New Jersey

12 places with something worth saying about them.

• Barren Island, Brooklyn A bay on the edge of Brooklyn got its name because factories there dumped the remains of nearly twenty thousand horses a year.
• Camp Evans Historic District In January 1946, engineers at this New Jersey site bounced a radar signal off the moon and caught the echo.
• Fort Hamilton The fort guarding New York Harbor was designed by one of Napoleon's own military engineers.
• Fort Monmouth In 1946, an Army team on this New Jersey post bounced a radio signal off the moon and heard it come back.
• Georgian Court University A New Jersey campus keeps one of about forty-five real tennis courts left in the world, and a British prince has played on it.
• Newark Bay Bridge (railroad) In 1958 a commuter train ran off the end of an open lift span into Newark Bay, killing forty-eight people.
• Old Bridge Township, New Jersey Metallica moved across the country to this New Jersey suburb to record their first album.
• Raritan River At the end of the last ice age, the Hudson River emptied into the sea through this channel.
• Richmond Tunnel A brand-new tunneling machine spent two years under New York Harbor and dug only about six hundred feet.
• Route 35 Drive-In Bruce Springsteen played a ninety-minute set in a New Jersey parking lot, then everyone watched a movie.
• Toms River Nobody knows who Tom was, so in 1992 the town simply voted on it.
• USS PC-1264 Of all the ships in the wartime U.S. Navy, only one ended up with a crew that was entirely African American, and it is still tied up on Staten Island.