The Chemical Shore, New Jersey's Industrial Corridor

Drive the New Jersey Turnpike between Exits Eight and Thirteen on a clear night and you will see what looks like a science-fiction landscape: towers of flame from refinery stacks, tangles of pipe and holding tanks lit in amber and white, an infrastructure so massive and so interwoven that it has no obvious beginning or end. This corridor, running through Elizabeth, Linden, Perth Amboy, and the meadowlands west of the Hudson, is one of the most concentrated industrial stretches in the United States, and it has been for more than a century. The reasons are geographic and economic.

New Jersey sits between the deep-water ports of New York Harbor and the interior markets of the eastern seaboard. The waterways of Newark Bay and the Kill Van Kull provided access for tankers. The flat marshlands of the meadowlands were cheap to buy and easy to fill.

And by the early nineteen hundreds, the chemistry was following the railroads: Standard Oil built a refinery in Bayway near Elizabeth in nineteen oh nine that would eventually become one of the largest petroleum-processing complexes on the East Coast. BASF, Merck, and dozens of other chemical manufacturers established operations in New Jersey in the early twentieth century, drawn by the same geography and by proximity to the immigrant labor pools of Newark and Jersey City. The industrial corridor made New Jersey wealthy and it made parts of it sick.

The legacy of chemical production left contamination in waterways, in soil, in communities. The Superfund program, created by Congress in nineteen eighty, lists more sites in New Jersey than in any other state, a distinction that reflects both how heavily the state was industrialized and how seriously it has attempted to account for that legacy. The corridor today handles a significant fraction of the East Coast's petroleum imports and hosts major pharmaceutical production.

The flares burn on. New Jersey, the most densely populated state in the country, built its twentieth century on the ground between the refineries and the suburbs.