We must praise the efforts of County Executive Thomas DeGise, Mayor Jerramiah Healy and Councilman/Chief of Staff William Gaughan and all State legislators in regards to their efforts against the extremely unnecessary and most unkind decision of the bus companies to discontinue much needed and utilized services within our city.
I am quite familiar with the bus services that for the past 50 years plus have served the southern portion of Jersey City. At one time there were numerous lines traveling all of the main thoroughfares of the Greenville area: the Central Ave. line (brown bus) starting on Princeton and Gates, traveling Garfield Ave. to the Heights section; the Greenville-Lafayette line (green bus) and the Public Service #14 Greenville (now NJ Transit) along Ocean Ave.; the #7 and #8 Jackson traveling along Jackson Ave. (now Martin Luther King Drive); the Bergen Ave. Bus (orange bus) along Bergen Ave.; the Blvd. Bus along Kennedy Blvd.; the #9 Newark Ave. Bus and the Montgomery West Side Bus (red bus) along West Side Ave. There was also the Marion Bus Line which was the only bus running east to west, and this bus traveled down Wegman Parkway to Jackson Ave. through Pacific Ave. Just imagine 10 bus lines running throughout the city and concentrating on the Greenville area.
In this writer's opinion the large Port Authority Building erected in the early 1970s helped contribute to the downfall of our Journal Square - all of the above bus lines and those running from the north of the county would stage into Journal Square. All of the passengers would get off the buses in the Square and both in the morning and evening, thousands of folks would shop and utilize the Square. With the Port Authority Building housing all of the transportation, the people no longer were present outside in the hub of our city.
Let us go back to the days of the brown, green, red and orange buses that helped make our lives so much better.
Robert B. Knapp
Post a Comment