Carteret: The Borough That Industry Built

The small borough hugging the Arthur Kill waterway between Staten Island and the New Jersey mainland is a place that exists almost entirely because of industrial ambition. Carteret was a farming neck called Rahway Neck until the late nineteenth century, when a stretch of waterfront on Staten Island Sound began attracting heavy manufacturing. The population in the early nineteen hundreds was roughly four hundred people on twenty-five farms. Within two decades it would be more than six thousand.

The borough was originally incorporated as Roosevelt in April nineteen oh six, carved out of Woodbridge Township, and renamed Carteret in nineteen twenty-two in honor of Sir George Carteret, one of the original British proprietors of colonial New Jersey. The name change came just as the factories were hitting full production, and the two events together announced that this was no longer farm country.

At the center of the industrial transformation was the United States Metals Refining Company, whose waterfront smelter began operations in nineteen oh three and eventually operated the largest smokestack east of the Mississippi River. The smelter ran for eight decades, processing copper, lead, and other metals, and its need for workers drew successive waves of immigrants from Eastern Europe: Ukrainians from the Galician counties, Poles, Slovaks, and others who established parishes and mutual-aid societies within walking distance of the plant.

What the smelter also did, over those eight decades of operation, was emit lead, arsenic, copper, and benzene into the surrounding neighborhoods for generations. The facility closed in the mid-nineteen eighties. Decades of litigation followed, culminating in a class-action settlement in which residents received forty-two million dollars in compensation for contamination that had seeped into their soil, their air, and in some cases their bodies.

Carteret today is a working-class borough of roughly twenty-five thousand people, its waterfront still industrial, its neighborhoods still defined by the immigrant generations who arrived to work the factories that are now largely gone.