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"...America reinventing itself."
Maps of New Jersey had shown a public golf course, Lincoln Park,
butting right up against the skyway, a golf course in the shadow of
Route 1, so to speak.
Lincoln Park proved to be a pitch-and-putt course across the street
from a high-rise housing project. The course sits on a small, featureless
parcel of scrub land hemmed in by two busy roads and a muddy spit of
the Hackensack River. I found myself there on a hot, humid morning,
playing golf with the mayor of Jersey City, Bret Schundler. A couple of
other groups played in the distance, but business was slow. A young
man in blue jeans with pasty skin and a shock of bright orange hair
played through.
Bret is the only mayor of any city whom I can say I know personally,
even though we hadn't spoken to one another in more than a decade.
We went to college together, lived in the same house. Lately I'd seen
profiles of him in the New York Times and
Reader's Digest, describing
his transition from Wall Street whiz to against-all-odds white Republican
mayor of Jersey City, New Jersey's second-largest city and one of its
poorest and most ethnically diverse. I'd remembered him as being
politically liberal in college. Somewhere on the way to making a small
fortune on Wall Street, he'd taken a turn to the right. Then suddenly he'd
left finance for politics and gotten himself elected mayor, not of some
cozy Republican stronghold, but of Jersey City, which hadn't had a
Republican mayor in seventy-five years. Bret had won by preaching a
steady line of education, crime reduction, fiscal responsibility and an end
to rampant corruption in city government. His initial victory came in a
special election to fill out the term of a mayor jailed for corruption. The
local Democratic machine tried to pass that victory off as a fluke, but
Bret dug in and won a second election several months later, carrying 68
percent of the vote, the largest margin for a mayoral race in the city's
history. He carried 40 percent of the black vote and 60 percent of the
Hispanic vote. By the time of my trip, he'd been reelected to a second
full term. Now, national Republicans had marked him as a rising star.
When I saw Lincoln Park on the map, I called Bret's office to see if
he'd play a round with me. I knew he'd remember me but was uncertain
how he'd react -- what effect a dozen years and his budding national
celebrity would have on the tenuous ties of college friendship. His
assistants on the telephone seemed terminally busy in that Greater New
York way. "Mayor Schundler's office ... You say you're an old friend of
his? Hold on ...... ... I'm sorry, Mayor Schundler is tied up in a meeting
right now." I left my number.
A few minutes later, my phone rang.
"This is Mayor Schundler's office. I have the mayor on the line."
Bret and I exchanged pleasantries for a moment or two. His voice
came at me canned from his speaker phone. Then he asked me what I
was up to and when I planned to be in Jersey City. His next question
was, "Do you have a place to stay?"
He asked me to meet him the next Friday night at Liberty State Park
on the Hudson River. I arrived on a clear, soft summer evening. From
Liberty State Park you can catch a ferry to the Statue of Liberty or Ellis
Island. The story of Jersey City has always been an immigrant's story.
Only now the newcomers are Asian and Hispanic rather than German
and Irish. The park has a youth baseball complex, and on this night, the
city was kicking off a baseball tournament for the Sandy Koufax league,
drawing teams of teenagers from California, Tennessee and Puerto
Rico. I arrived early and wandered around the complex. Jersey City's
reputation had long run toward poverty, hopelessness and crime. But the
scene that greeted me at the ball field was wonderfully hopeful and
wholesome. Groups of black, white, Asian and Hispanic kids
wandered about, helping set up stands and concessions. They sold
programs to the evening's festivities. A girl sold Italian ices from a cart;
not the rock-hard, prefrozen cannonballs you get at the grocery store but
freshly made and scooped from ice-cream drums in lemon-lime,
rainbow, vanilla, chocolate or raspberry, $1 for a large scoop. I bought
myself a vanilla and climbed the bleachers. A tape of native son Bruce Springsteen filled the
air with "My Hometown." I sat licking my Italian ice, watching the last
rays of sun splash off the towers of batiks and brokerage firms of lower
Manhattan, just across the river. The sky behind the World Trade Center
was pink. Between two stands of trees you could make out the Statue of
Liberty with her arm raised toward the heavens.
The mayor arrived with his entourage. I recognized him immediately,
a bit older, a bit thicker around the middle but unmistakable. A buzz
followed his every move. He spotted me in the stands and waved me
down.
Bret coached our house tackle football team in college. House
football was a sort of loosely organized extracurricular sport for which
they handed out full sets of pads and basically let a bunch of former highschool
players go at each other; I can still see him presiding over our
ragtag practices, a stoic grin on his face as he tried to pull order from
chaos. Even then he was driven to lead. He'd laugh and joke with the
guys, but he always seemed somewhat aloof from the revelry, as if
partaking and analyzing at the same time, as if his moral center,
controlled by some internal centrifugal force, never allowed him to get
too out of control. He'd talked then about becoming a minister. It didn't
surprise me at all that he'd become a crusading politician.
"I didn't like him at first," one tough-looking, tough-talking,
lifelong Jersey City resident said as we stood on the baseball diamond at Liberty State Park. "I said, he's got to be lying because
nobody's this sincere. But he is. One of the first things he did was
get new, clean uniforms for all the kids playing baseball. He said,
you wear a new uniform you start to feel good about yourself.
