Mapping the Imagined Past: The Pinelands Jetport
The story of how a vision of a Jetport in the New Jersey Pinelands led to its preservation, and mapping a city that only existed on paper.
The late 1950s were the peak of postwar American urban planning. The future home was the suburbs, domestic travel by car, and international travel by air. Increased air travel demand was pushing airport infrastructure in the New York metro area to its limits. The main problem was the size of the planes. The current technology could only foresee more planes being needed. The anticipated solution aspect of air travel was supersonic travel. Such aircraft would need infrastructure to accommodate their needs, along with providing timely departures and arrivals from other supersonic flights. Envisioning the need to have a supersonic jetport, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey did a study on the need for such a facility. 15 sites were studied. After conservationists defeated the initial proposal in Morris County's Great Swamp, other sites were considered. This led Burlington and Ocean County officials to create a grand proposal.
If built, the area of the Jetport could fit Newark Liberty, JFK, and LaGuardia airports within it and have space to spare.
The New Jersey Pinelands according to the Pinelands Regional Planning Board in 1960.
Like today, the Pinelands were the largest open space along the Northeast Corridor. This also had the consequence of its area being rural with low populations. The economy was dependent on seasonal agriculture, fishing, and tourism. The then-freeholders of Burlington and Ocean Counties created the Pinelands Regional Planning Board in 1960 to promote the area as a location for the jetport. The freeholders saw this as a way to have a stronger year-round economy for the area. One proposal for the area included the creation of a new city that would incorporate modern urban planning elements. These plans would promote combining the advantages of urban living and limiting the congestion of suburban traffic.
A New City
The vision Herbert H. Smith proposed of a jetport and a new city would have changed the Pinelands in ways not seen since the end of iron production in the early 19th century. To accommodate the needs of the proposed jetport, a new city would also be built that would serve as a home for airline professionals and a cultural hub for Ocean County.
Jetport
The jetport was to serve as the supersonic transport hub for the Northeast Corridor. It would have four parallel runways at 16,000 feet long. This setup would allow runways to be paired for exclusive take-off and landing runways. This would enable more efficient flights that would allow more than 100 plane movements per hour. The terminal would have been placed in the center. The Garden State Parkway bypass and new rail services would provide means of travel to and from the jetport.
New City
Smith's vision for a new city encompassed ideas that combined the controlled development of Robert Moses with an eye to the future of Walt Disney. This was to be a city of the future. The conveniences of urban living would be meshed with the American Dream of suburban housing. The backwaters of the Pine Barrens would become a cultural hub with the New City.
City Core
The city's plan consisted of an urban core, an inner ring of neighborhood units, an outer ring of industry and low-density housing, and an encircling open space. The plan involved building the core on a platform to accommodate the Garden State Parkway bypass and parking underneath it. The pedestrianized core would host a theme park inspired by Copenhagen's Tivoli Garden, retail shopping, convention centers, hotels, city hall, county buildings, and high-rise apartments anchoring the four corners of the 240-acre area. Heavy foot-traffic areas would have moving ramps, electric taxis, and electric scooters to move people faster. There was even talk of having the elevated platform heated to assist in snow removal.
Inner Ring
The inner ring would be broken down into 20 neighborhood units. Each unit would have mixed housing, ranging from single-family detached homes to high-rise apartments. This would allow a population of around 9,000 per unit. A unit would have 2 elementary schools and 1 junior high school per 2 units. The units would also have their own open space, shopping, and churches. Four units would be grouped along a central community center, which would host government offices, larger shopping facilities, high-rise apartments, and a senior high school. Four such community centers would have been built in the inner ring. Local traffic would have been separated from highway traffic.
Outer Ring
The outer ring would primarily host the infrastructure needed for the inner and core areas. The outer ring would have 6 high schools, 2 hospitals, a college, golf courses, cemeteries, waterworks, sewage facilities, an artificial lake, and other open spaces for recreation. There would be some areas for low-density housing. A 1,200-acre industrial park would be at the northeastern edge of the city and would host large-scale commercial services, car dealerships, city garages, maintenance facilities, and distribution facilities.
Open Space
While the plan laid out large-scale developmental changes for the Pinelands, it did include preservation. Smith included the addition of 500 square miles of preserved open space, doubling the amount of preserved open space at the time. All of the preserved areas would be combined into one unit. However, the proposal would have this land zoned for agricultural land and large-lot residential use. What appeared to be a means of preserving the pinelands also appeared to be a loophole that could be exploited in the future.
Backlash and Preservation
While the Pinelands Regional Planning Board presented and supported the idea, larger and smaller forces worked to prevent the Jetport and New City from being constructed. Major blows came from the FAA and the military. The FAA determined the placement of the jetport would disrupt air traffic too much for flights coming into Newark, New York, and Philadelphia. The military also did not want such a large development to be near their facilities at Fort Dix, Fort McGuire, and Lakehurst. Nascent conservation groups and politicians came out against the destruction of the Pinelands. The most famous example comes from the John McPhee book The Pine Barrens, which was published in 1968. By the end of the 1960s, the dream of a jetport and a city in the Pinelands was destroyed. Instead, the vision for the Pinelands became one of preservation. Further movement in the 1970's culminated in the creation of the Pinelands National Reserve in 1979. The Pinelands Land Management Plan would regulate land use within the Pinelands, which would be monitored and enforced by the Pinelands Commission. Their work has helped maintain the Pinelands as the largest open space along the Northeast Corridor, at 1.1 million acres. A detailed map of the Pinelands National Reserve and its land use can be found here, from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection.
Technology also played a factor in the jetport's demise. Conventional jets became larger, allowing airlines to keep up with increased demands. The envisioned airline crisis never came into being. Supersonic jets did come about, but were limited in their uses. The British and French Concorde jet only flew from London, Paris, New York, and Washington D.C. Flights were limited to over oceans due to sonic booms. The Soviet Union also developed the Tupolev Tu-14, and also faced limited service. By 2003, commercial supersonic travel ceased to exist.
Mapping the Imagined Past
A comparison of the Pinelands vision of 1960 to the Pinelands National Reserve in 2024.
It is one thing to map with historical data; it is another when that historical data does not exist in reality. With assistance from Timothy Hart at the Ocean County Cultural & Heritage Commission, the Ocean County Toms River Branch, and Rutgers University Special Collection and University archives, I was able to create a digitized map of how the Pinelands would have looked if the Jetport and New City proposal came into being. The preparation process involved the collection of current datasets and then georeferencing the maps from the proposal. The maps for the Pinelands, Jetport, and New City blueprints were fine, but some difficulty came with the New City grids. While the grids were fine if the city were to have a rectangular shape, the city was to have curves. This led to distortions in the grid shape in the final map. Road centerline data had to serve more as a guide than authoritative data due to the 50-year gap between the Smith maps and current road centerlines. This map should serve as a means to show future generations that this proposal was real and its impact on how New Jersey chose to preserve this land.
