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St elsewhere cast then and now7/6/2023 Route 22 in Union NJ was considered the ultimate “slob road”–a never-ending forest of signs, lights, traffic, and visual clutter. More “roadside squalor” as the caption describes it, this time on Route 46 in Saddle Brook NJ.Īfter “a clamor for legislation to save the landscape”, do things look any better after 60 years? The signage is more boring and plain, but that’s about it. You can join the fun by finding an old photo online or in a book and then looking up the street view on Google. But I’ve also included some notable pictures from other areas of the country. I’m focusing on the New Jersey/New York area because I grew up here and it’s easier for me to orient myself to locations I’m somewhat familiar with. Many photos of this type have no specific location or address listed, so you have to look for little clues and use your own knowledge and memories to guide you. It’s amazing how much things have changed over the decades. White Tower (with “curb service”), Sunoco–all green space now.įinding these “after” views is not as easy as you think. It definitely had a character all its own, which may be appreciated now more than it was then. Almost to the point where someone might miss seeing this 1950s-60s “grubble” (as New York mayor Ed Koch used to refer to this kind of haphazard roadside development, with its accompanying vivid neon signage). Well, there’s an eternal saying, “This too shall pass”, and passed it has, much of it. Muckraker books like God’s Own Junkyardwere written telling us how bad all this was. When I was growing up, highway scenes like the one above were quite common, and widely regarded as ugly, tasteless, tacky–a blight on the landscape. And thanks to that wondrous bit of technology known as Google Street Views, we can now see how things have (and haven’t) changed over the decades. So I decided to create this second post, which shows many interesting old scenes that I have collected over the years. While putting together my recent post ( How The 21st Century Is Replacing the 20th), I found a number of other photos that I was thinking of including, but they didn’t seem to fit. Although she was considered for the movie version of Suzie Wong, the role ultimately went to Nancy Kwan, her Broadway understudy.Admiral Wilson Boulevard (Route 30) and Baird Boulevard, Camden NJ Following a brief interview with 20th Century Fox she was cast in South Pacific as a barefoot island girl before following the film’s director to the stage where she took on the role of Suzie Wong in The World of Suzie Wong where she memorized her lines phonetically while learning to speak English. Once the war ended Nuyen and her mother fled to New York where she started modeling for Candy Jones in spite of the fact that she didn’t speak much English. To make matters worse, she looked Jewish so the Gestapo was always harassing her. At the end of the war, my mother weighed only with eyes sunk into her face. In 2019 she told the Mansfield News Journal: There were times we only had beans or lentils to eat, which the merchants mixed with dirt so they would weigh more when we bought it. However, that doesn’t mean that things were easy. Born in France abandoned by her father, Nuyen was raised in Marseille by a cousin and her mother in order to avoid persecution during World War II.
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