Meadowlands
Hardcover
15.75 x 12.75 inches
108 pages
50 four-color photographs
The Meadowlands is a place to pass through and forget on the way to someplace else. Not unlike a neglected child, The Meadowlands has grown up without guidance, constantly unsure of what the future holds. It is this loneliness and solitude that continues to bring me back year after year. These disparate images tell different stories; like songs on an album that build upon each other. Each one may be about something specific. More often than not, the specifics are less important than the feelings conveyed.way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Essay by Robert Sullivan
The Meadowlands is that giant swath of swamp and space that separates New Jersey from New York City, or, put another way, from New York City and the rest of the United States of America. The Meadowlands is a landscape that is, no matter where you are within it, more panorama than single place; it is widescreen, 3-D, and IMAX all rolled into one, regardless of whether you are seeing it in its clear blue sky version or in its smokestack-fueled gray. Exactly how big the Meadowlands is depends on what you consider to be the Meadowlands. Are you thinking about the parts that look like swamp, with reeds and herons and mud? Are you talking about the areas that the state government deems Meadowlands, which is that area that is part swamp and part what might be called developable landscape, whatever developable means? Are you talking about the places that are Meadowlands-esque, for lack of a more precise phrase: those business that are beat up, factories that are deteriorating, plants that produce things that are one giant note, such as electricity, or gravel, or smoke and fumes from burnt trash? Are you talking about the places that seem not quite like any place, places that, if you get lost and run into them accidentally, somehow seem a little lost themselves: parking lots without cars, bus stops without bus passengers, a castle filled with knights and maidens that are all out of time and—officially, anyway—without a king? Are you thinking of those roads that seem a lot like the opposite of the New Jersey Turnpike, the Turnpike being the Meadowlands’ Amazon River: little beat-up, one-lane, barely paved and sometimes even dirt paths, as opposed to the sixteen or so lanes of superhighway that separate the airport in Newark from the giant Swedish home furnishings outlet in Elizabeth? Those roads that wind up taking you to an old broken-down pier, a place, if you are driving or even walking, where you are forced to look down off of a crumbling shoreline and see the cold, fast-flowing Hackensack River as it wells up, just before melding with the Passaic River in Newark Bay and then becoming New York Harbor and then the Atlantic Ocean?
One of the reasons that I think the Meadowlands is forever fruitful as an area of study and exploration, or as a place where artists can go and devise art, is that I see the Meadowlands as a lot of different things, and at this moment, after walking from my typewriter to my daughter’s bedroom in the apartment we live in on the top of a little hill in Brooklyn, I see the Meadowlands as a big, almost imperceptibly curved shallow bowl that encom-passes two states, three rivers, numerous small municipalities in New Jersey, a vast interior ocean of a bay, as well as two kills, the Arthur and the Kill van Kull. (Somehow foreseeing that the Meadowlands would become an important setting for the crime family television drama The Sopranos, the Dutch, who came to the Meadowlands in the seventeenth century, referred to their streams and river channels using the word kill.) Today, I see the Meadowlands as what you get when you drain a glacial lake for thousands of years but don’t quite finish the job and then bring in a human settle-ment that likes to leave its trash in big piles in old lake beds, a kind of human community that prefers to pump its sewage into the old marshes and cut down the cedar forests and just generally muck the place up. I see it as a place where this kind of thing goes on for years, despite a large but less influential number of people who quietly ramble in or through or even just enjoy seeing the area, as it was or—semi-perversely, as in my case—as it is. In some cultures, ancestors tell of great floods, of ecological moments that were so dramatic as to be recounted in stories told over and over again over the course of generations. In my family, I was often told by my father of the time his family drove in a car from New York City to Red Bank, New Jersey and, in so doing, passed through the Meadowlands. He was young. It was a momentous event. His siblings complained loudly, as did he. He pressed his face into the back of the front seat of the car, using self-suffocation to ameliorate the wretched stench, the stink that seemed to stick to his clothes. It was a horrific ride, as my father recalled it—fires, fumes, the stuck-in-your-nostrils odor of the pig farms that filled Secaucus, that made Secaucus for many years a word that worked as a joke if you said it, which means that geology and human settlement preferences matter in humor, even if it doesn’t seem like it. This is an interesting thing about the relationship between humor and human settlement patterns, as well as land use. Because of the glacial lake, in other words, because of it draining, because of the resulting swampy and less-liked land, because pig farmers were exiled out of the city proper to the swampy outer edges (the pigs were exiled even further when we invented refrigerated trains and trucks to carry them in from even farther away), because of Secaucus’ relative isolation as an island in a giant swamp even up until today—because of all this, Johnny Carson, on the old Tonight Show, would have people in hysterics with that one word: See-caucus! “That smell!” my father would say. “That horrible smell.” This must have been in the 1940s. As trash built up, as more hills of garbage were legally and illegally set on fire, as new things that shouldn’t ever be thrown away were invented and thrown away in the fifties and sixties and seventies, the smell got worse, the air darker. This is what retired dump workers used to tell me when I was out in the Meadowlands and I would run into one of them. Retired dump workers sound like retired Virgils, having walked too many miles through the Inferno.
