What I’m proposing is a simple trade. One island for another – straight up – even Steven – quid pro quo. Staten Island for Hoboken.
While Hoboken may technically no longer be an island, we’re splitting hairs there. It is about as attached to New Jersey as Hong Kong was to England. Having lived in "the mile-square city" for some years now, I’ve come to regard it as a sort of buffer zone between New York City and America.
In the case of the Island of Staten, it requires one of mankind’s most ambitious engineering efforts to establish a toehold to Brooklyn. An ocean voyage is required to make the trip from Manhattan. Yet, you could swim from Bayonne.
Let’s face it, the current alliances are farcical. Staten Islanders have stopped just short of armed insurrection in expressing their loathing for New York City’s dictatorial dominion over their affairs. They are about as delighted with being the fifth and forgotten borough as the Chechnyans are with their Russian affiliation. As New Jersians, they would de facto become one of the state’s most important cities. I mean what’s the competition, Newark? They would become empowered not only to make their own local decisions, but be major players in "The Garden State’s" politics, including dispensing heavy doses of payback when it comes to interstate issues regarding their former overlords in New York. I can almost see the glint in a Staten Island police officer’s eyes as a New York plate motors down The Guy Molinari Causeway going two miles an hour over the limit.
Hoboken is an entity unique in New Jersey, an oddity both geographically and demographically. It’s hard to even think of it as in New Jersey, so much as near New Jersey. To get a bus to most of the rest of the state, you have to take a bus to New York first. Driving from nearby towns involves complicated unmarked maneuvers under train trestles, down side-street causeways and precarious lane changes, which if not precisely executed result in misdirections best resolved with the global positioning systems employed by arctic expeditions. How many cities are there, after all, that occupy only one square mile squeezed between a river, cliffs and two gaping tunnel entrances?
As for the occupants, the majority are recent arrivals, who in large part regard the rest of the state as a foreign country – the born-and-raised citizen having gone the way of the bargain apartment. Many of the current Hobokenites are more familiar with Istanbul than Weehawken and regard their association with "Joisy" as barely tolerable.
There’s no love lost here on either side, as most died-in-the-wool, life long New Jersians would lose little sleep after ditching the reviled Yuppies who, love ’em or hate ’em, transformed the banged up, shipbuilding, coffee roasting, hard drinking, blue collar manufacturing town Sinatra fled into the junior stock broker enclave it is today. Let’s face it, Ol’ Blue Eyes isn’t lionized for singing "New Jersey, New Jersey," and the folks who arrived in his wake didn’t exactly have their sights set on making it big in Trenton. They came and keep coming with their eyes fixed on the panoramic view of "The Big Apple" just across the river, where they work and play – not the craggy rocks holding the rest of the state at bay.
After 20 years, I still have trouble getting out the words New Jersey after Hoboken. I tell people I live on the "very" West Side. Hell, Washington Street is really like 17th Avenue in Manhattan.
I look forward to the momentous day when the exchange can be made. I propose a simple ceremony. Two limousines carrying the respective governors of the states pause at the "New York/New Jersey" marker in The Holland Tunnel, roll down the windows, pass the deeds one to the other, shake hands and back into their own states. A couple of new signs go up. A few bureaucrats change cubicles. The mapmakers put in a little overtime, and the deal is done. Who loses here? This is win/win.
But you know this isn’t going to happen on its own. So let’s get the ball rolling. Concerned citizens of a like mind are encouraged to contact:
SWAP (States Wanting Alternate Properties)
C/O Mongo’s Hot Dog Hut
Corner of Observer Highway and The Railroad Overpass
Hoboken, New York 1000?