintings with bold outlines, vivid colors, and stylized forms that simulated the mechanical reproduction techniques of industrial printing processes. By i965 he reinvented abstract expressionist brushstrokes through his painstaking Benday-dot painting process.
Not shying away from his commercial art roots, he designed ceramic tableware for the Durable Dish Company. Lichtenstein represented the United States in the 1966 Venice Biennial. His works have been the subject of many exhibitions throughout the world including 1969 and 1993 retrospectives by the Guggenheim Museum. His late career works were complex fractured compositions of interiors. Lichtenstein’s contributions to public art include murals in Dusseldorf, Tel Aviv, Singapore, and New York, and posters for entertainment events and political campaigns. Along with his fellow pop artists Andy Warhol, Jim Dine, and Claes Oldenburg, he was instrumental in the renewal of interest in American representational art, after decades of abstraction. Roy Lichtenstein died in New York City.
Lifeguarding. Ocean lifeguarding in New Jersey started in i855 in Atlantic City, where police officers became "constables of the surf” by changing into bathing attire during the "bathing hours” of eleven a.m. to one p.m. Other municipalities followed suit with volunteer lifeguards who pulled people from the surf for tips. The first organized lifeguard service started in i872 in Atlantic City. Paid lifeguard crews were common by the i900s, although early crews were concentrated in popular oceanside resorts such as Ocean City, Wildwood, Cape May, Ocean Grove, and Asbury Park.
Modern ocean rescue crews are organized along New Jersey’s approximately i30 miles of coastline, working beaches from Sandy Hook to Cape May. The season for lifeguards usually begins Memorial Day weekend and extends through Labor Day—sometimes a bit beyond. New Jersey ocean lifeguards seasonally make approximately seventy thousand rescues and have compiled an excellent record of service. Often the summer season is marked with no drownings at lifeguard-protected beaches. The majority of ocean drownings occur during nonprotected hours or in nonprotected areas.
Atlantic City’s first full-time lifeguards, Dan Headley and Nick Jefferies, c. 1892.
Modern lifeguards are well equipped with rescue devices. The basic rescue apparatus is the Rescue Flotation Device (RFD). This is a cylindrical plastic can about thirty inches long, usually red, with handle grips molded into the sides. It is connected to the rescuer by a short line and shoulder sling. The victim grasps the handles and is towed to safety by the lifeguard. Often RFDs are connected to 600-foot lengths of rescue line so that victims can very quickly be pulled to shore by a second, land-based lifeguard.
Other common devices include rescue kayaks and paddleboards, both of which can handle heavy surf conditions. Many crews now use Jet Skis—powered personal watercraft with attached rescue sleds—to reach victims. These machines, which can navigate in extremely heavy surf and reach speeds of more than fifty miles per hour, are particularly effective offshore rescue devices. Other crews utilize Inflatable Rescue Boats (IRBs), small, fast, seaworthy pontoon boats with outboard motors. Modern crews also use radio communications, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and quad all-terrain vehicles to reach victims quickly, especially in remote areas.
Lake, pond, swimming pool, and water park lifeguards make use of rescue tubes, softer foam versions of the RFD. They may also employ other devices, such as toss lines and shepherd’s crooks (long poles with hooks that cradle victims).
Training requirements for lifeguards are rigorous. Most open-water lifeguards in New Jersey are certified by the United States Life-saving Association. Lake, pond, pool, and water park guards are certified by the American Red Cross. Additional certifications are usually required in first aid and CPR. Rescue water-craft operators must have New Jersey boating safety certificates.
Life-Saving Service. a national organization that served the needs of mariners in distress between i849 and i9i5, the Life-Saving Service, the precursor of the U.S. Coast Guard, developed in New Jersey. Although there is some debate as to who should be credited, William A. Newell, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, is generally thought of as the founder of the Life-Saving Service. He witnessed a tragic shipwreck just three hundred yards off the coast of Long Beach Island, and he was reminded daily of the loss of life-he lived next door to the cemetery in which the thirteen victims were buried. Newell petitioned Congress in 1848 for the establishment of a Life-Saving Service, and it was quickly approved. By the spring of 1849, under the direction of Revenue Marine Captain Douglass Ottinger, eight stations were established along the coast of New Jersey, each equipped with a surfboat, rockets, carronades, beach apparatus carts, rescue lines, and other lifesaving equipment. They operated much as volunteer rescue squads, responding when needed to stricken ships. By 1854, there were fourteen stations in New Jersey; since they were sometimes located in remote areas, a full-time keeper was appointed at $200 a year.