Jersey City is a tough town politically. They'll eat you up. But the
mayor's doing all right."
It was nearly midnight when the opening ceremonies, including a
softball game and a pizza party afterward in a crowded little parks-and-recreation building,
finally disbanded. Bret had spent the evening shaking
hands, schmoozing. In the parking lot, he
said something to a man in a brown suit with slicked-back hair who had
been hanging around Bret all evening. The man nodded, got into his car,
and drove off.
"Who is that guy?" I asked.
"Security," Bret said simply. "Most people would never bother you.
But you never know when some lunatic . . ."
We eased out of the Cochrane Stadium parking lot and onto the
nearly deserted streets of Jersey City. We wound through the
downtown, stopped at a plaza overlooking the Hudson, and walked out
to the edge of the river. Here was the same view of Manhattan, in
reverse, that I had just recently seen from Brooklyn. It's a toss-up which
side has the better view, but you couldn't help but see why from either
side New York is the source of incalculable dreams.
We left Jersey City and drove over to neighboring Hoboken. We
turned on to a boulevard of bars and trendy restaurants, still lively at this
hour, with sculpted neon signs and ferns in the windows. Young
professionals, many of whom commuted into New York each weekday
morning, roamed the streets. The buildings looked freshly scrubbed, and
the street reminded me of Georgetown in Washington, or Newbury
Street in Boston.
"They brought themselves back essentially by displacing the poor,"
Bret said. "We weren't going to do that in Jersey City. It's the most
ethnically diverse city in the country." Bret's own grandparents, German
immigrants by way of the Caribbean, had landed in Jersey City, before
moving out to greener acres in Westfield. We made our way back to the
130-year-old, three-story brownstone house Bret shares with his wife
and daughter, who were away visiting relatives. We sat out back on a
small patio and garden, talking and reminiscing. I asked him how far he
planned to go with politics, whether he had designs on the governorship,
the senate, the presidency. He demurred, already versed in the
automatic, tactful evasions of the skilled politician.
The next morning Bret had set aside time for a round with me at
Lincoln Park, between meetings at City Hall and an afternoon
commitment to speak to a local school group. I followed him and
his driver/bodyguard, in their Chevrolet sedan, out to Lincoln Park. Bret
had retrieved some old, dust-covered, mismatched clubs from his
basement, real-wood woods and old bladed irons that looked like they'd
last seen action during the Eisenhower administration. Somewhat
incongruously, he also had a brandnew golf glove from the Old Course
at St. Andrews and a ball with that fabled course's insignia, from a trip
he'd taken there a few years earlier.
I remarked on his woods.
"They're not making them from wood anymore?" he said innocently.
"No, they've already gone through, steel and now they're into
titanium," I said.
He shrugged.
Lincoln Park is basically a pitch-and-putt course, with each hole
around eighty yards. Some men at the driving range recognized Bret as
we walked from the clubhouse to tile first tee. "Congratulations," one of
them said. "I voted for you." Bret gestured to the nearby housing project.
During his campaign, Bret told me, he'd gone door to door through that
project, winning over skeptical voters. He carried the project.
The tee boxes were patches of AstroTurf and the course was flat.
You had to look carefully at your scorecard to make sure you were
hitting at the correct hole. As it turned out, we misjudged anyway and
played our tee shots out to the second green, then had to make our way
back to the first. Bret hadn't played golf in a while. On one shot he
caught the ball well with a seven-iron, way too much club for this dinky
course. The ball sailed straight and landed about 100 yards past our own
hole, up against a fence. It passed under the nose of a man playing a
different hole. As Bret jogged over sheepishly to retrieve his ball the
man, apparently not recognizing him as the mayor, mocked his long shot.
"What, Wheaties this morning?"
I'd brought my whole set of clubs out of the trunk and now felt
ridiculous lugging the bag around when all I needed was the
sand wedge and a putter. Bret had taken off his suit jacket but had on
his suit pants, loafers, blue dress shirt, and a goldpatterned tie tucked in
between two front shirt buttons. We must have made an odd-looking
pair. After a while, we didn't even keep score. There didn't seem to be
much point. Mainly, Bret told me about the changes under way for
Jersey City, plans for the future. His voice full of excitement, he
described a plan to build an eighteen-hole golf course, fine enough to
attract tournaments but always open to the public. The course would be
built at Caven Point, an area just off Liberty State Park. Bret hoped
Tom Kite would design it. We sank our putts on the final hole and
walked over to the parking lot, where Bret's driver waited patiently to
whisk him off to his speech at the school. As I drove away I carried a
poignant image of my friend, the eternal believer, standing on that
dilapidated patch of scrub grass, speaking with such conviction and hope
about Jersey City. A traveler cruising along the Pulaski Skyway might
look down on this city and involuntarily shudder at the rusting industrial
yards and dank buildings, then check his gas gauge, just to make sure he
wasn't going to run out around here. But Bret looked around and saw
only possibility. I thought suddenly of George Lyons, the old pro who
had driven me around Franklin Park in Boston on his golf cart. It
occurred to me now that this Route 1 journey was not, as I had
foreseen, an exercise in nostalgia, down a road whose time had come
and gone. Everywhere I went there were signs of renewal, rebirth, signs
of America reinventing itself.
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