The story features the larger than life characters we have all come to know through popular entertainment: Al Capone, Arnold “The Brain” Rothstein, and Lucky Luciano — even Jersey City mayor Frank Hague gets his due. The opulent world, as seen through the creators of Boardwalk Empire, is replete with money, power, and showgirls — a time of bootlegging, rum-running, prostitution and Tommy-gun shootouts.

Jersey City historian Bob Leach has another take on the era. It’s a more humble view that hits closer to home, and it is one he will recount in his latest program, Jersey City Speakeasies. Leach replaces the extreme brutality and extravagance of Boardwalk Empire with stories of family restaurants, fraternal lodges and union halls.

For the record, Leach has not seen the show, but his sources tell him its description of Prohibition in Jersey City, and more specifically, of Hague, aren’t exactly accurate.

“I do not own a TV and have never seen [it]. But people like it and I won’t ruin a good story for anybody,” he says. “It has been widely reported that their depiction of Frank [Hague] is way off.”

The HBO series depicts Hague, played by actor Chris Mulkey, as a liquor-swilling whoremonger and brutal man. In the fourth episode, a twentysomething redhead is perched on his lap, with one hand draped around his neck and the other hand on his crotch.

“What do you tell a woman with two black eyes?” Hague asks. “Nothing. She’s already been told … twice.”

Leach says imagery like this falls into line with other pop-cultural takes on the era.

“Our sense of Prohibition has been shaped by Al Capone movies. My stories are local Jersey City tales — I tell about the ‘mom and pop’ Italian restaurants that made red wine in the cellar, like Pipi’s on Orchard Street,” Leach says. “But there are Capone-style places too, like the Sip and Summit at Journal Square [where people] entered via a phone booth from a cigar store next door.”

Leach has been telling stories about Jersey City for decades, but is just turning his attention to Prohibition now. He was born in 1937, four years after the repeal of Prohibition, and remembers his family talking about it.

“The so-called ‘dry years’ and speakeasies were often a nostalgic subject of conversation around the supper table,” he says, adding that the popularity of Boardwalk Empire has, in part, influenced his decision to start talking about the era.

“Since the premiere of a certain cable-TV show, I am getting lots of calls on the subject,” he says. “Now I will tell the old stories I heard as a boy.”

Leach says that his talk will include a “bona-fide Tommy-gun shooting.” The Tommy gun, officially known as the Thompson submachine gun, was the favored weapon of law enforcement and criminals during Prohibition. Its appeal ranged from Eliot Ness to Bonnie and Clyde.

“There were a few Tommy-gun murders in Hudson County, but not in Jersey City” he explains. “Mayor Hague would not permit it. My story will cover at least one murder — over the border in Hoboken in 1930.”

What more can the audience expect to hear?

“My stories are always described as colorful — but my stories are informative as well,” Leach says. “For example, I will explain how pharmacies legally sold whiskey. There will be a Q&A, in which I will answer the serious questions.”

The pairing between Leach and the cemetery may seem strange at first. But his relationship to the cemetery goes back to his childhood.

“When I was young and took roving walks around Jersey City, I often stopped in the graveyard to sit and relax and daydream. It was a lovely, ramshackle garden and every headstone was an imagined story,” he says. “I bought a grave plot there over 20 years ago.”

Eileen Markenstein, the president of the cemetery, is thrilled to host Leach.

“No one tells ‘old Jersey City’ stories like Mr. Leach,” she says. “He is Jersey City’s legendary storyteller.”

The audience can expect Irish songs and Guinness too. Markenstein has arranged for singer-songwriter Greg Greg to entertain following Leach’s participation in the program.

“Greg Greg is a ‘Jersey City son,’ born and raised, and has performed for free at many of our other events, including rock concerts, Earth Day events, and our ‘History Rocks’ event,” she says. “His grandparents, great grandparents, and great great grandparents are buried at the cemetery.”

Jersey City Speakeasies is not only about a good time; it’s also a fundraiser for the ongoing restoration of the historic cemetery.

“It is imperative that we hold fundraising events to continue operating and preserving the very special and historic cemetery,” Markenstein says. “We are an ancient burial ground filled with beautiful monuments, 200-year-old trees adorned with English ivy, various wild animals, and ancient wildflowers. We have an amazing labyrinth of underground crypts and tunnels just waiting to be further explored and studied.”

The cemetery, which huddles into the Palisade on Newark Avenue, is becoming an attractive venue for art, music, and culture in Jersey City. In the past two years, it has has hosted more than 20 cultural events, including art exhibitions, live music, walking tours, historical lectures, children’s activities — even Revolutionary War re-enactments.

Why this sudden interest in the cemetery, which only a few years ago lay abandoned? For Markenstein, the answer is simple.

