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Originally published in 1939
Some of this information may no longer be current and in that case is presented for historical interest only.
Edited by GET NJ, COPYRIGHT 2003
Outside the magnificent view across Newark Bay clear to Newark and Elizabeth, Bayonne has little of the unusual to offer the sightseeing visitor except the amazing oil-refinery section on Constable Hook. This is worth a visit if the sightseer has the patience and courage to thread its mazes, and the foresight to secure a pass that will admit him to the inner secrets of an oil refinery. The approach is by 22nd Street, which starts from Hudson Boulevard on the heights and descends across streets of retail stores, through a minor industrial and tenement district, and then loses itself in a thick forest of what appear to be gargantuan steel mushrooms. These are the oil tanks of America's major refineries, receiving crude petroleum pumped in unbroken streams from pipe lines that go through the Alleghanies to Pennsylvania, and Ohio, and under the Mississippi River as far west as Oklahoma and Texas. In Bayonne the crude oil is broken down or "cracked" into crude petroleum, gasoline, kerosene, naphtha, vaseline, various tars and pitches, and a host of minor products (such as chemicals and drugs) that emerge into common use under disguises that only scientists understand.
Most of the district is fenced off into carefully guarded areas owned and developed by the various refineries. A few of the smaller refineries are open to visitors on application at the gate. To enter the more spectacular major ones, however, one must obtain permits in advance, generally from headquarters in New York City. The New York offices are frequently willing to admit large parties under guides, but visitors are never allowed to wander at will. There are various causes for this intensive guarding. The nature of many refinery products is such that a careless sightseer with a cigarette could blow Bayonne into New York Bay; further, some of the processes are secret. The major refineries themselves are carefully planned miniature cities containing stores, community houses, first-aid hospitals, and restaurants for the use of the thousands of employees.
Other waterfront factories produce chemicals, garments, cork, cables, yachts, and metal and food products. The business section stretches for twenty blocks along Broadway, a wide street packed with small food, clothing and accessory stores. Tall buildings and smart shops are lacking; Bayonne's merchants sell to workers. It is first of all a workingman's city, and its localized industries are attuned to this basic fact; so also are its recreations and its civic life, in which latter phase the labor question most naturally prevails. The city traditionally is open shop, but the bulk of the working population is organized either in company or in independent unions.
The homes in the better residential section consist of one- or two-family frame houses set well back from the sidewalk, with trees and close-cropped lawns. Most of them date from the building boom that followethe World War. On Newark Bay, adjoining a residential area, are city and county parks attractively landscaped with paths and drives, offering unexpected contrast to the industrial development close by.
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