Grandparents' houses on Johnston and Clinton Avenues Jersey City

The next day I came back by myself to this neighborhood. The reason was that when I saw Arlington Park next to Saint Patrick's on Bramhall and Grand Streets I realized how close I was to both the houses my grandparents had lived in and to the one in which my parents, brother, sister and cousins had lived.

Yet again I am amazed how close things are in Jersey City and how variegated the neighborhoods are. The house I remember my grandparents living in was at 15 Clinton Avenue; it was a more than respectable house on a small street a few blocks from the park. A memory that was jogged by the setting was a non-family wedding in which I was a junior usher, I think the bride was Janet, a friend of my sister. The wedding was performed in Saint Patrick's church [whose stone didn't come from the Erie or Lackawanna or Pennsy cuts through the Palisades but from the Central Railroad of New Jersey's cut].

Two odd pieces of information remain stuck in my mind from that wedding, one being the comment that one of the older men made during the rehearsal about how lucky the nervous bride was that she was being married in relatively small St. Patrick's and not being married in All Saints [a few blocks away] where the walk from the vestibule to the altar was almost a block long.

How has Clinton Avenue changed? The houses are not kept up well; some of them have no fences or the fences and railings have been patched with or replaced by the pressed wood construction that you find now in suburban housing for decks. I would not go out of my way to choose to buy a house and live on that block but it is not horrible or depressing. As I was walking around taking pictures I went to the corner at Hamilton Avenue, turned right and entered another world.

My grandparents' house was a nice working class house on a nice working class block for working class immigrants who had gotten a little ahead. When I turned the corner onto Madison Avenue, however, I was on an elegant residential block of brownstones and middle class, close to upper middle class, housing, from the turn of the century. A few houses are actually built with brownstone material - most are brick - but all are in the brownstone style: wide fronts, high floors and windows, medium high stoops, elegant trim, wrought iron decoration. Clarence Day's family could have lived there. The street looks especially good because it is lined with mature trees and is paved with brick. 

Some background for people who didn't grow up in Jersey City. All the time I lived there, and probably until the 1970s there was no black section, no "ghetto", in Jersey City: what there was was Lafayette and adjoining parts of the city the only section of the city that African Americans lived in but which was still racially mixed, and - I think - majority European American as late as the 1970s.

As a result most of the blacks of Hudson County - not just of Jersey City - lived there or in the sections of the city adjoining Lafayette, not just poor blacks [and poor whites]. As in Harlem in NYC at that time, the black middle class was in the same neighborhood as the black working class and the black poor. I may be wrong but as I was walking around Madison Avenue I kept remembering that when my grandparents lived there this block was all black and was in fine condition - architecturally and in regard to Bausubstanz,, in fact, better, than my grandparents' house around the corner on Clinton Place. I'm guessing, but don't know, that this block of Madison Avenue had been one of the middle class black blocks.

I then drove about 9 or 10 blocks to 345 Johnston Avenue near Whiton Avenue and Monitor Street [where the Central Avenue bus used to turn off to go down to the CRNJ ferry] the house in which my grandparents had first lived, where my parents and brother and sister and one cousin from my mother's side of the family had lived and where aunts and uncles and cousins from my father's side of the family had lived.

345 Johnston Avenue was a tenement. In my memory - which might be warped - the best tenement in the neighborhood but still a tenement. One of my cousins who had lived there made a comment that it was always kept up when they lived there and was respectable. But I also remember the neighborhood in a later period in the 50s and 60s as being a really crummy city street: houses not kept up, Johnston Avenue having mostly tenements, not houses or apartment houses. Scruffy, dirty, depressing, noisy. Crammed in and unpleasant.

Look at this picture of 345 Johnston Avenue. Do you think my memory was that far off? No, my memory was right. But .....

But everything, everything, for a four or five block stretch of Johnston Avenue has been demolished: tenements, houses, stores, everything. In their place suburban ranch-style duplexes were put up. This is similar to what I had seen the previous day on the bus tour going up Ocean Avenue. Marguerite's store, and all the other stores are missing and except for the street grid everything has been rebuilt  from scratch. It was like the situation of German cities rebuilt after World War II. The street has even lost its name in a big section; Johnston Avenue had run all the way - maybe a mile or more - down to the Central Railroad of New Jersey terminal and the ferries to New York. Now at about Monitor Street the name changes from Johnston Avenue to Audrey Zapp Drive going down to the terminal which is now being changed into a museum.

And going about three or four blocks from here onto Ocean Avenue is Saint Mary's Byzantine Catholic Church which may have been my grandmother's church [Saint Anthony's was my grandfather's]. The section of Ocean Avenue running from Saint Mary's a few blocks down to All Saints and Johnston Avenue is another middle class 19th Century Jersey City block that still looks in excellent condition.