Bayonne (pronounced bay-OWN) NJ is on the water. It's an 11-sq mi peninsula with Newark Bay to the west, New York Bay to the east, and Kill van Kull to the south (borders Jersey City). The kill-- one of the most heavily-traveled waterways in the Port of NY & NJ-- is a tidal strait connecting the two bays and separating Bayonne NJ from Staten Island NY; the steel- network arch which spans it, Bayonne Bridge, dominates the small (65k pop) city's landscape. Like most of NY-NJ, heavy industry is mostly gone; unemployment is over 10%.
Though it lies 15 mis. to my east, it hasn't much auto access so I've never been. Until today, my image of Bayonne was formed by the view out the big old windows in the lower-Manhattan building where I worked in the '70's: it looked to be a dense smoggy urb with big piers & an enormous clock. Turns out the clock (50ft dia, still biggest in world) actually lay just to the east in Jersey City, atop the old Colgate-Palmolive Co; the icon keeps on ticking in a lot somewhere nearby. Though Bayonne has a tough-guy image, that was apparently wishful hype by young Italo-American males of the 1950's; Bayonne was and still is a mostly-Catholic town with a mild crime profile compared to its rough neighbors-- perhaps this is why denizens stick around despite constant river traffic noise & the stench (they're a stone's throw downwind of the Bayway refineries).
Posts: 2605 | Location: As they say at 101.5FM: Not New York... Not Philadelphia... PROUD TO BE NEW JERSEY!
after which I depart for a visit to my antique mum whose wifi is always on the fritz. Otherwise I shall post the one limerick submitted which shall surely win compared with the unfinished poor specimen I am teasing along.
Let's go!
Posts: 2605 | Location: As they say at 101.5FM: Not New York... Not Philadelphia... PROUD TO BE NEW JERSEY!
