How New Jersey Saved Civilization: The first cloverleaf interchange (original) (raw)
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Anyone who has ever driven on a Jersey highway knows there's plenty of drama to go around. Now one of the Garden State's most famous interchanges is getting the celluloid treatment. Coming soon to a theater near you — well, more likely to a DVD player of a road geek with a fetish for bituminous concrete and balustrades precisely 4-feet, 3-inches high — is "The Woodbridge Cloverleaf: Onramps to Innovation," a 30-minute documentary about the first cloverleaf interchange built in the U.S.
The film, commissioned by the New Jersey Department of Transportation, details this engineering marvel, so innovative in its day that it made the cover of Engineering News Record, knocking the Hoover Dam to the back pages.
Diehard infrastructure freaks will swoon to languorous pans of the underside of the concrete-encased I-beam overpass and the faces of the abutments, all set to a sultry bossa nova beat. When it was built in 1928, the interchange connected brand-new Route 25, a major corridor between New York City and Philadelphia, with Route 4, which ran from Elizabeth down to the Jersey Shore. (Due to subsequent highway renumbering, today it's the junction of Routes 1&9 and Route 35.)
The highway engineer designing that section of Route 25 knew traffic would be too heavy for an at-grade intersection, so he proposed two possibilities. The first was a rotary, or traffic circle, very much in vogue at the time; in fact, the Airport Circle in Pennsauken, the first highway rotary in the U.S., had just opened a few years before. The other option was based on a picture of a cloverleaf shaped interchange he'd seen on the cover of an Argentinian magazine. (Because Argentina is known for nothing if not its beef and its civil engineering.)
The state Highway Department opted for the elegant cloverleaf, which would neatly accommodate turning and through-traffic without conflict. Well, at least not at first. Thanks to the growth of the car culture and suburban development, drivers who once could merge easily onto the highway now found themselves backed up on the loop ramps, waiting for a gap in the traffic.
The bridge itself began to deteriorate, and in 1995, the DOT declared it functionally obsolete. The so-called "safety engineered superhighway intersection" is now a ghostly contour on satellite images; as with most of the nation's cloverleafs, it has been replaced with a new design featuring fewer loops and longer acceleration lanes.
But when you pass through it, say a silent thanks. If not for that great leap of faith, the interchange might have been one gigantic traffic circle. And you'd still be sitting in it.
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