It’s not just artists, though, who are drawn to the Meadowlands. It’s not just birders taking advantage of it as the great still greenish flyway on the coastal route from Halifax to the summer place in Florida. It’s not just illegal dumpers or those giant tow trucks that are specifically designed to tow trucks, which disappear off the New Jersey Turnpike exits and rumble into the mists, stopping at last at giant but secret-seeming truck farms. It’s not just the people who are buying housing on tracts of swampy land that get filled permanently, even though the land is more likely filled temporarily, no matter what the developer tells you. (I remember driving down a “new” road, put in in the eighties, that was, by the end of that decade, like a beat-up dirt road to a ghost town that I once drove down in the mountains of Colorado, only not so smooth.) It’s not just ferocious aedes sollicitans, the pit bull of Mid-Atlantic mosquitoes, that is drawn to the Meadowlands, a Meadowlands feature that is eventually drawn to you. It is everyone, as far as I am concerned.
Yes, of course, you will meet people who say they have never thought about the Meadowlands or the Newark Meadows or the Hackensack Meadows or the Jersey Meadows or, as Bruce Springsteen once called them, the swamps of Jersey. But they are wrong. You can’t avoid the Meadowlands, even if you think you can, just given its location. All those who enter and all those who leave New York City are bound if not to notice it then to experience it. The meadows are the gateway to the giant metropolis, the moat of the megalopolis that must be crossed. From a car, you may not give the Meadow-lands a lot of thought per se, unless you are stuck in traffic, or backed up to get into the giant outdoor sports and entertainment arena that is called the Meadowlands (a place where, incidentally, there was once a high cancer incident among players). But while in the Meadowlands, you will certainly notice that you are not in your suburban town or your apartment building-filled city neighborhood. The Meadowlands is something else altogether, and your personal landscape recognizer, though perhaps inaudible to you, or on mute, notices.
If you are on a train, you will notice and most likely comment—train takers are the greatest fans and even devotees of the Meadowlands, the migratory group that is most Meadowlands-curious. If you are on a plane, you will see the Meadowlands as you come in for a landing, or just after takeoff. It’s an intense Meadowlands experience—you are sideways to the ground and looking hard to your left or right, which is disconcertingly straight down, and you are getting a blinkered but bird’s-eye view straight down into a marsh, where the old cut lines are otherworldly, like the canals on the surface of Mars. These cuts were made throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the idea being that if you made cuts and kept the water moving, there would be no mosquitoes. Reports of mosquito clouds invading Manhattan from Jersey were as terrifying in the 1930s as Orson Wells’ broadcast of War of the Worlds, the great Martian invasion hoax. By the way, when Orson Wells made people believe that Martians had landed on earth, one of the reasons it sounded so believable was that Wells told everyone that the Martians had landed in New Jersey. Where else would Martians land?