“We are doing something amazing … and everyone wants to help,” she says. “We have welcomed the local art and music communities with a very unique place to show their art and play their music. Our historic Gatekeeper House gallery is a beautiful place to showcase our talented local artists and authors, and they in turn help us survive.”

With the recent loss of the Jersey City Museum and continued problems with the city’s entertainment ordinance, artists and musicians need venues more than ever.

“We are becoming a real cultural center for Jersey City’s thriving artist community,” Markenstein says. “We love them all for donating their time and talent to our events.”

Photo: Jonathan Fitzgerald

THE DETAILS

In commemoration of Saint Patrick’s Day, the Historic Jersey City & Harsimus Cemetery invited barroom storyteller Bob Leach to recite a series of anecdotes, stories, and tales about Prohibition-era Jersey City. The event — which takes place Saturday, March 12 at 2 pm — will include live music with singer/songwriter Greg Greg and Aileen Husk, and feature special guests, such as Kevin Francis Tate, author of the Black Hare. The program, being billed as a “fun-raiser,” has a suggested donation of $15 for adults; this includes a complimentary pint of Guinness. The suggested donation for children is $5. All proceeds benefit the Cemetery Restoration Fund.

Leach will deliver an encore performance on Wednesday, March 16 at 1 pm at Five Corners Library. The library will serve Irish soda bread. The program is free.

A scene from Boardwalk Empire: At left is Chris Mulkey as Frank Hague, at right is Steve Buscemi as Enoch “Nucky” Thompson. (Photo courtesy of HBO; Hague photo courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Towards the end of an episode of HBO’s prohibition-era drama Boardwalk Empire, the camera pans to Mayor Frank Hague bouncing two topless women on his lap, as one pours wine down his gullet. Hague, Jersey City’s mayor from 1917 to 1947, is portrayed as a stereotypical political boss — a strong-arming, tough negotiator with rich tastes who likes his booze and women plentiful, and his envelopes fat. 

On the contrary, Hague — who’s become better known for his administration’s corruption and patronage than for the arguable good he bestowed on early 20th century Jersey City — was a teetotaler. Not only did he have a strong disdain for alcohol, Hague was anything but a cassanova. Indeed, he was a workaholic mama’s boy moralist who married relatively late in life and was considered awkwardly shy among the opposite sex.

Hague plays a bit part in the HBO show, which centers on Nucky Thompson, a composite character patterned mainly after Atlantic City’s prohibition era Treasurer Nucky Johnson. Hague, who would become a more powerful player than Johnson in Jersey and national politics, appears in scenes intended to display Nucky’s statewide clout. The two are wrangling over whose fiefdom should get funding from a road appropriations bill with the help of then-Senator Walter Edge.

A frustrated Hague finally sits down with Thompson to talk business after lingering for several days at a ritzy Atlantic City hotel. “I’m a simple man. All I need is a bed, the love of a good woman, and an envelope about so thick,” quips Hague, taking a gulp of white wine.

“I made sure you got all three,” responds Thompson.

“That you did, my host,” affirms Hague, adding, “Where we goin’ after this?”

Thompson invites the Mayor to see a performance by Houdini’s brother (“He’s just as good”), adding “I’ll get you a date.”



“Only one?” laughs Hague.

Later that night, the two men appear again, ties loosened, in a brothel. Hague guzzles more wine and tugs on a cigar as a nude woman sitting across from him croons and strums a ukulele.

By all accounts, Hague was a pragmatist. But even when it came to steering road pork to his neck of the woods, it’s not clear that he would have had or feigned a prurient interest in women.

The idea of Hague in a brothel?

“That’s doubtful,” says John Hallanan, president of the Jersey City Landmark Conservancy. “He was a pretty straightlaced guy.”



Though there were rumors of Hague having a mistress, he didn’t appreciate men in City Hall cheating, Hallanan says, quoting a statement said to have been made by the mayor: “If you have a problem with a skirt, I don’t want to find out about it, and if I do, you’re in trouble.”

And it’s almost certain he wouldn’t drink simply to fit in. He was “very much opposed to drunken behavior,” according to Hallanan, who says Hague once went so far as to tell another political boss who ordered a martini during their lunch meeting at New York’s Plaza Hotel, “You will not have a drink with me.”



Hague’s governing philosophy centered on moral values, or at least the veneer of morality. Under his administration, Jersey City allowed no street carnivals, burlesque shows or dance halls. Hague seemed to expect his city employees to uphold those values also — or appear to do so. Every New Year’s Day, for instance, the mayor held a morning reception at City Hall to greet the citizens and city staffers. It wasn’t a good idea for city workers to show up with boozy breath or bloodshot eyes.

“He wanted to make sure people who worked for him or with him weren’t going out and partying the night before,” Hallanan explains.

