Most everyone in West Windsor and Plainsboro townships knows where Route 1 is and what to use it for. It’s the “main” road around here. But as time goes on its relative significance diminishes, since the commercial and office development that attracts local people to it has just about reached capacity.
That’s probably a good thing, since during some parts of the day, when you combine the “through” traffic with the local there’s little room left for any more on that road — in either direction. Just getting across it on Washington Road takes a lot of patience. And that includes a few pedestrians and bicyclists now and then. I have seen them waiting patiently at the Penns Neck circle in their journey toward Princeton.
Of course it wasn’t always that way. Before Carnegie Center, Nassau Park, MarketFair, Forrestal Village, and other sizable developments were built it was just the main highway through town that gave us access to the rest of the world — or at least central New Jersey. If you wanted to go to Trenton or New Brunswick, you went via Route 1 — also known as State Route 26.
You can still go to those places that way, but the whole corridor has become clogged with traffic. It’s sometimes faster to find an alternate way to go via local roads — depending on where you’re starting from. For points beyond central New Jersey — in any direction — you take the New Jersey Turnpike, I-95, I-195, or I-295, among others. There are now many choices of high-speed roads to use, even though getting to them is sometimes at anything but high speed.
Fifty years or so ago the local part of Route 1 started its transformation to a “high speed” highway. Such transformations took place on other roads, as well. They included anything that would improve safety and access such as lane widening, improved pavement, use of raised center dividers, and on-off ramps.
All these improvements meant that speed limits could be raised. Before then Route 1 was a narrow two lanes in each direction, and there was a central grassy median that got mowed periodically by the state. There were also numerous intersections with local roads, some with traffic lights. In many respects it was considered a local road itself. And the lower volume of traffic meant there was less need for traffic lights or overpasses.
Today the central median has been replaced by a concrete divider of the type known as the “Jersey barrier.” (You will find this type of divider in other states, but it was first developed in New Jersey in about 1959, so it is called the Jersey barrier everywhere.) Part of the width saved has been used to create a third lane in each direction. This has also allowed for an increase in the speed limit.
All together the length of local Route 1 is 6.2 miles, 3.9 miles in West Windsor and 2.3 miles in Plainsboro. Starting at the Quaker Bridge Road intersection and going north, there are six road overpasses, the last being the one at Forrestal Village. One overpass carries the Dinky railroad shuttle. In that same distance there are also five traffic lights at road intersections.
The New Jersey portion of Route 1 extends from Trenton, where it leaves Pennsylvania, to the George Washington Bridge, where it enters New York. As it approaches New York it crosses the Hackensack River via the Pulaski Skyway west of Jersey City. From there north to the bridge it skirts the eastern boundary of the Jersey Meadowlands.
On entering New York it crosses part of the Bronx before entering Connecticut, where it becomes known as “The Boston Post Road” after the mail route it once served as. West of Trenton, Route 1 crosses the Delaware River and heads southwest until it enters Philadelphia and crosses the Schuylkill River in the Bala Cynwyd section. From there it makes its way to Baltimore, paralleling I-95.
So much for Route 1 as a local — or nearly local — road. Actually, as one of the first major roadways in the country that retained a single identity over its full length, Route 1 has many interesting points outside of New Jersey. It extends from Key West, Florida, at its southern end to Fort Kent, Maine, at its northern end on the Canadian border, a distance of 2,369 miles. It’s the longest north-south highway in the country.
My first introduction to this road was when my father used to drive me from Brooklyn to see the newly opened Newark Airport in the mid-1930s. He drove across the Manhattan Bridge and then took the Holland Tunnel to New Jersey where we got on Route 1 and the Pulaski Skyway. You could see the new airport and its hangars from the Skyway.
He would then continue down Route 1, which skirted the west side of the airport. Those were the days when the main airliners were DC-3s that had twin piston-type engines and carried about 20 passengers. That was a big deal at the time, and seeing them so close up really turned me on to airplanes.
I have personally come close — or fairly close — to seeing both ends of Route 1. During my stint in the U.S. Navy in 1946 I spent several months at the Boca Chica Naval Air Station at Key West. The only way to reach Key West by land was — and still is — via Route 1. When we wanted to visit Miami for weekend liberty we could hitch a ride on Route 1. (There wasn’t much going on in Key West, the town, that interested me, and Ernest Hemingway’s home was not yet a tourist attraction.) Of course, since it was around 150 miles to Miami, it was much easier if we flew and saw Route 1 from the air. We did that in a PBY “flying boat” into which we could cram about six or eight men in the hull. It made the trip in less than an hour. But there were no windows, so you couldn’t see anything outside during the flight.
Since Route 1 followed the Florida keys it curved off to the south of the straight-line flight to Miami, and if you were flying in an airplane with a cockpit and windows you could get fascinating aerial views of the sea life in the shallow water of Florida Bay. I did that several times as the mechanic on one of our squadron’s TBMs — made in Trenton, by the way. I remember seeing giant turtles and sharks that way. You could see their shadows on the flat bottom of the shallow water if the sun was directly overhead.
Much later on my wife and I were visiting an old friend from New Jersey who had moved to Fort Lauderdale. One day on the spur of the moment I suggested we drive down to Key West — on Route 1, of course. We did and found that it was a very tiresome drive — the scenery is very beautiful, but the same all the time. We passed over some of the best known keys — Largo, Islamorada, Marathon, and Big Pine among others. When we got to Key West we actually visited Hemingway’s home, which by then was a museum open to the public.
The northern end of Route 1 is more complicated, since you must drive nearly 200 miles along the U.S.-Canadian border to reach it. We came close once but never actually got there. Our closest approach came on a family camping trip to Maine. We camped on Mount Desert Island, at Acadia National Park, which is about 10 miles from Route 1. One day I suggested that since we were so far north, why don’t we drive up to the Canadian border. We could also see how far it is to the end of Route 1.
We started out and realized that it was about 100 miles to the border. But we kept going and finally reached the town of Calais on the border. Only when we got there did I realize that the end of Route 1 was actually nearly another 200 miles. I had failed to see on the map that Route 1 snakes along the border that far again before reaching its actual end. We turned around and went back to camp.
Overall Route 1 is a fascinating road mainly because its variety reflects so many different aspects of the physical country. Obviously it blends in with its surroundings no matter where it is. Since it’s not an interstate highway, it does not have the sameness that you become aware of if you’re driving, say, on Route 95 for several hundred miles. On a long trip, when the objective is to get there as soon as you can, the interstates are the way to go. But roads with a lot of local flavor like Route 1 have their own attractions.
For those who want to see what Howard Hughes can do for us, just think of all the nice new traffic the development of his square mile would bring. Maybe we would need four or five lanes each way and more overpasses.
