More like fart it here. As I mentioned yesterday in the post about living in Canada, learning about the weird places people live is surprisingly interesting. Let me know if you live in a place and want strangers on the internet to know about it! Let's keep this rolling with a slice of life from rural New Jersey thanks to Steph Koyfman. Check out her blog here.
A photographic essay of the town I’ll never stop making fun of
Before I say anything else, I’ll just get it out of the way. Flemington sounds like Phlegmington. I was nervous about moving here in 5th grade, and mainly for that reason. Anyway, moving on, I thought I’d bring your attention first to this nice photo of the property line my parents share with the farmer across the way.
While we’re on the subject, here’s a list of other weird things Flemington is famous for:
Many moons ago, landscapers made the folly of dumping branches onto the farmer’s side of the thorny bush hedge that was serving as a natural fence at the time. I’m pretty sure the farmer confronted my parents verbally and aggressively at that point, and ever since then, the proliferating bushes that once graced this bovine vista slowly started to die away, but only those that were adjacent to our lawn. The neighbors on either side were fine. My parents even claim to have seen him sprinkling a sinister substance about under the cover of dusk or dawn, but needless to say, they ended up having to erect this rustic-looking fence instead.
I thought this would make a pretty on-point introduction for our journey through this agrarian-turned-development-centric town. Flemington’s history is a farming history, and you still see that everywhere, only now with more designer Toll House Brothers homes encroaching on it. I can’t say everyone here kills each other’s bushes out of spite, but at least now I get to listen to my dad make funny jokes about how when he dies, he’ll have his body poisoned with crop-killing chemicals and then secretly buried on the farmer’s plot.
Here’s the other contradiction raging at the core of this town: for being so development-focused, it’s pretty broke. Both economically and in terms of things to do. I would say a lot of that owes to the recession (obvi), but this place has been objectively pretty lame since at least 1998.
Exhibit A: Your List of Options as a Teenager in Flemington on a Friday Night
- Movies, Applebee’s and/or Friday’s Trifecta
- Steal shopping carts from Burlington Coat Factory and then race them to the other end of the strip mall
- ???
- See and be seen at Wawa (New Jersey’s answer to 7-11). I’m not even exaggerating.
My options now as a casual 21+ visitor are slightly expanded, and they basically encompass two drinking scenarios that represent both extremes of New Jersey stereotypes. One is a bar called Hillbilly Hall, tucked away on a distant winding back road that you’ll never navigate correctly the first time if you don’t know where you’re going. This is where you can go to see dudes in John Deere hats singing karaoke. On the other hand, you can drive the 15-20 minutes to New Hope, where there’s more bars and stuff and a slightly greater chance of fist-pumping and Pauly D aspirers – even though it’s technically across the border in Pennsylvania.
To be fair though, things are a little worse than I remember. There are now officially no independent cafes – if you don’t count the Bible reading room cafe (I don’t). A consignment shop I was about to make an appointment with told me three days later that they were being forced to shut down. The crumbling, semen-stained movie theater, which housed option A above, just got demolished to make way for – surprise surprise! – another bank and CVS, just in case you really couldn’t abide the extra 10 minutes of driving it would take you to get to the other one off Route 31.
Also, this wasn’t as recent, but it was a big controversial bummer when the zoning officials (or whoever) decided to tear down the historic Flemington Fairgrounds, arguably one of the most interesting relics of a not-so-commercial past. The carnival there had been in full swing since the early 1900s, ripping people off via impossible arcade games and carving out an important cultural meeting place for the townsfolk. There was also a Racetrack providing locals with a small taste of NASCAR in their own backyards. Long story short, it was all bulldozed. Guess what replaced it?:
While we’re on the subject, here’s a list of other weird things Flemington is famous for:
- Those Flemington Furs ads you see as soon as you cross the bridge and tunnel from Manhattan
- Car dealerships Northlandz, which holds the Guinness World Record for World’s Largest Model Railroad, connected to, no kidding, an extensive wax doll museum
- The courthouse, where the Trial of the Century, famous Lindbergh dead baby whodunnit of the 1920s took place (above).
I have nothing sarcastic to say about the rest of the photographs in my possession, so I’ll leave you with this flattering, hyper-saturated tour de force of breathtaking fields and pastoral magnificence – what Baudelaire would have surely deemed suitable for demonstrating the “astral” quality of the wide open Americas (no, I don’t really know what that means either).
Not so abstract interpretation: “The smoking bench”
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6 comments:
Seems more boring than living in Canada.
I hope lots of people like this one or else it means Canada is better than New Jersey.
That's weird that some small town would be overrun by Walmarts and CVS.
Yeah but what color are those horses' dicks?
Feel like this would be a good place to set up a base once the zombies come.
What does this have to do with Snooki?
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