Wet Activity Under Dry Law Rakes in the Shekels

But Hague was no fool. He realized the liquor business — especially one operated on the black market — meant big money for the city, for himself and for his cronies. Despite his personal aversion to drink and debauchery, he knew that upholding the federal government’s prohibition on alcohol would be impractical in a city dominated by hard-drinking Irish and Italian immigrants, and just plain misguided from an economic standpoint.

Instead, his administration subtly ignored the liquor ban. Saloon licenses and under-the-table payoffs for speakeasies brought the city valuable funds. Though he himself was dry, Hague was a practical man who recognized a great economic opportunity if he were able to “control corruption, centralize it, and profit from it,” says Hallanan. Some profits would help furnish his expensive tastes, while others would keep the masses at bay, providing Christmastime gifts of turkeys or food baskets, for instance.

In the spring of 1920, mere months after the 18th Amendment had gone into effect, state and local governments questioned the legality of the federal booze ban. Jersey City officials figured they may as well continue renewing saloon licenses — which brought in $500 a pop — just in case the Supreme Court overturned the fresh law.  

Prohibition was “regarded in many parts of New Jersey as little more than a joke,” the Jersey Journal wrote in March of 1920. Jersey City was no exception. “City officials of Jersey City are going right ahead with plans to license about 400 saloonkeepers on June 30 at $500 per license, just as though there were no 18th Amendment in the constitution and no Volstead Act on the federal statute books and just as though no Prohibition Director for New Jersey had ever been appointed by Washington authorities.”



The report noted that the re-licensed saloonkeepers had “been having a perfectly glorious time raking in the shekels.” The licensing, stated the paper, “indicates a refreshing disregard for the dry amendment.”

As for the administration, according to the Journal’s blunt reportage, Hague and co. believed the move was justified, because the approximately $200,000 derived from the licensing fees would “be spent to help run the city government.”

Hague’s tolerance of liquor law violations pleased many of the Irish and Italian immigrants who had recently settled in Jersey City. And, allowing taverns to operate helped him maintain order and control of these local hubs of political organizing.

Hague also probably didn’t appreciate the anti-Catholic immigrant undercurrent of the temperance movement, which was typically promoted by WASPs, some harboring anti-immigrant sentiments. Though he may have felt that alcohol was a disruptive force, particularly in the dominant Irish community of Jersey City, he was not willing to take action about it.

“He recognized [he was] better off not enforcing it,” Hallanan says. “Anytime a move was perceived as anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant or anti-Irish, it was automatically going to lose support in Jersey City.”

Controlling the flow of booze into the city, and maintaining order through a graft-ridden system of payoffs also may have helped Hague ward off mafia infestation at a time when cities like Chicago proved susceptible.

One tale has Hague scaring off the mob in the dead of night. When mobsters en route to New York one evening were busy unloading a trainload of hooch in a Jersey City rail yard, Hague’s men — a hundred cops wielding machine guns — surrounded them.  As the story goes, Hague himself told them to run and not stop until they had left the city limits. They did, and Hague’s men seized the liquor, booty worth half a million dollars.

“If the reason for prohibition of alcohol was to maintain order in society,” says Hallanan, “Hague recognized it would backfire and didn’t enforce it.” Indeed, the city, a prime port and rail hub, was ripe for exploitation by mob bootleggers. “What distinguished Hague is what could have happened but didn’t,” Hallanan suggests.

Yet his administration’s disregard for liquor laws did not sit well with everyone.
 
Anti-Salooners, The Majestic Theater and The Woman Who Dared to Drink

The puritanical Anti-Saloon League was a thorn in Hague’s side even before prohibition. In 1913, when he was still serving as Jersey City’s Public Safety Commissioner, the Anti-Saloon League strolled through the city’s 7th Ward on the lookout for violators of the Sunday Closing Law, a so-called Blue Law that prevented saloons from doing business on the Lord’s Day of rest. A letter sent to Hague by a League leader published in the Jersey Journal in 1913 depicts a day of outrage for the anti-salooners, including for one of the missive’s authors, Samuel Wilson:

I saw a back room in the saloon next door to the Majestic Theater and there are booths in Waytell’s place opposite. There is a small back room with tables and chairs in the saloon at the southwest corner of Grove Street and Railroad Avenue, also Fahey’s, Washington and York Streets, in the new saloon on Harrison and Monticello Avenues, the Belmont Café, Belmont and Monticello Avenues, and Farrell and Bart’s, Montgomery Street and Bergen Avenue. Carell’s on Journal Square was doing a rushing business yesterday. The bar was crowded. The place has booths which to my mind are very obnoxious appurtenances in any drinking place. In one saloon I saw a woman sitting with a man in an alcove drinking.

According to the paper’s report, Commissioner Hague dismissed the complaint. The “activities of the anti-saloon leaguers and their alleged findings had not reached him officially as yet, and until they did he had nothing to say.”

