Down in Mercer County, Dan Lenco will tell you an odd but true story about something that happened on his family’s farm in Hamilton Township back in the 1950s.
One day, a strange man emerged from the freight train tracks that ran next to the farm. The stranger politely asked Dan Lenco’s father if he could do some work on the farm for a while. The father said, “Sure,” and the stranger worked alongside the family on the farm for two days. Then, the stranger told the family that another train was about to come through, so he had to go. The stranger collected his pay, walked into the woods, and the Lencos never saw him again.
While this is a true story, it clashes with the public’s perception of modern cluttered New Jersey and reminds everyone that the oft-maligned state is rife with farms, historic battle sites, vineyards, and gardens.
But for how much longer will these agrarian elements remain?
Researchers at Rutgers and other local institutions estimate that within 20 to 50 years, the state will reach total buildout, meaning every non-government-protected piece of land will have been built on.
This is a scenario that irked 25-year-old West Windsor native and New York University graduate Michael Levine so much that two years ago, he began working on a documentary called “Losing Ground” that chronicles the state’s disappearing open space, including interviews with the aforementioned Lenco and other farmers.
As Levine traveled the state filming evidence for the 86-minute documentary-in-progress, he received significant funding from a Jersey City lawyer, as well as donated music from a Secaucus-based rock band.
Now, he is doing final edits so he can show the documentary at film festivals and possibly gain distribution across the country. The film has won raves all over the state, because even in urban areas, people are worried about losing open space and historic land.
The saga begins
Levine grew up in wealthy West Windsor Township, the town in which the Princeton Junction train station is located. But he said his town wasn’t always so wealthy.
“West Windsor changed in the time I grew up there,” he said last week. “At the start, it was not wealthy by any stretch – really just your average agricultural community – and it was only as the land suddenly came into demand in the 1980s that it went in that direction.”
Sprawling single-family homes mushroomed all over Levine’s town. As he got older and attended NYU, he worried about all the rural areas around the state being trampled by cookie-cutter developments.
After graduation, he landed a job programming events at the Jacob Burns Film Center in Westchester County, New York. There, he met a producer named Alexis Boling, who was a friend of the theater’s director of operations.
Levine shared a train ride back to New York City with Boling, and told the producer of an idea he had to make a documentary about New Jersey’s disappearing open space. Boling, who has a production company in Brooklyn called Harmonium Films, liked the idea and offered to get involved.
After Levine started working on the film, he showed a 17-minute version at the Jacob Burns Film Center. A Jersey City lawyer named Paul Pennock, who also knew the theater director, was in the audience and volunteered to put up some funding. Pennock lives in Jersey City but owns rural property in upstate New York.
Levine logged hundreds of miles on his Acura as he traveled the Garden State interviewing farmers and activists.
At the end of last year, he showed the rough cut in one South Jersey town, winning praise and a write-up in the New Jersey section of the New York Times.
The film provides footage of New Jersey’s hinterlands from sunup to sunset, and notes several ironies. An agricultural festival in South Jersey is held on the site of a former asparagus farm. One housing development was built on the gravesite of Elsie, the famous Jersey cow who became a symbol for Borden’s dairy products.
Levine said last month that his favorite place in New Jersey to explore is Salem County, which “reminds me of what my town was before it changed. I feel like I know this place, and I know what can happen.”
He met many residents of Salem who are concerned that their towns could wind up overdeveloped like neighboring communities. It is sometimes hard for Jersey farmers to resist the fat paychecks offered by developers.
In fact, one farmer, Ronny Lee of Lee’s Turkey Farm in East Windsor, in Mercer County, says in the film that he has been offered $15 million for his coveted acreage!
It would take a lot of farming to produce that kind of return.
Secaucus contributes
Levine is currently talking to the Secaucus-based band The Wrens to use some of their music in the film as well, perhaps even pieces written specifically for the documentary. He also recently received an offer of another cash investment from Pennock in Jersey City, and is hoping to get more funds to finish his work.
Levine said that even in cities, “People are able to relate [the film] to their own communities, to the loss of urban green space.”
He is also doing freelance film work for other people and looking at other projects. He would like to document New Jersey’s Pine Barrens, which are “the center of the state geographically, but it’s a culture completely separate.”
To get more information on the film, write to losinggroundmovie@yahoo.com or look at www.losinggroundmovie.com.