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Route 9: Turning Back The Clock
By Bill McLaughlin
Route 9 is an integral part of the Ocean County area, an historic road that is virtually impossible to ignore. It is among the area's biggest boons, and also among the biggest problems. Traffic and congestion, yes, but also much-needed goods and services. The Manchester Times takes a look back at what Route 9 once was.
Most Ocean County residents think of Route 9 as the shortest way between two points, but rarely an easy trip to make.
The local, free alternative to the Garden State Parkway wasn't always the crowded, bumpy ride it is today. A century ago it was a bumpy ride absent the crowds who more frequently were traveling by train or boat to get long distances.
Long before the Eisenhower administration focused on building a national network of interconnecting highways in the early 1950s, travel by car in this country was difficult at best.
A family taking a vacation trip to Atlantic City from northern New Jersey was more likely, in the 1920s, to take a train rather than car. That's because only a small percentage of Americans could afford the auto, and also if you had one what would you do with it once you got there?
Dating back to the 19th century, the road now called Route 9 was maintained by either municipalities or individual land owners. Travelers could expect to pay a toll for crossing waterways. This happened up and down Routes 1 and 9, the precursors of the two long-haul roadways in New Jersey, the Turnpike and Parkway.
So little documentation exists on how the roadway fit into our ancestors' way of life, snippets in personal diaries are the main source material. What is known is that in central Ocean County, for example, the hubs were maritime towns like Toms River and Barnegat and seasonally Lakewood for its summer influx of millionaires, and rail crossroads like Whiting and Lakehurst. County and local historical societies don't pick up on Route 9 as an entity until 1907, when the state of New Jersey took over the road and named it Route 4. Confusion about the designation, which was Route 9-4 until the late 1950s, didn't cause much concern because traffic was still negligible.
The Worth family spread at the southern end of Berkley Township changed hands from generation to generation. So did the Bunnells, who lived near the cranberry bog, the Vanderveers, and the family of Judge Henry F. Mott, a civic leader of his day.
Until the mid-1920s, the Bayville area was pretty much farm land with a general store, a gas station and a few other shops in Bayville. As the popularity of the motor car grew, so did the number of vacationers to soak up the sun and add to traffic volume on local roads.
Most of the land west of Route 9 was pine forest with scattered farms. Things stayed that way until the late 1960s, when senior housing first was built west of the Parkway.
Bayville was a sleepy little town of 1,550 souls in 1956, according to county planning board statistics of that era. There were 56,609 Ocean County residents at the time, according to the census, with 10,000 living in Lakewood.
What happened next is one of the great whodunits of our times. Beachwood, Berkeley, Pine Beach and other Route 9 towns began to build out during the post-World War II era, and there was no consensus to protect rightof ways along the main north-south arterial roadway. Either no one saw the need to plan for a future four-land highway or no one would make tough choices while such a plan was still feasible.
Today, the cost of buying up right-of-ways alone would be prohibitive to expanding Route 9. Building a roadway with alternatives to the dual lane constancy is a pipe dream.
Toward the end of the 20th century, some leaders still didn't see the need for alternatives to a rising volume of traffic on the roadway.
In northern Ocean County and throughout Monmouth County, the state built out where it could, making Route 9 at least two lanes - and in some cases three - in each direction from County Line Road in Lakewood to the Middlesex County line. The widening coincided with a building boom from the Manalapan-Marlboro corridor to Howell in the southern end of Monmouth County.
After the Garden State Parkway was completed in the 1950s, a shore area land boom began that hasn't slackened much in the intervening years. World War II vets figured the commute from the shore to northern jobs wouldn't be much longer than on public transit from their home towns and would have some benefits: their kids could grow up in a fresh air environment, away from the corruption of the big cities and with the ocean almost at the doorstep.
At a meeting in Eagleswood about a decade ago, long-time local engineer Jack Mallon was asked by civic leaders why Route 9 became clogged the way it was. Mallon answered that there was no long-range planning because there was no unanimity of will.
What a small town like Eagleswood would want or need is a far cry from what those in the Lakewood-Brick corridor would want, with its city-like congestion. Mallon said with some links - like the Beachwood corridor - forever limited to one lane in each direction no reasonable solution was possible.
As for alternate routes, the proposed rail trail being built from Barnegat to Brick was always considered a potential end run for locals who could avoid summertime backups on the busy roadway. But Lacey residents mounted a grass roots campaign to keep free of cars and won.
But an alternative route never happened because politicians like Bill Zimmerman of Berkeley didn't want to funnel potential patrons away from Route 9 businesses. So up and down the roadway, town fathers mixed manufacturing with commercial with residential uses until the acreage along the roadway was fully developed.
And that left us with the Route 9 we have today.
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