[/amazon_link]I haven't read it, but I'm sure it's full of fabulous secrets about the Garden State!
When people ask me where I’m from, I often say New York City. When they ask me which part, I tell them, “New Jersey.” NJ is a diverse and wacky state about which there is much confusion, and I’m here to add to it.
Q: Why is it called the Garden State, when it looks like an industrial wasteland when you drive through it?
A: I thought I’d explained this already. Some idiot went and named it the Garden State, and people started flocking in from NYC cluttering up the place. So we established a blighted area zone around the major traffic arteries so that everyone would think it was a post-apocalyptic movie set and…just…keep…going. Sort of like the Hollywood western movie towns in reverse. Instead of desert behind the facade, it’s lush greenery and bucolic landscape.
Q: Where do “Jersey Barriers” come from?
A: The exact location is a secret known only to a few NJTPK employees, but some where between Exits 23 and 24 on the Turnpike, there is a natural hot spring that oozes hot sediment. When surveyors found it right in the path of the Turnpike, they decided that rather than reroute the road, they’d make use of it as a natural source of concrete. All that required was the installation of a die to form the cross section of what we know know as Jersey Barriers, and a machine to chop them off when they reach the right length. As each barrier is pushed out, it pushes all others down the road one space. Filling all the nations highways took about thirty years. Today, you’ll see road moving equipment removing old barriers on bridges and at constructions sites, taking them away so to make room for the new ones still being formed.
Then again…maybe you weren’t cleared for that information. Forget I said anything.