The Jersey City news. (Jersey City [N.J.]) 1889-1906, 1900-01-20
GOOD ROADS OPPORTUNITIES.
An Expert Shows What Hudson County
Might Do With the Aid Of the
State Appropriation.

"The News prints below, with it's most
cordial endorsement, the views of a gem
tleman who has made an expert study of
the subject upon the possibilities of good
road making, with State aid, in Hudson
County,
The progress of the age is well illus
trated in the improved conditions of the
public highways Of New Jersey and in
the State laws enacted and amended in
aid of the great evolution now in pro-
gress. The old system of working town.
ship roads by the labor of incompetent
men and boys employed to work out their
taxes by annually scraping from the gut
ters to the centre of the road the light
soil deposited by the rains of the previous
year has been superseded by a wiser sys-
tenn
This new system is providing for the
farmers and industrial classes convenient
communication with all sections of the
counties and inviting the pleasure seekers
to long and lovely rides in the rural dis
tricts. The topography of Hudson County
is not so well adapted to the construction
of county highways as other counties of
the State, but there is no good reason for
such an utter and deplorable lack of these
improvements as we now endure.
The people of our county and our Board
of Chosen F'reeholders have certainly BEEN
oblivious to the great advantages to be Sc
cured by more and better roads to con-
meet adjoining counties with the business
centre of Hudson County.
The new Boulevard serves good pur-
pose for connections north and south, but
the lack of suitable connections with the
western boundary of our county has iso-
State lying towards the west. Until the
sale few years ago of the Newark
turnpike to the county, Jersey City had
absolutely no free communication with
the rich agricultural region beyond the
western boundary of Hudson county
Every farmer in that section who desired
to market his produce and spend the
money so acquired was debarred access
to Jersey City except through the me-
dunn of railroad transportation or ex-
tortionate toll roads
Jersey City is probably the solitary ex-
ception among the seaboard cities of the
United States, all of which in other To-
calities enjoy the benefits of a traffic
with the interior population adjacent to
them. This self-imposed embargo has
given to Newark her most profitable re-
tail trade which logically belonged to US.
If any one interested in this subject will
spend some Saturday in the streets of
Newark, he will learn the truth of this
statement by reading ON the hundreds OF
| truck wagons the names of Kearny,
Kingsland, Rutherford, sBelleville, Frank
lin, Nutley, Passaic, Little Falls, We
roma Caldwell, Cedar Grove, Preakness
and Pompton, from which places the
farmers have been corralled by Newark
strategy, and are selling cheaply the
fresh products of their farms while their
wives and daughters are spending the
proceeds in the retail stores near at
hand Jersey City, at the same time, is
spending its hard gotten earnings in buy
itc for i1xy
| supplies, some of which have come from
Long Island. and the rest have passed
through our city by railroad and ferry
without stopping here.
This anomalous condition is largely due
to the system of county roads leading to-
ward Newark, and the absence of them
toward Jersey City.
| If thirty years ago, there had been con-
structed one good macadanlized road from
Jersey City to Belleville we would now be
enjoying a large amount of traffic with
the western part of Hudson and Bergen
counties, the southern portion of Passaic
and the northern portion of Essex county,
| all of which has been diverted to Newark
by our neglect to provide a convenient
froadway for connecting with those locali-
ties.
Even now it is not too late to recover
some of the benefits which we have lost
by our stupidity. Newark has been wide
awake while we have BEEN alternating
Let us briefly study her methods. In
1868 the Legislature passed a special law
/. applicable only <to Essex county, because
| the other counties of the State were roo
conservative to accept its provisions by
which a Board of Road Commissioners
was appointed, with power, to lay out and
construct a system of county roads.
Llewellyn S. Haskell, who projected and
laid out Llewellyn Park on the Orange
Mountain, was the moving spirit of the
enterprise and the most influential MEM
Der Of the Board These Commissioners
constructed and laid out seven county
roads radiating from the city of Newark
| in every direction through the county to
! the exterior boundary lines. These roads
were all graded and macadamized and
were from eighty TO one hundred feet in