A headline from the local paper just two days after Prohibition began read, “New Jersey Anti-Saloon League Plans to Play More Active Part in Politics Than Ever - Seeks to Elect ‘Bone-Dry’ Officials.” Needless to say, many of the politicians of Jersey City and the rest of the state were considered very “wet” indeed. In fact, the issue so saturated political discourse at the time that candidates and officials were actually referred to as “wets” or “drys.”

Despite Hague’s wet political stance, he most likely agreed with the anti-salooners on the issue of women drinking in saloons. “He was pretty adamant about … laws against women in saloons; it was assumed if she was there she was a prostitute,” Hallanan says.

With such a selective attitude towards the rule of law, it’s no wonder Hague became known as a political boss. “Guys like Edge will come and go,” says Hague to Thompson as they bask in brothel cigar smoke on Boardwalk Empire. “But bosses, like us, we’re here to stay.”

To Hallanan, the idea Hague would actually refer to himself as a “boss” is highly unlikely.

“Hague hated that term,” he says. “He always prided himself that he stood for election. … He would get furious if he ever heard people call him Boss Hague.”



Whether the HBO series evolves to offer viewers a more complex view of Hague remains to be seen. At this stage, worries Hallanan, Boardwalk Empire is “just going to bolster the reputation of Hague being a hopelessly corrupt politician.”

He says that Hague’s checkered legacy should be tempered more often with some of the mayor’s accomplishments, like the building of the Jersey City Medical Center and making the city safer.

“However much he may have profited personally … or looked the other way when these Prohibition laws were to be enforced, he did leave behind him a legacy,” Hallanan says. “Things did get done.”

Since then, the journal has sat dormant, but this fall, historians at the society teamed up with colleagues at the New Jersey Historical Commission and Kean University to relaunch the journal, which will now be published online twice a year by the Rutgers University Libraries.

In the first issue in four years of the peer-reviewed journal are many interesting articles for Garden State history buffs, and one treat in particular for anyone interested in the political history of Jersey City.

In a fascinating 27-page article, University of Redlands (California) history professor Matthew Taylor Raffety trains his eye on legendary Jersey City mayor Frank Hague. To our delight, Raffety eschews Hague’s tenure as mayor, which has provided fodder for a number of historical articles and books, but rather turns to his pre-mayoral career.

Raffety says Hague’s early political career “provides an instructive example of how urban politicians used public spectacle, the media, ethic identity and middle class mores to redefine American urban politics.” The article goes on to tell the story of Hague’s rise to power via the persona he crafted as one part machine politician and one part Progressive reformer. He crafted this persona, of course, largely in the pages of the local press, and one thing Raffety’s article makes clear is how adept Hague was at public relations.

You can read the full article here.

For more on New Jersey History, visit the journal’s website.

- The future of the proposed 9/11 memorial at Liberty State Park remains uncertain due to a pending legal dispute, a larger-than-expected price tag and a daunting fund-raising challenge.

- Assemblyman Anthony Chiappone has hired a lawyer as he faces an investigation into allegedly forging paychecks.

- In a piece on WPA projects across the region, the Times notes that Jersey City was home to many New Deal projects, and says Chilltown serves as “a cautionary tale about the ways in which extraordinary federal spending can become entangled with the ambitions and political machinations of local politicians.”

- A 19-year-old man was sentenced to 15 years in prison for an armed robbery he committed as a juvenile.

- Independent Ward A candidate Andre Richardson is teaming up with Curl Topz Barber Shop (99 Ocean Ave.) today for the “Chop for Change” event, from 12:30-4:30 pm.

In statewide news:

- Former Democratic state Sen. Joseph Coniglio was convicted on corruption charges yesterday. The Record looks at how the conviction might come into play in this fall’s gubernatorial and assembly elections.

- Gov. Corzine says 9,000 layoffs are possible if his proposed state worker furloughs are blocked by the courts. Yesterday a state appeals court upheld Corzine’s ability to institute the furloughs.

- Republican gubernatorial candidate Chris Christie has released more information about his personal finances and urged his opponents to do the same. Steve Lonegan has thus far refused to do so, saying it has no bearing on the election, a point we have to agree with.

photo by Steven Hart

“When it opened in 1932, in a Thanksgiving Day gala, the Skyway was hailed as a marvel of engineering,” writes Steven Hart in the introduction to his 2007 book The Last Three Miles. “Much of what was said back then remains true today — the Pulaski Skyway is a milestone in the early history of America’s effort to cope with the rise of the automobile. It is also a monument to failure.”

Hart’s fascinating book — subtitled “Politics, Murder, and the Construction of America’s First Superhighway” — looks at the backstory of the Skyway’s construction and the mark the iconic elevated highway left both on Jersey City and on the region as a whole.

The 51-year-old journalist and former Jersey City resident recently took some time to talk with JCI via email about the Skyway, Frank Hague, organized labor and transportation planning.

