Randall Gabrielan hasn’t lived in Jersey City for nearly 40 years, but his youth here apparently made quite an impression. He spent nearly a year working on his new book, Jersey City: A Monumental History, pulling together several centuries’ worth of vintage postcards, photographs, maps and illustrations – as well as modern snapshots, many juxtaposed against their historical counterparts.
“The book reflects my belief that history is happening all the time,” Gabrielan said recently, “so there are a fair number of recent structures [in the book], but there is also content that relates to the earliest roots of Jersey City.”
A Monumental History doesn’t weave a grand tale of Jersey City over the centuries, but it does show many of the threads through hundreds of glossy images and captions containing historical tidbits and remarks from Gabrielan.
As the honorary historian of Middletown, N.J. and the executive director of the Monmouth County Historical Commission, Gabrielan is no novice when it comes to compiling image-driven histories of New Jersey. He’s published more than two dozen books under the well-known “Images of America” imprimatur. In fact, A Monumental History is Gabrielan’s second visual tour of Jersey City – in 1999, he released Jersey City in Vintage Postcards through Arcadia Publishing.
“You have to like a place to want to write about it with a second go-round,” he said.
Gabrielan will appear at the Jersey City Public Library for a discussion, sale, and signing event on Tuesday, June 12 at 7 p.m.
Returned home for research
Gabrielan said his research drew mostly from published histories of the city and contemporary accounts, as well as old editions of The New York Times.
“There’s a certain value in observations made as they were happening,” Gabrielan said.
Also invaluable to his work was the New Jersey Room of the Jersey City Public Library, to which many of the book’s images are credited.
“There was a period where I was going there once a week,” Gabrielan said.
The book is now in publication from Pennsylvania-based Schiffer Publishing Ltd., which has previously printed heavily illustrated history books on the Jersey Shore towns of Ocean Grove and Ocean City.
A Monumental History will be available at select bookstores and at the Jersey City Public Library. Autographed copies can be ordered directly from Gabrielan by e-mailing him at monmouthhistory@comcast.net.
Christopher Zinsli can be reached at jcmag@hudsonreporter.com.