I grew up in New Jersey, but I got out as soon as I graduated high school. Never really did much site-seeing or interesting travel within NJ, I mostly just skateboarded in the Asbury Park area and left as soon as I could. But with a lot of time and distance, I’ve recently been appreciating some of the underrated aspects of New Jersey.
When you learn about the history of Bell Labs, the way that New Jersey has always been a suburb of NYC, a place where weird industrial and governmental stuff is always spilling over… One can start to appreciate a certain mystique I’d like to call Garden State Cybergothic.
For such a small state, New Jersey has a lot of spooky lore. I would bet it has one of the highest concentrations of spookiness, per square foot, in the union. The Pine Barrens are underrated more generally, and the myth of the New Jersey Devil is pretty interesting. The New Jersey Devil comes out of the Pine Barrens, in fact.
I don’t believe in supernatural stuff but when there’s a high concentration of myths and “haunted” things, sometimes this can reflect historical path-dependencies that accumulate into a weird kind of social energy within a particular locale. Not “energy” in a woo-woo sense, just…
Weird stuff happens in a place for explicable but exceptional empirical reasons, due to some exogenous influences unique to the area, then these factors enter into local symbolism, this symbolism shapes attitudes and expectations, which then cause certain rare, aberrant behaviors or tendencies, which are then interpreted as corroborating the lore, and so on… If this flywheel spins long enough, you could very well get bizarre regional pockets of behavioral-symbolic entrainments.
Supernatural-seeming myths become semi-real, through perfectly sensible social-psychological processes.
The world’s largest transistor in Holmdel, New Jersey. Hat tip to ~hansel-ribbur, who shared this to the Other Life group on Urbit.
Garden State Cybergothic mainly reflects the spillover of projects that were too weird or sketchy for mainstream NYC real estate.
For instance, I grew up in a township near the city of Deal. The local park and recreation area was called the Deal Test Site. In retrospect, that’s a bizarre name for a kid’s playground, but I never thought twice about it as a kid. It was called that because they used to do testing of radio tech there, back in the day. The Bell Labs era, in fact, and before then too, as early as the 1920s I believe.
There was an old abandoned radio tower and office building in this park. Just a massive, creepy testing ground sitting there in the middle of a park.
One time when I was in middle school, my friends and I broke into the building and I remember it like a scene from a video game—maybe Resident Evil or Silent Hill. I remember it looking kind of like a 1950s Mad Men office building but covered in dust and garbage—post-apocalyptic zombie vibes.