In 1871, Sumner I. Kimball, then head of the Revenue Marine Corps, was appointed general superintendent of the Life-Saving Service. He substantially upgraded the entire operation by staffing the stations full time and providing the men with military-style uniforms and rigorous training. Equipment was improved, and the Life-Saving Service expanded to both coasts and the Great Lakes region. New Jersey eventually had forty-two stations, from Sandy Hookto Cape May, at a typical distance of three miles apart.
Unique lifesaving devices were used to rescue shipwreck victims. The process typically began with a signal flare from the stricken ship. The rescuers would respond with horse-drawn beach apparatus carts. The Lyle gun, a large-bore, short-distance cannon, would fire a shot line to the ship. Heavier lines were then drawn taut between the ship and the shore-based rescuers. They would rapidly pull a Francis life car, an eleven-foot, sealed, double-ended boat packed with four to six victims, from the ship to shore. Its first test came quickly—in January 1850, two hundred people were rescued from the British emigrant ship Ayershire off the coast of Manasquan. In later years, the life car was replaced with a single-person breeches buoy. This was a life-ring device outfitted with canvas pants and connected with lines from ship to shore.
Surfmen wearing cork lifejackets pose with their lifecar, surfboat, and beach carts at the Long Branch Life-Saving Station, c. 1875.
By the turn of the twentieth century, the role of the service began to diminish significantly. Bigger, better constructed ships, with powerful engines and improved navigational and communication devices, made shipwrecks far less likely. The end came in 1915 with the merger of the civilian Life-Saving Service and the military Revenue Cutter Service into what became the U.S. Coast Guard. The Life-Saving Service under the direction of Kimball compiled an impressive record of 177,286 rescues between 1871 and 1914.
Lighthouses. Shipwrecks were all too common in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries along the wide sandy beaches of the Atlantic Coast of New Jersey and the shallow waters of the Delaware and Raritan Bays. To make the waters safe for mariners and to aid commerce, lighthouses were constructed on the shores and lightships were stationed in the waters surrounding New Jersey. In 1761, merchants of New York City petitioned the New York legislature to hold public lotteries to raise funds for the construction of a lighthouse on Sandy Hook at the entrance to New York Harbor. One of eleven colonial lighthouses, the Sandy Hook Lighthouse was first lighted June 11, 1764. On August 7, 1789, the ninth act of the newly formed Congress of the United States, and the first to make provision for any public works, created the Lighthouse Establishment as part of the federal government. It accepted title to and jurisdiction over the lighthouses then in existence, providing the states ceded the sites to the government. The Sandy Hook Lighthouse is the oldest operating lighthouse in the country.
The state’s second lighthouse was built at Cape May in 1823, marking the eastern entrance to Delaware Bay. Eventually toppled by erosion, it was rebuilt further inland in 1847, and again, in its present location, in 1858. A pair of octagonal towers (Twin Lights) was constructed on the Highlands of Navesink in 1828 for ships making first landfall off the New Jersey Coast on their way to New York City. A 40-foot tower built in 1834 marking Barnegat Inlet proved inadequate; when threatened by erosion in 1858, it was replaced by the 172-foot tower that exists today. The Absecon Lighthouse was first lighted on January 15,1857, as a coastal lighthouse. A number of lightship stations also existed, including Scotland, Sandy Hook, Ambrose, Five Fathom Bank, Brandy-wine Shoal, Upper Middle, and Northeast End. The last lightship in New Jersey waters was WLV189, which served on Five Fathom Bank, 1971-1972. The vessel was eventually returned to New Jersey waters on February 28, 1994, when it was sunk as part of the artificial reef program.
