When Anthony Just arrived back in Hudson County in 1952, he had spent almost two years away from home. While the military bus was supposed to let him off in Manhattan, he talked the driver into dropping him off on Manhattan Avenue in Jersey City where he could catch the Number 2 bus for Secaucus. While looking out the window of the Number 2 bus, he noticed something odd – that cars seemed to be driving along the railroad tracks. He realized that it wasn’t the tracks he saw, but the New Jersey Turnpike, which had been constructed while he was away in the Army. Although he didn’t know it at the time, Just was witnessing a dramatic change in the nature of his town, something that forever ended the era of farms and meadows and made Secaucus into a whole different place to live. Now, driving through the south end of town nearly 50 years later, the former mayor is 72 years old, yet he remembers nearly every feature of the landscape where he grew up. Just lived through two of the most significant moments in the history of Secaucus: the arrival of the New Jersey Turnpike in 1952 that ended the town’s reign as a farm community, and the arrival of Hartz Mountain Industries in 1969 that turned Secaucus into a capital of retail and commercial development. Just moved to Secaucus from Jersey City in 1932 when he was six years old. His father was a longshoreman until the Great Depression stole his job and for the next 18 years the family had to scratch out a living on a small farm off County Avenue, near where the Duck Pond is today. “My father worked very hard, and my mother raised 10 of the 12 children she bore,” Just said recently. “Two of them died as infants. It was a tough life for a woman.” Just’s mother died in 1949, a year before the Turnpike came through and a year before he got sent to Korea. Driving south on County Avenue, Just slows his car to point between several houses to the Turnpike rest area that now occupies the place where his farm had been. “My house was where the gasoline pumps are now,” he says with a slight sadness in his voice. During World War II, Secaucus served as one of the country’s food resources, raising 200,000 hogs per year, translating into 50 million pounds of pork. Much of it went overseas to the military. Just remembered as a boy travelling around the area collecting leftover food from factories and restaurants to feed the pigs. “We had no grain. The pigs fed off day-old Silvercup bread and Drake’s Cakes, or swill from restaurants,” Just says. “Now seagulls feed on that stuff after it’s dumped in landfills.” As he drives, Just names the owners of the farms, though now in their place there is a car wash, a pizzeria, a cafe, and warehouses. Near Secaucus Road and County Avenue were vegetable and fruit farms, with a patch across from the current UPS building where the county raised its own tomatoes. Hartz comes to Secaucus The south end of Secaucus was known as the back end. It was the most rural part of town, and the last to let go of its farms. Kids later came to call the area the “airport” because Curtis Wright, the manufacturer of air craft engines, had a facility here. The meadows around what is now the Duck Pond were Just’s playground, a wonderland of wide open spaces through which hunters used to roam in search of starlings – a common bird now found living in the eaves of business buildings in places like Jersey City and Paterson, but was then a food stable for poor families. Just remembers having meals of starling and spaghetti “Hunters used to come here carrying double-barreled shot guns to shoot at the flocks of starlings,” he said. The hunters rarely found all the birds they shot, but Just and other kids did, bringing them home for meals. Years later, in 1969, Hartz Mountain purchased the 750 acres from a man named James Colt, the son of a Chicago transportation tycoon who had once had great hopes for the area but had never cashed in on them. “After Hartz took over, people worried about the Duck Pond and what might come of it,” Just said. The town later forged an agreement with Hartz that allowed the pond to be used as a park. Now thousands of ducks live or stop over at the place. “We managed to get a 300-year lease,” Just says. Railroads and foundries Bumping over the potholes of Castle Road where warehouses line the sides of the former Colt property, Just talks about how Hartz went about filling the land in order to build on it, shipping in tons of sand from Sandy Hook, pumping it into the swamps, and later leveling it off with bulldozers. Further west on Castle Road, Just passes the former railroad property over which he wandered during his childhood on his way to the Hackensack River to fish or swim. He and his friends walked along the Jersey City Waterworks pipeline that still crosses the south end of Secaucus today. Just recalls railroad debris along one section and how the round house, which allowed trains to turn around, had stood here when he was a kid. The Lackawanna train track was on one side, and the fast track – the line for passenger trains – was on the other. Some of the freight trains had more than 100 cars, he says, something that has come full circle with the arrival of container freight to nearby Croxton Yards. A large portion of Castle Road back then had been a dirt track designed to service one of the railroad bridges over the Hackensack River. Although now invisible after all the filling of meadows here, this part of Secaucus was once called Sauer Island, and housed the Sauer Island Iron Foundry in the late 1800s, where steel was smelted. Trainloads of ore used to feed the furious furnace. As a kid, Just often stumbled into reminders of that era, bits of slag hardened into rusting chunks of what looks like stone. One huge chunk has been preserved, sitting like a statue among the warehouses near Seaview Drive. Out of his stomping ground As he drives, Just points to the now-abandoned Hartz Mountain sewage plant on the shores of the Hackensack River, south of Harmon Cove towers. This is property the town took over long ago. Just passes Harmon Cove’s 25-story towers and the town houses that line the west side of the Meadowlands Parkway, with outlets and Panasonic headquarters on the other side. Meadowlands Hospital, the Crowne Plaza Hotel, and WWOR-TV run along this road, testimony to the massive changes that overtook Secaucus in the 1980s. As Just turns the car onto Route 3 East and steers through the Plaza section, he leaves the area he wandered around as a kid. But he remembers Brinkman’s farm and Tonne’s farm and the fine housing built upon in the first residential breakthrough. “There was as building boom in the north end during the 1960s and 1970s,” he says. As he travels, he points to buildings he had once considered in his plans for the town library and other uses, saying that much could be done with them even today. He talks about the time the west side of Paterson Plank Road was largely a trash dump. But it has since become one of the principal residential neighborhoods of the town. The car passes near where the Aratusa was once docked, a boat restaurant that burned and sank in the late 1980s. Then, he drives passes Schmidt’s Woods, named after Jacob Schmidt, a former mayor and tavern owner, whose family still owns and operates a concrete firm in the north end near Trolley Park. Finally, as he makes the circle back toward the center of town, he passes the sewage plant constructed in the 1950s during the term then-Mayor James Moore. He shakes his head a little as if not quite believing the changes he’s seen, yet he’s still as much in love with Secaucus as he was as a boy. “This is a good town with fine people and a wonderful history,” Just says. “I don’t know what the future will be, but I know it will be different, just as it was different for me when I lived through it.”
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