A short history of Trolley Park

Trolley Park pokes out into the Hackensack River like a blunt finger, the unnatural end to a great road that used to run from Hoboken to Paterson, one of those past plank roads made of cedar from the meadows. The state sealed the avenue’s fate when they took down a bridge here in the late 1920s, leaving two strands of the same road on either side of the river. Eighty years later, drivers still stare out at the gap, asking where the road went. Westbound people on one side stare at the eastbound people on the other side. The west side has the golf driving range, the east side, Trolley Park. Trolley Park is located at the extreme north end of Secaucus where Paterson Plank Road stops at the shore of the Hackensack River. Secaucus officials built Trolley Park in 1992 as a tribute to the regular trolley service that made its way through here from Hoboken to Paterson, sometimes called The White Line, other times the Passaic Line Street Railway. (Secaucus brags of having had the first trolley and the first stage coach.) “When I got into office in 1992, we found this spot loaded with junk,” former Mayor Anthony Just said recently. “The road department cleared it out and put in some benches and some lights. The original rails were here, and so was a section of cobblestone road.” Before NJ Transit became the dominate transportation network in the state, Public Service ran the trolleys, a by-product of energy companies that used to compete for business by offering services that ran on the energy they sold. Today’s young people are confused when old-timers mumble something about catching a “public service” bus, as most of them were either born after 1980 when Public Service Gas and Electric gave up their claim, or moved into the state after the power company gave up its routes to the semi-governmental entity that currently runs most of the trains and buses in New Jersey. Old-timers who were kids at the turn of the century talk about a time when people used to knock on the door to ask if the house wanted to be “electrified,” and different companies were constantly digging holes at the curb to put up poles for their own company’s wires, a confusion of industrialists seeking to meet the needs of a power-hungry public whose lives had been turned on by dreamers like Thomas Edison. Yet more than lights, energy companies provided an even greater need: transportation. The trolley – which local historians claim originated in a factory on Flanagan Way in Secaucus – became one of the central means of transportation for a general public that could not afford a car. Power companies like Public Service Gas & Electric purchased the right-of-ways the way NJ Transit have more recently purchased right-of-ways for light rail, and an infrastructure of trolley lines criss-crossed the state. From 1916 until World War II, Public Service trolleys transported about 450 million people. During the way, buses became the principal mode of public transport and Public Service joined that race to become the biggest company in the state, with routes that covered transportation to New York, Paterson, Hoboken, and other huge urban hubs.