Quote of the Day (Michael Wood, on Destroying Rivers and the Past)

“The health of our rivers is vital to everyone. If you love history, it is even more pointed, for in our landscapes are carried all our histories. Destroy a river and you also lose its past; it is akin to losing part of our collective memory. We live in times of the degradation of landscapes across the world, caused by poverty but also by the deliberate actions of the rich and powerful. And in Britain these disasters threaten not only our environment and our physical and mental wellbeing but our history, too.”— English historian, broadcaster, and documentary filmmaker Michael Wood, “Michael Wood on…The History Carried in Our Landscapes,” BBC History Magazine, April 2023

Professor Wood’s article deals with rivers in Great Britain. But these waterways—from the Hudson and Potomac in the east, through the Mississippi and Missouri in the heartland, to the Columbia in the West—have been crucial not only to American commerce but also American culture.

The Passaic River in northern New Jersey might not be as famous as these, but it has been as important to those lining its shores. This waterway has been essential to commerce in the area, but also shamefully abused, even listed in 1970 as the second most polluted river in the United States.

In September 2013 I took the image accompanying this post, of a revived tract of land on its banks: Riverfront Park in Garfield.

The creation of Riverfront Park shows what can be done with great effort in a concentrated area. Much remains to be done elsewhere along this 80-mile-long river to ensure the health of residents in the area—and the maintenance of historical memory of how the waterway helped give birth to America’s manufacturing industry.

In addition, the stream forms the backdrop to William Carlos Williams’ poem Paterson, which, the doctor-turned-writer noted, “follows the course of the Passaic River, whose life seemed more and more to resemble my own: the river above the Falls, the catastrophe of the Falls itself, the river below the Falls and the entrance at the end into the great sea."

Photo of the Day: Flashback, Spring 2016, Dahnert's Lake County Park, Garfield NJ

Some years ago, a local DJ, who roundly despised football, would play baseball music as a bit of counterprogramming on Super Bowl Sunday. In a somewhat similar spirit, as the dead icy hand (not to mention snowflakes) of winter falls on us, I thought I would give readers something to look forward to: spring, in the form of a photo I took in mid-April four years ago of Dahnert’s Lake County Park, at the western edge of Bergen County NJ.

Maybe by then, we will have something else to anticipate: the gradual recession of the coronavirus that has had us in its grip since March, blighting everyone’s lives in ways small and, unfortunately, large.

Photo of the Day: Sunday in the Park in Garfield, NJ

The park in question would be Dahnert's Lake County Park, in Garfield, on the western edge of Bergen County, NJ. I took this photo in mid-April. (See this prior post of mine.) I would imagine that even more people are thronging the park these days.

Photo of the Day: Reflections on a Lake

A couple of weeks ago, as part of a Sunday afternoon of photo-taking, I took this shot of Dahnert's Lake County Park, in Garfield, on the western edge of Bergen County, NJ. (A few days ago, I posted the first from this series here.)

Photo of the Day: Trout Fishing, Garfield NJ

Admittedly, “trout fishing” is not the phrase that springs to mind when I think of Garfield, a city on the western edge of Bergen County, NJ, with a gritty industrial past that has left a residue in the form of chromium water contamination from a spill at its E.C. Electroplating Corporation site.

But in driving past a few years ago, I noticed how the area along the Passaic River had been cleaned up (something I discussed in this prior post). And, from working in the city more than a quarter century ago, I recalled a park a few blocks away.

The 10-acre Dahnert's Lake County Park, along Midland Avenue, is stocked with trout beginning the second week of April. I took this photograph of one optimistic fisherman there a week ago.

Photo of the Day: Wall of Water

I took this photograph of the falls on the Passaic River from Riverfront Park in Garfield, NJ, over a week and a half ago.

Photo of the Day: A Man, a Rod, and a River

The image accompanying this post was one of the more dramatic photos I took last week of the Passaic River, which I described the other day in my piece on Riverfront Park in Garfield, NJ.