But the other thing about the Meadowlands that draws people to it is that it represents a kind of hopefulness. The white of an egret wading through a trash dump-impounded marsh is a startling testament to something, and even if you are not wildlife biologist enough to know exactly what, your gut tells you it is on balance pretty good. The Meadowlands is full of what the nineteenth-century priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins described as “dearest freshness deep down.” “[N]ature is never spent,” he writes. There is life in the Meadowlands, a life that seems more resilient than regular life. The Meadowlands is not generally revered as a landscape the way Arches National Park or the Grand Canyon is. It doesn’t seem to be pristine enough. It is lower on the scenic totem pole. It’s not wilderness. All this thinking is a mistake, though. There is some classical wildness—a few swamps have not been completely destroyed, birds pass through, streams threaten to get cleaner, and plant species return. But there is also lots of other wildness, a hybrid kind that is, I would argue, just as important: old bridges with stalagmites of pigeon dung, abandoned living room furniture sets, the junkyards that, aside from leaching battery acid, say something to us, even if we don’t want to hear it—for me, the experience of a Meadowlands exploration is akin to looking for old breeds of roses in cemeteries or walking through Roman ruins. The big problem, a problem that is mixed up in our view of the Meadowlands, is that there is a scenic totem pole. The ranking of natural wonders is what got us into trouble to begin with. We didn’t pollute our vacation lakes, but we dumped fifty-gallon drums into the Meadowlands in Kearny, New Jersey, on a fairly regular basis.
Ecologically speaking, the Meadowlands is the hydrological equivalent of a digestive system: the cleansing intestines, the decontaminating kidneys that purify the water of the Passaic and Hackensack River valleys. Indeed, the Meadowlands can still purify the water when you give it a chance. If you put in a giant new development—amusement park, mega mall, luxury housing, take your pick—you won’t be giving it a chance. The reason you feel good in your gut about seeing an egret in a marsh impounded by railroad tracks, even if you are a little horrified, is that it’s hopeful somehow. You’re not exactly certain what it means for the fate of the egret or for you but in your gut you figure it can’t be all bad, and it’s good to feel hope in the guts.
Joshua Lutz has spent eight years with a camera in the Meadowlands, driving and tromping through all of the above, and he has emerged with a book’s worth of photos that in the space of pages manage to conjure the widescreen Meadowlands world. If you are a devotee of the Meadowlands, you will be excited by Lutz’s photos in ways big and small. The wind in the mosquito dipper’s hair, for instance, speaks to the feeling the Meadowlands gives a visitor on a sunny spring day—a feeling that says, Yellowstone Valley in Montana! The red feather on the arrow of the bow hunter reminds you, if you are me, of death—the Meadowlands is a morbid place, no matter how sunny things get. The portrait of the cinder block outlet store, stuck as it is on the side of a Meadowlands cliff, is a photograph of the quiet details of emptiness as they meet the cacophony of what you might call Nature: the empty architecture grinding into the geological vitality of the place. In the battle between traffic bollard and sapling, the sapling wins, every time, even if it takes a while.
One of my favorites is the picture of the bus stop in East Rutherford. The shelter is bus rider-less, and there is no bus anywhere to be seen. Behind it, a grove of saplings, the first step in the succession of forest growth that is succeeding in the Meadowlands as I type. The trees sprout from what builders call fill. Fill is the crumbled remains of old buildings. Fill is a place that was knocked down and thrown somewhere else as rubble. If you think that human places are depositories of human emotion, pools of human presence past, where invisible remnants of crowds somehow remain, then fill can have a slightly spiritual content: whole New York City neighborhoods have been thrown as fill into the Meadowlands. Fill is everywhere there; an entire layer of the Meadowlands, I would argue, is pretty much fill. Behind this bus stop, in the mundane passing of commuters—motel workers, maintenance people, people working at factories and outlet stores in the Meadowlands—are the buried dreams they are themselves building up, the old dreams reeking from the ground, if you listen, as if they had radioactive half-lives. And then behind that, there is swamp, the miry clay from which we all struggle to lift ourselves. The scene might make a good set for Waiting for Godot, with all the comedy that applies and all of Beckett’s mournful and compassionate humanity. The Meadowlands, by the way, is no joke. If I were to caption this photo, I would go to Gaugin: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?