Many people associate the Skyway with the New Deal and the Works Progress Administration (WPA) — is that correct?

The Skyway was not a WPA project — it was the tail end of the Route One extension project begun in the mid-1920s in response to the imminent opening of the Holland Tunnel. The extension was designed to carry traffic from the Holland Tunnel across the Meadowlands, then to Newark and Elizabeth. Various political delays made the Skyway the final link in the extension. The Skyway construction began in 1930 and was completed in 1932 before FDR took office.

Can you explain how Mayor Hague was able to get the project built?

The Route One extension was a state-funded project. Hague was a strenuous advocate for the project since he, like anyone else with a speck of foresight, could see what would happen when millions of vehicles started pouring from the Holland Tunnel and into the heart of Jersey City. He gave his personal blessing to the appointment of Fred Lavis as chief designer and gave speeches to support the project on the floor of the state legislature. The total project cost was $40 million, about half of which was abosrbed by the Skyway.

The Skyway, incidentally, did not get its name until 1933 — a year after it opened. Until then, it was known as the Meadowlands Viaduct, the Diagonal Highway or Route 25.

What other New Deal projects was Hague able to get done in Jersey City?

The best known WPA project in Jersey City would be Roosevelt Stadium, which was built at Droyers Point and opened in 1937. (Though the waterfront stadium was supposed to be named Veterans’ Memorial Stadium, Hague named it after FDR.)

In recognition of Hague’s political clout, FDR allowed the mayor to treat all WPA jobs in Hudson County as patronage positions, and Hague’s machine skimmed off the salaries of every county WPA worker. So you could say anyone descended from one of those workers is also a living memorial to the WPA.

Can you talk a little more about Hague’s relationship with FDR? Did FDR respect Hague or merely need him? How did Hague feel about FDR?

FDR personally despised Hague, partly because he considered bosses of Hague’s stripe to be corrupt predators, and partly because Hague did his best to keep FDR from winning the Democratic presidential nomination during the 1932 primary and the national convention in Chicago. Both men, however, were pragmatists.

Hague backed Al Smith, but when FDR took the nomination Hague knew he had to mend fences, which he did by pledging his full support and arranging a huge rally in Sea Girt for the official launch of FDR’s presidential campaign.

FDR knew he needed Hague in his corner to ensure New Jersey’s Democratic vote, so he he allowed the WPA jobs to be treated as patronage and even looked the other way when Hague’s people were caught opening the mail of suspected labor organizers in the 1930s — a felony.

FDR never moved openly against Hague, but he did encourage the gubernatorial candidacy of reformer Charles Edison and helped gull Hague into giving his support as well. When Edison made his first moves against Hague, he was sent running by Mary Teresa Norton, one of the first women to enter the legislature, whose career had been sponsored by Hague. She stood up in Congress and called Edison every bad name a polite Irish-Catholic lady could say in that venue. The next day, FDR sent her a friendly note, just to make it clear he had no ill will towards Hague.

You argue in your book that the Pulaski Skyway was a sort of turning point in terms of the nation’s transportation priorities. Why’s that?

As the first superhighway project in America (a designation given by the engineers who planned and designed the project), the Route One extension and the Skyway represent the first steps toward coping with the skyrocketing number of automobiles on American roads. It is thus a landmark in the 20th century transformation of America by the automobile. Its construction also marked a turning point for Frank Hague, since it sparked a labor war that he used to launch an all-out crusade against labor organizations. The years following the Skyway labor war were the time when Hague began to justify some of the bad things that were said about him.

Can you tell me a little more about that labor war? What sparked it and how did Hague fit into all of it?

Hague had been pretty much a friend of labor throughout the 1920s — for example, Jersey City police had turned back strikebreakers, something unheard of at the time. Much of his labor support came through Theodore “Teddy” Brandle, who had brought all of North Jersey’s construction and ironworker locals under his control. In return for guaranteeing labor’s endorsement for Hague and his candidates, Brandle was given a free hand to control hirings and firings on all Hudson County construction projects. Brandle also co-founded a bond company with Joseph Hurley, a Hudson County assemblyman, and fees from state construction contracts poured through his office. Brandle also founded the Labor National Bank and built its headquarters in Journal Square.

The official start of their falling out was a labor dispute during the construction of a generator building at the Jersey City Medical Center complex — the contactor used union men, but didn’t hire them through Brandle. The dispute grew violent and Hague had to step in by paying off the contractor, then going to the freeholder board for more money to complete the project. But Hague was already moving into an openly anti-labor stance, chiefly because he thought Jersey City’s high tax rates were chasing away employers — he tried to guarantee labor peace as an enticement to industry.