New Jersey was an important proving ground for lighthouse technology. In 1823, the Sandy Hook Lightship was the first U.S. lightship to be placed on an outside station, in the Atlantic Ocean off Sandy Hook. Prior to this, lightships were used only in protected waters. The first Fresnel lens (a lens designed to focus light into a narrow beam—the lower the order, the larger the lens) to be used in the United States was installed at the Twin Lights of Navesink in 1841. The 1850 Brandywine Shoal Lighthouse was the first U.S. lighthouse to be builtusing the screwpile. Each foundation leg, or piling, was tipped with a large metal auger that acted as a screw when turned down into the soft floor of Delaware Bay. The lighthouse was then constructed on the platform joining the legs. A pioneer of many subsequent lighthouses around the nation, the one at Brandywine Shoal survived the action of waves and ice floes until 1914, when a larger lighthouse made of reinforced concrete, which still serves today, replaced it. In 1883, Twin Lights became the first coastal lighthouse in the United States to use a mineral oil (kerosene) as an illuminant. In 1898, an electric arc lamp was installed in the south tower of Twin Lights, becoming the initial primary lighthouse in the country to use electricity and the only shore station to have a power plant for making its own electricity. In 1921, the first radio fog signals in the United States were placed in commission at the Ambrose Channel Lightship and at Sea Girt Lighthouse.
During the 1900s, the lighthouse service sought to automate lighthouses, reducing the need for lighthouse keepers and thus reducing operating costs. The first attempts were made circa 1910-1915 at lighthouses on Delaware Bay, with experiments using acetylene gas at the Cohansey, Egg Island, and East Point lighthouses. As electricity became available in an area, lighthouses were electrified and the keepers removed. Ironically, the last lighthouses in New Jersey to be automated were those of Delaware Bay, which were electrified in 1973-1974, and the Ambrose Light Station off Sandy Hook in 1988. Coinciding with the automation of lighthouses was the removal and replacement of lightships with automated large navigational buoys, or LNBs.
In 1939, control of U.S. lighthouses was turned over to the Coast Guard. During World War II, many lighthouses were dimmed so as not to aid enemy U-boats operating off the coast. Improvement in navigational technology during that war diminished the need for many of the lighthouses after the war. With automation came a decline in the condition of lighthouse structures. During the twentieth century, many of the lighthouses in New Jersey were lost to various fates, including fire (Cohansey, 1933; Egg Island, 1950), demolition by the government (Finns Point Front Range, 1939; Cross Ledge, circa 1962), or were left to deteriorate (East Point near Heislerville; Finns Point Rear Range near Pennsville). Increased interest in lighthouses and maritime history beginning in the 1970s has resulted in efforts by various individuals and groups to save or rehabilitate lighthouses. There are twelve lighthouses in New Jersey that still exist on land. One New Jersey lighthouse, formerly the Sandy Hook North Beacon, was moved to Jeffrey’s Hook on the Hudson River, where it became famous as the subject of a children’s book by Hildegarde H. Swift, The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge.
Light rail. New Jersey’s first street railway began operation on March 5, 1859. Horsecar lines spread in populated areas of the north and in Camden in the south.The Newark and Bloomfield Street Railway experimented with electric power on June 2,1883; in 1886 legislation was enacted requiring street-railway companies to electrify. In 1890 a new company, operating in Passaic, Garfield, and Clifton, successfully ran electric cars.
Traction combines developed until Thomas N. McCarter merged street railways with his electric and gas Public Service Corporation, resulting in 378 miles of electric lines. Having been introduced in 1917, buses replaced streetcars on all but one line (the Newark City Subway) by 1952. In 1980, the state formed New Jersey Transit, taking over commuter rail and most bus operations. Redevelopers of the major cities again looked to streetcars, now called light rail. In 2000, for the first time in sixty-five years, the Hudson-Bergen light-rail line opened, to be followed by extension of the Newark City Subway, the South Jersey Light Rail (diesel light rail), and the Union County line.
Limestone sinks. The Kittatinny Valley of northwest New Jersey contains natural depressions known as sinks, sinkholes, or do-lines, which form when acidic groundwater dissolves the underlying carbonate bedrock and forms cavities into which the overlying soil eventually subsides or collapses. Sinkholes occur in "karst” landscapes, which are areas underlain by dolomite, limestone, marble, or gypsum, characterized by pinnacle and trough topography, blind valleys, caves, sinkholes, and a unique hydrologic system typified by sinking streams and springs. Many of the sinks contain ponds, particularly north of the Wisconsinan terminal moraine, within small valleys defined by exposed and buried ridges of bedrock draped by shallow glacial till. Water levels in sinkhole ponds fluctuate seasonally, creating a special type of vernal pond that supports unusual flora and fauna.