Lutz captures as well the broad vistas that speak to the infinity of the place. See the red rock that makes the New Jersey Turnpike Extension—as it crosses over the reed-flanked water on the edge of the Hackensack River—look like something the earth made, and the hill like something manufac-tured by man. See the way the gray-white water of the Kingsland Marsh matches the gray-white wash of the sky. The sky seems more affected by what it hovers over when you are in the Meadowlands, though really the sky is of course no more or less affected than it is when it covers other lands. It’s just that sometimes we feel bad about the sky when it’s over the Meadowlands. Sometimes we project. And then there is the Martian glow of an island planted with semi-indigenous plants at the entrance to the parking lot of the Days Inn motel. Red lights meant to warn helicopters and low-flying planes light up the skyline, a safety feature that makes the view feel dangerous somehow, even though it shouldn’t.
Most photographers, when they come to the Meadowlands, stick to the sky and the long landscapes, but Lutz has captured the inhabitants as well, the people he has, in a sense, discovered. When I use the word discovered, I don’t mean it in the way it is used to talk about Columbus and America. I mean discovered, as in come upon. In fact, another opposite applies in this case: in the Meadowlands you don’t really discover anyone. You recognize that there are people you aren’t noticing. The impetus is on you; the Meadowlands opens your eyes, and traveling there is good practice for your everyday traveling experiences, for times when you might be missing some people, and vice versa. The Meadowlands trains the eyes in the simple but complicated act of discovery.
Several of Lutz’s photos are taken in and around the so-called Meadowlands Sports Complex—the complex being made up of the Meadowlands Race-track, Giants Stadium, something that changes its name depending on corporate sponsorship and is currently called the IZOD CENTER (in that crazy all-capital-letter way), and then the parking lots that host circuses and carnivals and flea markets and so on. The people who gather in these places are like a metaphor for all of the wilderness that is America: we think we know our place—from the TV? from magazines?—but we don’t at all really, and so much is happening to so many people that is out of view, shut off from everyone not doing it, whatever it is. In this case, Lutz catches a Live Earth rally, though from a distance it could be an Iron Maiden concert or a gathering of Christian men or a gathering of Bruce Springsteen fans, singing along to “Rosalita” with the Boss himself: “And my tires were slashed and I almost crashed, but the Lord had mercy / And my machine, she’s a dud, out stuck in the mud somewhere in the swamps of Jersey.” Medieval Times is a lost place that recreates medieval jousting tournaments, for customers who pay to eat and drink as mostly men do battle on horses. People can take buses from Times Square (or they could when I first heard about it, back in 1988) or people can drive to see the jousts—there is ample joust parking. Lutz has captured two medievalists, in the lost moments of boredom between simulated death matches, an SUV framing a prince’s crown.
Things have changed since I first explored the Meadowlands, about twenty-five years ago. A lot of the secrets are still there—the old radio stations, for instance, like the WMCA transmitter that Lutz has captured frozen in time and place. The thing about getting old and knowing the Meadowlands is that things that you first met as non-ruins are now ruins, or ruining up, and a few of the ruins are completely gone. Rome wasn’t built in a day but America does a good job of destroying its own history, the regal parts and the Meadowlands-y kind, a lot quicker than that, sometimes in hours, as a lot of Meadowlands wreckage attests.
Of course, things have always been changing there. Everyone always has an idea that they will change the place, that they will be the first to make it habitable, the first to make it a pleasure park, the first to defeat the relentless sink of the dreck, which, until the fifties and engineering adjustments that helped build the New Jersey Turnpike, consumed whole projects more regularly. One of my favorite Meadowlands projects of the past—and it still seems viable to me, maybe in a slightly permutated form—was the idea launched in the early nineteenth century by a guy named Robert Swartwout to make the place a giant dairy farm, supplying the milk needs of the metropolis. He never got the support he needed on the project, and it eventually faded away, like him. When I first went out there, the idea of recreating in the vicinity was frowned upon. Even the occasional muskrat trapper you would run into would look at you as if you were a little off, which, in my case, I couldn’t argue with. Today, there are canoe rental places. Back then, I caused a commotion while canoe-buying when I dropped what I was up to. “Canoe in the Meadowlands!”