The Skyway project was built by four companies, all of them members of the ferociously anti-union National Erectors’ Association, and when Brandle went to war against them he was hugely overmatched. The firms hired goons to guard the work sites, and there were numerous scuffles with Brandle’s pickets. One labor picketer was shot in the back and partially paralyzed. Early in 1932, a carload of scabs bound for the Kearny worksite was attacked by men with crowbars and bats; one of the non-union workers suffered a fractured skull and died. Hague used the death to launch an all-out war against Brandle and, later, all unions.

What other attacks did Hague launch on organized labor? Were they tied into his crusade against communists?

Hague couched his anti-union campaign in the language of anti-communism, and in his mind the two causes were pretty much the same. His chief method was to get locals declared corrupt and then placed under receiverships that drained their finances and scattered their membership. Organziers were routinely arrested and beaten by the city police, and denied the use of rental space for their rallies.

Back to transportation planning. If the Skyway was one turning point, do you think that we might be at — or close to — another point in our history where there could be another turning point in transportation priorities? If so, what do you think it will — or should — look like?

We can only hope that short-sighted thinking will finally give way to an expanded and improved mass transit network involving upgraded and improved railways.

Do you see similarities between the climate now — especially in Jersey City and Hudson County — and the climate in the 1920s and 1930s when the Skyway was being built?

Obama, of course, inherits an economy hollowed out by the disastrous fiscal practices of his predecessor. The sense of renewal among labor unions is another significant similarity. It’s an interesting coincidence that our current mini-depression was predated by the arrival of revisionist ideologues like Amity Shlaes who are trying to convince people that government spending intensified the Great Depression rather than bringing it to heel.

Overall, do you think the Skyway changed Jersey City for the better or for the worse?

Probably for the worse, since its design flaws quickly returned truck traffic to local Meadowlands roads and encouraged the blighted development we now see in South Kearny. It’s the mirror image of the Erie Cut: a division above ground instead of below ground.

Currently there are crews working on the bridge. Do you think the bridge can actually be improved, or will it always be a flawed piece of transportation history, outdated from its inception? If it can be improved, what changes would need to be done to it?

By following railroad principles in designing the Skyway, designer Fred Lavis inadvertently made it almost impossible to upgrade the roadway. The right-of-way is simply too narrow, and the development presses in too closely. I have nothing but compassion for the people who will have to figure out what to do with it.

For more on Steven Hart, visit his website.

While this is the stuff of daily headlines today, we could just as easily be talking about the headlines of nearly 80 years ago.

Many commentators have referred to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 — aka the federal stimulus package — as President Barack Obama’s “New New Deal.” With a New New Deal in the works, it’s time for a look back at the first New Deal and how it affected Jersey City.

As part of the New Deal, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) was created by a presidential order by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and funded by the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935. Over the course of eight years, the WPA created nearly 8 million jobs and resulted in new buildings, roads and infrastructure, and creative projects in the arts, drama and literacy.

The WPA left its mark on Jersey City, and several — but not all — of the initiative’s projects remain standing today.

Hague, FDR and WPA Dollars

Any discussion of the WPA and Jersey City must include former Mayor Frank Hague and his connection to Roosevelt. Hague’s ability to deliver the New Jersey vote to Roosevelt in the 1932 presidential election was paid back with interest. “As long as the favors poured in Hague would use his machine to support Roosevelt, and as long as Roosevelt needed Hague the favors would be forthcoming,” Lyle W. Dorsett wrote in his contribution to the 1994 book A New Jersey Anthology.

Hague and his crew controlled all federal patronage in the state, from federal appointments to funding. Harry Hopkins, a former social worker, gave Hague control of more than 18,000 Civil Works Administration jobs in 1934. Hopkins then appointed William Ely, a Hague supporter, to be the state’s first WPA director.

And Hague made sure the city he called home was taken care of with WPA funds. According to Dorsett, Hudson County received more than $17 million in WPA funding between 1933 and 1938, with much of it coming to Jersey City. By 1939, that figure had reached $50 million.

Jersey City employees of New Deal programs complained about rampant political coercion — they were forced to vote for the Hague machine’s candidates and “tithe” three percent of their salaries to the political organization at election time. But Hopkins ignored this evidence and continued to find jobs for Hague’s friends.

Jersey City Medical Center

The Jersey City Medical Center was one of Hague’s pet projects. The complex was constructed in the elegant and modern Art Deco style that characterizes other WPA projects in Jersey City. Built into the Palisade Cliffs off Montgomery Street, the stepped forms of the 10 brick and terra cotta buildings ranged in height from 15 to 23 stories high. The complex had a total of 99 floors with 2000 beds. Hague invited Roosevelt to lay the cornerstone for the facility in 1936, and construction was completed in 1941.

