No longer pounding the pavement
Life smooths out a bit when your street is resurfaced
For the past few years, I’ve used the First Person column as a bully pulpit to criticize officials of my hometown, West Orange, for decisions that I feel negatively affect its environment and quality of life.
Now I’m finally getting a chance to pay the township a compliment. Full stop. Let me hedge that a bit; I’m getting a chance to pay a compliment to the contractors chosen by the township.
And it doesn’t concern topics I usually weigh in on. No, this time I’m not mounting a righteous high horse about trees unnecessarily and illegally cut down, or inappropriate, unsightly development blighting the slopes of First or Second Orange mountains, adding to traffic congestion, pollution, and strains on municipal services.
What I am writing about — pretty much gushing over — is much more basic, absolutely trivial considering what’s going on in the world, the very essence and definition of ho-hum quotidian. It’s something devoid of glamour, extremely low tech, highly labor-intensive, dust-raising, lawn disrupting, and requiring a good dose of fossil fuels.
I’m talking about the long and winding road leading up to the repaving of my street. And I’m gushing over its transformation from ugly duckling to swan, from a rutted, kishke-shaking washboard to a billiard-smooth mini-boulevard without seams, potholes, or misaligned manhole covers.
In retrospect, this didn’t happen overnight, or over months or years. No, it was a multi-decade process, a slow-motion deterioration of a suburban mountaintop cul-de-sac that bore the scarring of being torn apart and patched together for new gas lines and water mains, with spidery surface cracks caused by repeated salting, plowing, and freeze-thaw cycles.
By my reckoning, this was the third time Cleveland Terrace has been milled and resurfaced since my family moved here in 1957. Perhaps there was another instance while I was away at college or the army, or in various apartments before moving back with Dad in his last years, and then bringing in my new family in 1981.
I’m aware that every municipality —there are 564 of them in the Garden State — is required to adopt some sort of capital improvement budget with expenditures projected for water, sewer, road improvements and the like. But as the years rolled by without Cleveland Terrace receiving attention, my jealousy grew while I watched other roads in the township, some close to my neighborhood, being remediated and repaved, and wondered when our turn would come.
As each election approached, candidates for mayor and council would appear at the door, and I would ask them about Cleveland Terrace. Their reply was always sympathetic, and it was always the same. Only so much was budgeted each year for repairs, and they had to be done in sequence. I would gesture in a sweeping motion toward the pavement and proclaim, in mock Shakespearean tones: Behold, yonder street. It is a disgrace!
I easily could have visited the engineering department at town hall to inquire about its fate, but I didn’t want to risk disappointment with the answer. Instead, I took matters into my own hands, buying bags of asphalt, then dumping, raking, and tamping the contents on the gullied entrance to my driveway. These exertions only left the surface looking more uneven, with the texture of an abstract drip painting abandoned midway.
This state of play remained unchanged until the day, several months back, when a worker with spray paint appeared and began marking our street’s water and sewer connections in blue. These cuneiforms paired up with yellow arrows sprayed on the asphalt several years earlier to guide crews trenching new gas lines.
I knew something earthshattering (my metaphor by choice) was afoot when another worker arrived with a wheel pedometer. I took him to be an estimator, recording the street’s length, width, and other metrics needed to order the proper amount of material, the right equipment, and the requisite dump trucks required to haul out the old asphalt and bring in the new. (Sounds a bit like New Year’s.)
Next came letters from the township, advising Hoover Avenue and Cleveland Terrace residents of dates when driving or parking would be prohibited. This involved two time frames: the first for prep work, installing new Belgian-block curbing, repointing manhole covers, and replacing sewers (with pre-rusted grates), followed by a pause, and then the second burst of activity for milling and resurfacing.
The job’s degree of difficulty increased significantly because of Cleveland Terrace’s location atop Second Orange Mountain, accessible only from Hoover Avenue with its steep gradient, and terminating in a cul-de-sac at one end and a paper street at the other. In this case, my Orthodox neighbors literally held the high ground, having trudged up and down Hoover for years on their way to Congregation AABJD and other area shuls.
While I desperately wanted the work completed, I worried that my wife, injured in a recent fall, wouldn’t be able to keep her doctor’s appointments or attend rehab sessions. I needn’t have. The construction workers and police did everything possible to accommodate us. They allowed me to maneuver my car around equipment and even placed a board over the trench for new curbing while a burly laborer held Gail’s hand as she “walked the plank.”
Let me give shoutouts to Reggio Construction and Macchione Paving, both of Bergen County, for orchestrating all the moving parts with cool professionalism. Crews labored in synchronization, with backhoe operators limiting lawn disruption to the narrowest strip possible so workers could install Belgian blocks. And as they did, cement trucks followed with their chutes deployed and concrete flowing. Meanwhile, front-end loaders darted about, depositing ballast and topsoil before carting off slag and old asphalt. And the next day, lawns were backfilled, raked, and reseeded.
This activity, however, was only a warmup for the main event. Cue the crown jewels of the project, the milling machine and asphalt spreader. The former apparatus featured a conveyor angled skyward, with pavement scrapers under the chassis, clanking treads for traction, and an operator standing atop and, guiding the behemoth at perhaps five miles an hour while it spewed the old surface up the conveyor and into waiting dump trucks.
I’ve always enjoyed big, clunky machinery. As a kid, I used to love watching the last of the steam engines on the Pennsylvania Railroad chugging along the elevated mainline tracks paralleling McCarter Highway in Newark. Or a pile driver, again steam powered, at some big construction site downtown, banging slabs of steel into the bedrock to shore up a foundation and giving off rhythmic clangs in the process.
Now, though, I would have to content myself with the much smaller, quieter, and thoroughly ingenious asphalt spreader. With its gaping tray positioned underneath the tailgate of a dump truck, the device ingested the hot asphalt and discharged it as a new, gleaming roadway. Workers on the machine’s rear platform kept inserting measuring sticks to check the depth and pitch of the surface. In just two passes, the spreader covered Cleveland Terrace with a mantle of fresh asphalt while heavy-duty rollers moved to and for the final tamping.
I had to wait a day to let the new roadway cool and set up. My first spin surpassed all expectations for quiet and comfort. I’m for almost anything that smooths out life’s little bumps (and the big ones) during these times.
To the courteous, patient, and skilled workers of Reggio and Macchione: Good job, fellas!
Jonathan E. Lazarus of West Orange is a retired editor of the Star-Ledger and a copy editor for the Jewish Standard and New Jersey Jewish News. He promises to return to writing about trees.
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