New Jersey, Land Of The Poets

"there’s a number that explains it: 566, the number of municipalities in New Jersey, more per square mile than any other state. It’s the same number that explains so much else about our state — its economy, its politics, its landscape, its psychology, and why it has provided such a rich trove of stories for newspapers like this one. Poetry is compressed language, a density of meaning in a small space, and we are a compressed state, a density of communities in a small landscape.

“New Jersey’s gift to its poets,” wrote one of the other Pulitzer winners, Stephen Dunn, “is that it’s a place of many places.”

There are so many of them that the late Dave Van Ronk wrote a song, “Garden State Stomp,” whose lyrics consisted entirely of 80 of the most euphonic place names strung together in a rhyming pattern; and enough remained that he might easily have gone a few stanzas more. “Allamuchy, Hacklebarney, Rockaway, Piscataway,” he opened, and continued all the way to, “Matchaponix, Delawanna, Wawayanda, Timbuctoo.”

It’s a crazy system we have here, inefficient in the extreme and the cause of periodic handwringing, especially in years like this, when a budget crunch makes it seem an unaffordable luxury to have 566 governments serving a population roughly the same size as New York City’s, which manages with just one. A commission in Trenton — the infelicitously named Local Unit Alignment, Reorganization and Consolidation Commission — has been studying the issue for the last year. It recently recommended 26 possible mergers of North Jersey communities; the South Jersey recommendations are expected later this month.

But the commission can only recommend; it can’t undo an entrenched legacy of home rule in the state that dates back before the Revolution. It can’t force any of those 566 municipalities to share schools or police or even garbage collection with any other, let alone ask them to merge. It can’t erase the fiercely parochial bonds shared by those who remember when the mill closed, when the river rose, when the fire struck, when the high school football team won the championship.

Consolidation sounds like a reasonable idea, a rational solution to an expensive and anachronistic status quo, until it starts knocking at your own door. If your blood begins to rise at the prospect of your community joining in wedlock with one of its neighbors, then you’ve just marked yourself as a genuine New Jerseyan.

All those separate places — all 566 of them, with their costly mayors and police chiefs and school principals, but also their priceless heroes and villains, their legends and tragedies — may be bad for our wallets, but they’re essential to our identity. They are the fenced-in gardens where our abundant stories grow; and the smaller they are, the more captive the audience, the faster the stories can root and bloom."