This past Sunday I did my presentation for Book-TV at an American Legion Hall in Ocean County, New Jersey. I chose this site because so many refugees from my native Newark and other collapsing New Jersey cities – Camden, Trenton, Patterson, Passaic – found refuge in this county.
For these refugees, Ocean County was not nearly as glamorous as it sounds. Most settled far from the sea in the slapdash suburbs being carved out of the Pine Barrens.
If workers had to drive 60 or so miles to their jobs, so be it. They could not afford the established suburbs surrounding a city like Newark and could not remain in neighborhoods whose living conditions had become, in the words of one childhood friend, “untenable,” the title of my latest book.
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