by Janna and I had a delightful weekend in Hoboken, New Jersey. Hoboken is a great city with a wonderful, intimate, small-town feel surrounded by massive urban areas like Jersey City and Newark and, of course, the center of the world — New York City — is right across the Hudson river. Hoboken reminds us of our hometowns of Council Bluffs, Iowa and Lincoln, Nebraska.
Hoboken is famous for being an expensive NYC bedroom community, and for Frank Sinatra, and for being the on-location setting for the 1954 classic film — On the Waterfront — and the water and longshoremen and cargo hooks and other sea-worthy tributes dot the Hoboken waterline.
Here’s a brief history of Hoboken, in video mural form, that welcomes you to 150 years of living in the city.
The greatest background for the Hoboken shoreline is New York City! Here’s a North to South early morning haze video of the wild life across the water.
Here’s another video moving South to North along the NYC skyline a little farther north on the waterfront — and you can see the morning haze has burned off a bit and the scene is a wee bit clearer.
If you ever have a chance to visit Hoboken, you should, and stay awhile. It’s a small hamlet of 52,000 residents nestled in just 2.011 square miles, and when you walk the town, you actually walk the entire town.
These murals are quite something.
The mural is painted on a curved concrete retaining wall spanning about half a city block. I started at the bottom of the hill where the mural was 20 ft. high and, and as I stepped up the steeply curved hill, the mural slowly became smaller until it ended up being 3 ft. tall.