What's to Love About the New Jersey Turnpike? Everything.

New York Times

08-07-2025

Like many who grew up in the Northeast, I rarely thought about the New Jersey Turnpike, other than to joke about its ugliness. When I was a kid, the turnpike felt synonymous with the nothingness and boredom of New Jersey — a 'nonsite,' as the artist Robert Smithson once called it.
The turnpike, an express toll road covering 117 miles, connects some of the state's suburbs to New York, Philadelphia and other major cities on a gargantuan concrete highway. When completed in 1951, it was celebrated as a marvel of engineering, the third-longest of its kind in the United States, and academics called it 'the embodiment of American pragmatism.'
This pragmatism can end up having comic effects. What is one supposed to make of a rest stop populated by a Starbucks and Popeyes and named for Walt Whitman? Why is the road managed by an entity ominously named 'the authority,' as if it were an alien or a paramilitary organization? I remember an urban legend going around my high school, that the New Jersey Turnpike Authority was a secret government plot to turn all of New Jersey into turnpike.
But the more time you spend on this highway, the more otherworldly it does feel. The turnpike's tollbooths heighten your expectations from the start. Payment of the fee then grants you access to a long, flat amusement park, which funnels you into a dizzying number of random worlds along its spine. I've taken wrong turns and ended up wandering through Little India, on Oak Tree Road off Exit 11, or Newark's Brazilian neighborhood off Exit 15E. These immigrant enclaves are not far from the ludicrously named American Dream Mall, off Exit 16W.
All roads go from one place to another, but some do much more, transforming riders as well as transporting them. As a kid, I most dreaded taking Exit 8 to Manalapan. At home in Richboro, I was a regular American teenager, but after just 40 minutes on the highway, I was a Burmese child at the Manalapan Buddhist Temple, being poked and prodded by my relatives, sneaking glances at the clock in meditation sessions. When I graduated from college in Princeton, we took Exit 9 and ate at Wonder Seafood in Edison, and it was like taking a portal to the south of China. Though college was supposed to be a melting pot, it was the turnpike that flung me into true diversity. Now, when I go from my parents' home to mine in Brooklyn, I travel through its most famously hideous portion: a 33-mile strip flanked by the flames of oil refineries on one side and giant shipping crates on another. The ugly, raw vistas usher me out of suburbia, quickly turning me from my parents' baby into a taxpaying adult — as if the refineries also refine me.
Could Robert Smithson's 'nonsite' have been a compliment rather than a criticism? In 1951, the sculptor and painter Tony Smith took a joyride down the not-yet-completed turnpike, and as he flew down the dark, abstract asphalt, that liminal road 'did something for me that art had never done,' he later told Artforum. 'Its effect was to liberate me from many of the views I had about art.' Afterward, he began making the terse metal sculptures for which he's best known, beginning the North American minimalism movement. The highway's ability to warp and transform people has even been honored in fiction: In the cult-classic movie 'Being John Malkovich,' the main character continually tumbles through Malkovich's brain, spat out afterward into a ditch along the turnpike — a detail that inspired the real-life town of Elizabeth to proudly erect a tourist destination near its Exit 13A off-ramp.
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