Newark Approach
Always request a window seat. Sometimes you'll get a nice surprise, and if you have the camera ready, you can document and save a snapshot of a scene, a city -- a city that will never again exist, thanks to the constant creative destruction of urbanization across all parts of the world. Returning from a trip in February, 2002, the plane crossed the Kittatiny Mountains and then banked south over the Passaic River, dividing Bergen from Essex Counties. It was morning, and the light was a bit surreal, and sometimes blinding when mixed with the light mist over the New York / Northern Jersey landscape. Making matters worse, I had been taken in by the marketing and convenience of a mail-order photo processing company, so I was shooting with film that would degrade very quickly. By the time I was able to begin scanning the entirety of my slide collection in the summer of 2010, some of the emulsion had bled into a diffuse haze that added more fog to the morning light. Even so, nothing can obscure the fundamental historical and geographical imprint of centuries of industrialization, followed by two or three generations of full-fledged deindustrialization.
"The city has spread across the plain, up the rivers, over the low-lying hills, down along the sea. Long ago it had put its stamp indelibly on New Jersey, but it continues to move with the inevitability of time." (Bebout and Grele, 1964, p. 91).
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"In the beginning was the plain, lying between two great rivers and sloping south and east to the Atlantic. The plain was crossed by other rivers and was backed in the northwest by rolling hills with nesting lakes and ponds. There were marshes and forests, coastal and river harbors, fish in sea and stream, fertile land, untouched minerals .... Across the eastern river was the colonial city of New York, sheltering barely one thousand souls, and soon across the western river would be Philadelphia. ...
Three hundred years later, New Jersey has become the most urban state in the world's most highly-developed urban-industrial nation." John E. Bebout and Ronald J. Grele (1964). Where Cities Meet: The Urbanization of New Jersey. Princeton: D. Van Nostrand Company, p. 1.