Jersey City Waterfront & Downtown
Morris Canal Basin: The Coal Route That Helped Build a Harbor City
Listen at the stop, then read the transcript and follow the sources behind the story.
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Transcript
Before railroads dominated this waterfront, a canal carried one of the fuels of American industrialization toward New York Harbor.
The Morris Canal opened across northern New Jersey in the 1830s.
Its eastern end reached Jersey City.
The canal's purpose was economic.
Anthracite coal from Pennsylvania could move toward factories, furnaces and urban customers.
Iron and agricultural goods moved too.
New Jersey's difficult terrain required an ingenious system of locks and inclined planes to raise and lower canal boats across large changes in elevation.
By the time boats reached this basin, they had crossed a landscape that looked nothing like the flat canal corridors many Americans imagine.
Then railroads improved.
They moved freight faster and operated more flexibly.
The canal declined and eventually closed in the early twentieth century.
Most of its Jersey City infrastructure vanished beneath later development.
The surviving basin is therefore easy to underestimate.
It is a remnant of an earlier transportation system that helped make this waterfront economically useful before the great railroad terminals reached their peak.
This stop also shows why Jersey City is difficult to explain through one industry.
Canal.
Rail.
Ferry.
Tunnels.
Port facilities.
Highways.
Each generation built a new transportation layer because the same basic geography remained valuable: this was one of the closest mainland points to lower Manhattan and one of the best places to transfer people and goods around the harbor.
The city was not simply across the river from New York.
It was one of the systems that made New York's scale possible.