According to Ulana Zakalak of Zakalak Associates, a Jersey City-based historical preservation consulting firm overseeing the restoration of the site, Hague wanted a top-notch medical center, particularly a maternity hospital, because he grew up in a large family and feared for his mother’s life every time she delivered a baby. Mothers delivering at the Margaret Hague center, named after the mayor’s mother, would be treated to a luxurious two-week hospital experience. It was the largest maternity hospital in the country at the time, and most locals would commonly refer to the entire medical center as “The Hague” or identify themselves as “Hague babies.”

The Medical Center left the site in 2004 to move to 355 Grand St., and the complex is currently being restored and converted into luxury condominium buildings known as The Beacon. The new site embraces the original Art Deco design of the site, and all of the buildings will be renamed after famous Art Deco theaters.

Because the site is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, special care was taken during the restoration process to bring the buildings back to their original brilliance.  Preservation easements were needed to do the necessary work, and nearly everything from the terrazzo floors to the ceilings was meticulously restored.

The original lobby for the hospital is now a billiards room for Beacon residents. The room is notable for a WPA-commissioned bas-relief mural carved in Tennessee marble titled “From Myth to Medicine.” The piece, which has been appraised at more than $1 million and flows around the entire room near the ceiling, stands out among WPA art because, unlike most works, it was signed. Zakalak says that the tiny signature of Allen George Newman was recently found in the swirl of a cloud.

Roosevelt Stadium

Built on a landfill at Droyers Point on Newark Bay, Roosevelt Stadium employed more than 2,400 workers during its construction. The stadium, which was built between 1935 and 1937 at a cost of $1.5 million, had a seating capacity of 23,000, but temporary seats for special events often expanded the capacity to 100,000.

“In its heyday, the stadium was the scene of epic baseball games between the Jersey City Giants and the Newark Bears, contests that a sportswriter who was there called ‘better than those played in the major leagues,’” Dan Weissman wrote in the Star-Ledger in 1984. “And, of course, there were the fights and college football.”

In addition to the boxing matches and minor league baseball and college football games, the stadium was also host to music concerts and recreational events. But it is perhaps best known as the site where Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier while playing in the minor leagues on Aug. 18, 1946, in a game between the Montreal Royals, a farm team of the New York Dodgers, and the Jersey City Giants. Robinson would repeat the feat in the major leagues the next year.

Roosevelt Stadium was designed in the Art Deco style by Christian H. Ziegler, reportedly Frank Hague’s favorite architect, who had also worked on the Jersey City Medical Center. The bowl-shaped stadium was two-stories high at the grandstand, with the bleacher and outfield areas surrounded by a low concrete wall. Terrazzo flooring ran through most of the facility. There were 20 entrances to the stadium, with the main entrance facing Newark Bay.

Renovations were made to the stadium in 1970, but a 30-foot light tower fell off the roof in 1978, weakening the integrity of the stadium’s exterior walls and light towers. By the 1980s, the field was beyond run-down.

“It was keeping us $300,000 a year to heat it, vandals had wrecked it, and it just got to the point where the direction we had to take was to build new housing facilities,” then-Jersey City Mayor Gerald McCann told Weissman in 1984.

Upon its demolition in 1985, one of Roosevelt Stadium’s seats was donated to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., and another one was sent to the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. The townhomes and condos of Society Hill now sit where the stadium once did.

A. Harry Moore School

One of the first public schools in the country built for students with disabilities, the A. Harry Moore School was named for the Hague ally and Jersey City native who is the only New Jersey governor to ever serve three terms. Construction on the school began in 1930, the cornerstone was laid on May 5, 1931, and students began attending that September.

The school was designed by Jersey City native John T. Rowland, who was also the general architect for the Jersey City Medical Center. Located at 2078 Kennedy Blvd., it is yet another example of the Art Deco style popular at the time, with white pressed bricks covering four- and five-story structures. The addition — with a natatorium, treatment rooms and solarium — was built in 1939 with WPA funds obtained by Moore during his time as a U.S. Senator.

An Egyptian influence can be seen in the design on the top story windows along the façade. Terra cotta panels with geometric patterns, classic elements of Art Deco design, are below the windows. Brick covers the ground entrance, and iron fencing with brick piers surround the school building.

The A. Harry Moore School was part of the Jersey City Public School System until 1963. The city later leased the school to Jersey City State College, and now approximately 190 students attend the school, which is affiliated with New Jersey City University’s special education program.

The 2009 Stimulus and Jersey City

While it remains to be seen exactly how the federal stimulus package will impact Jersey City, we’re starting to see some details. The city has already been told it will receive $7.8 million for the Housing Authority, close to $2.7 million for homelessness prevention via Emergency Shelter Grants and $1.7 million from Community Development Block Grant funds, according to spokesperson Jennifer Morrill. She says the city is awaiting instructions on how the block grant money can be used. She says Jersey City has also been told it will receive $4.5 million for street repaving and a $1.83 million grant from the Justice Department to fight crime.

Much of this research was helped by NCJU’s Jersey City Past and Present project and the Jersey City Free Public Library. Thanks.

