West Caldwell, New Jersey at 100

The fact that West Caldwell was incorporated in the twentieth century should give intelligent residents pause. Most American towns and cities incorporated after 1900 remained farming communities until after the Second World War, and their growth was fueled by suburban, autocentric expansion. West Caldwell is no exception. Its downtown - if it can be called that - is a collection of shopping centers and a lowbrow supermarket, all built in the sixties. Its town hall and library occupy the same building - a charmless, cheap brick box that was orignally an office building. Most of the families who live in the postwar tract houses that dominate the town - I'm lucky to live in a somewhat charming section built before World War II, just as West Caldwell's farming base was beginning to wane - have no historical or social connection to the town; they merely live in West Caldwell for its proximity to the workplace and its "good schools." The high school, by the way, was built in 1958 and looks like a fertilizer factory. (It was used for exterior shots of the fictional high school in Todd Solondz's wonderfully antisuburban movie Welcome To the Dollhouse, largely filmed here.) Ditto the post office, built in 1975 and accessible only by car. There's no sense of history or community here, except in the form of annual summer concerts in Crane Park featuring hack singers that would have trouble passing a Walt Disney World audition and underpublicized events at the West Caldwell Historical Society that romanticize the exploits of the families who lived here in the nineteenth century, when the town was still part of Caldwell Township.

So will I go to the picnic, a least in pursuit of a good time? Maybe. Besides, as a writer, I feel there might be a story there. But if I go, I will do so with my tongue firmly planted in my cheek. The picnic, by the way, is being held not in Crane Park (named for one of thoe nineteenth-century families I alluded to) but at a large field in the middle of an industrial park. Henderson Drive, the street that runs through the industrial park, is named for the black millionaire developer who built the damn place. By the way, Henderson Drive is pretty much the only street in West Caldwell named for a black American.

We do, on the other hand, have a street named for Calvin Coolidge.