I still recognize the Meadowlands, though, no problem. When I rise up on a bridge, when I climb an old hill and look out on the Meadowlands, I know it the way I know an old friend, or perhaps more appropriately, the way I recognize a face on the street who has been through some hard times but is still there, life still twinkling in his eyes. In fact, I think of the Meadowlands as a person more than a place. I do not think of it as anything with arms or legs, necessarily. I think of it as a being of sorts, and, as hysterical as it seems, I like to think of it as a being that can see me, not to mention everybody else—especially at night, when I am in a car on the Pulaski Skyway and the big sky darkness up over the confluence of the Passaic and the Hackensack has me surrounded. I have a feeling that the Meadowlands is cognizant of the increase in airline flights over it lately. I suspect, too, that it has watched as backups on the New Jersey Turnpike lessened due to electronic toll-taking technology, and then increased again—I like to believe that it watches from the reeds next to the toll-booths, where, years and years ago, I crept up quietly on the traffic in my canoe. I have seen the haze over the Meadowlands in the morning, the cover of gray mist, and thought that the Meadowlands was saying relax, stay calm, this big mess is going to work itself out somehow, just wait, and these days I can tell that the Meadowlands knows there is a lot of new development happening in and on it. For instance, I think it knows that Donald Trump is now looking to do battle with it. I think it is ready.
I went over to the Meadowlands two summers ago with my son, who was not around when I first met my wife and I took her out to see the Meadow-lands—Meadowlands dating. My son and I met a guy named Leo and went with him to a marsh. I was reminded of Leo upon seeing Lutz’s photo of a bearded man in a turban, meditating in the grass alongside the gas pumps: it is, to me, a lush and reviving spiritual retreat within the confines of our spirit-straining concrete life. Leo doesn’t look anything like the guy in the turban; he usually wears a baseball cap and khakis, and he has short white hair. But Leo is the kind of person you tend to meet in the Meadowlands, which is a person you might not ever imagine meeting, someone who is like no one, and, in this case, is a former machinist and World War II veteran who must be close to ninety now.
My son and I drove out on a hot day. Leo wanted to take me and my son to see some buried treasure. Or where he thought there might be some buried treasure. It was not the first time that I had gone with Leo to look for treasure; he has an idea that some pirates stashed some under an old plank road, and another great thing about the Meadowlands is that very well could have happened. He also wanted to show me a wall that he thought should be preserved, due to its significance in a battle that George Washington’s troops slogged through. When we got to the treasure site, we did not find the treasure. Basically, Leo took me to the spot where he hopes to dig one day. He wanted my help in financing an expedition, and, well, I’m not very good on the financing side of things, though Leo already knew that. As opposed to the treasure, the wall was actually visible and in this way more impressive, and when I got home I called a few people to see if it could be preserved, or at least not be knocked down. (I think it’s still there.) I was happy to see that my son, who was just thirteen, was OK about not finding treasure, a secret of life. But like me, he was never sure exactly what he was supposed to be doing. Leo is on a mission that I don’t always quite understand.
Towards the end of the day, Leo directed us to an old cemetery near his home in the Meadowlands. We went down to the circle of war veterans’ graves, and Leo asked my son to follow him, which he did. They walked a few paces toward the center. Then Leo shook his hand. It suddenly occurred to me that it was Memorial Day. Leo motioned me over. “When I was a kid, a veteran shook my hand right here, and he was a Civil War veteran,” Leo said. “And he told me that when he was a kid, a veteran shook his hand and that veteran had fought in the Revolutionary War. So now I’m shaking his hand.” My son and I both just stood there. After a while, my son thanked Leo. Then we drove him home and got caught in horrible traffic on the Turnpike, stuck in the Meadowlands.