PHOTOS OF THE JERSEY CITY MEDICAL CENTER RENOVATION:

- Today’s front page Journal story looks at the case of a 14-year-old child who pleaded guilty to manslaughter earlier in December. The victim’s family is apparently angry that the child will “only” face up to 3 years in a juvenile correctional facility. While HudCo prosecutor Edward DeFazio tells the Journal that the child is “exposed to the maximum sentence for that offense,” the paper clearly questions that decision, with the across-two-pages headline “IS THIS JUSTICE FOR KILLER, 14?” The story never looks at *why* we don’t lock up children for life behind bars, or any other hard realities of incarceration. For that, we have to turn elsewhere. “Kids who commit serious crimes shouldn’t go scot-free,” said a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch in an introduction to a 2005 report the group co-authored with Amnesty International on the practice. “But if they are too young to vote or buy cigarettes, they are too young to spend the rest of their lives behind bars.” The report notes that the US is one of the only countries in the world to allow sentences of life without parole for children. They found that at least 2,225 child offenders are serving life without parole sentences in American prisons for crimes committed before they were age 18, while in the rest of the world, there are only about 12. And one last tidbit from the report: it found, like many other sentencing studies do, “no correlation between the use of the [life without parole] sentence and youth crime rates.”

- Former Jersey City Housing Authority Board of Commissioners chairwoman Lori Serrano hit the Council meeting last week to ask if there has been any investigation into her October dismissal. Serrano was replaced on the board by a lobbyist for Mayor Healy for not completing five courses that are required of commissioners, but she and her supporters think it has more to do with disagreements with the authority’s director, Maria Maio. Councilman Steve Lipski said that there is an investigation by the authority’s lawyer into Serrano’s situation. Some have called for Maio to resign in recent months, and a plan to raze the housing projects on Montgomery Street and replace them with a mixed-income development was met with criticism. In an interview with the Reporter, Maio plays the blame game a little, pointing the finger at tenants “who don’t come to meetings and listen to rumors” for the ire directed her way, and says her opposition is limited to a few people who “have an agenda” and are “caught up in politics.” She also notes that in 2009, she “would like to see more positive press coverage of the Housing Authority.”

- In his Between the Lines column in the Reporter, Al Sullivan says “reports suggest” that Sean Connors might not challenge Ward D Councilman Bill Gaughan after all, because the HCDO might tap him to replace HudCo Freeholder Eliu Rivera in 2010. He also sketches out a connection between legendary Jersey City Mayor Frank Hague and political corruption in Chicago. Matthew Amato, author of Jersey City: A City in Socio-Economic and Political Change, tells Sullivan that when Hague was vice president of the national Democratic Party under FDR, he used Jersey City’s Democratic Committee as a model in setting up organizations in other cities, including Chicago.

- Former Hudson County College administrator John Shinnick, who has been accused of intimidating employees, has a new $110,500/year post as director of finance and facilities at the Hudson County Schools of Technology.

- Provident Bank gave Christ Hospital $1 million over five years, and the Hospital will brand the maternity and pediatric inpatient services unit “in honor of The Provident Bank Foundation,” according to a brief in the Reporter (not available online.)

In statewide news:

- Last night’s bitter cold proves timely. Last week, Gov. Corzine signed a $22.5 million home heating aid package to add to the $88 million he approved for home heating aid in October. The new package includes $10 million for those who make too much to qualify for low-income assistance but still need help, a number that is surely on the rise in these tough economic times. The program is being run through the nonprofit organization NJ SHARES. It’s worth noting there are other ways to save money on home heating. Definitely check out the New Jersey Citizen Action Oil Group, a co-op that “uses bulk purchasing power to negotiate discount prices on home heating oil for thousands of members statewide.” The group is running a promotion from now until Jan. 1 — if you sign up by Jan. 1 and reference their Dec. 19 email, the first year of membership is free.

- Gov. Corzine talks to the Star-Ledger about the economy, the ’09 election and his legislative agenda. Not much of import in the story, but the paper does report that Corzine “all but ruled out replacing civil unions with gay marriage before the fall campaign.” Corzine cites the ailing economy for the non-action, but I’m sure there are political reasons to put it off as well. He also talks about how his toll-hike plan fell apart earlier this year, saying it was “not the most user-friendly time” to introduce the idea.

- A bill to extend the deadline to attach printers to NJ’s touch-screen voting machines has died. This mean’s the Secretary of State’s office will be breaking the law starting Jan. 1. Concerns have been raised about the technology — both of e-voting overall and of verified paper ballots — but this law was passed in 2005, and through a series of delays and obfuscations, we have never actually complied with it. The voter-verified paper trail is a good idea, and so is complying with state laws, not getting around them via legislative maneuvering. I, for one, am glad to see the bill fail. More from the Asbury Park Press.