Approximately a year ago, I launched this blog because I sensed a need in my native state for a critical eye to be turned to matters of politics and culture. Hoo boy did I sense a need, you know?
But then after a month or two I also got lazy and didn't do much with it. (And not because, in the vein of Coriolanus, I was expecting a groundswell of posts begging me to keep on blogging.)
Anyway, I'm back. Mostly, perhaps, because I realized how much I have to say about New Jersey even now. Posting probably once or twice a week. For your edification and amusement and, with luck at times, even the stirring of your sense of outrage. This state does not have to be the joke it often seems to be in so many ways.
Please be kind. And voluble. And if I have to choose, I naturally opt for volubility. Thank you.
Reconsidering Rutt's
The sharp-eyed past fans of this blog will of course have already noticed that I've changed the photo above (from a Scottish megalithic structure, no matter the current popularity of the TV series "Outlander") to one of Rutt's Hut in Clifton. And in fact it's of Rutt's on a weekend evening when it still has an hour during which to be open and serving up rippers. Yep, this is what Rutt's Hut often looks like now during "primetime." Business doesn't seem to be so hot. We'll try and examine why this is so.
Now, in the entire state of New Jersey there are probably only two places about which folks say, in an awestruck tone, "We're really here. Golly!" or something very close to this. (There used to be three, until Bruce Springsteen thoughtlessly had that berm thrown up in front his house in Rumson, the one across the street from the private school he sent his kids to.) One is Jon Bon Jovi's mock version of a Loire Valley chateau on the Navesink River, outside the (closed, understandably) gates of which often sit bands of female adolescent Japanese tourists whose diligence approaches stalking.
The other is Rutt's Hut, and here, so great turns out to be the reach of both PBS specials on American food and the Food Network, the awestruck cut across every age and ethnic group. "We made it!," they often chortle into their cellphones to some relative or friend. "We're actually here." It is in fact a rare weekday afternoon during my own visits to Rutt's when I am NOT asked by some folks to take a picture of them with their cell or Iphone. (Maybe I just have that kind of cooperative, semi-bovine look upon my aged countenance.)
I never get to talk to these people subsequent to their first ripper washed down by a "large howdy," however. Yet I really do wonder what they make of Rutt's Hut other than its fame via television coverage, because the truth is that Rutt's, hot dogs aside, is a terrible place. A very terrible, unwelcoming place. Some might even see it as slum-like. One into which its owners have apparently sunk no money whatsoever since the long-passed time of my own childhood. They are so lackadaisical about all this that even their website, ruttshut.com, after 5+ years, is still promising that it's coming soon in full accessibility. It's great if you're a famished seagull but maybe not so hot otherwise.
When I was a kid, Rutt's was so popular that it had hired security, big African-American guys who enjoyed prodding teenagers with the carefully burnished nightsticks they carried. We'd show up there around 11:30 PM on a Friday, a half-hour before we could "legally" eat meat back then thanks to the strictures of what Phil Donahue always jeeringly terms "Holy Mother Church," and the guards would thus deny us entrance until midnight. Sometimes, probably for the sheer sake of sadism since the smell of crisping franks is so pervasive in this corner of Clifton, they'd make us march in step around the agglomeration of sheds that is Rutt's while they counted cadence.
At this time, too, Rutt's was but one part of a Trinity of hot dog hangouts in Clifton, if obviously the most successful. There was Neilley's, in a building as old and run-down as Rutt's was even back then. And Bertlin's, which had the advantage for its own business of being open on the one day of the week Rutt's was closed in those days, Mondays. Rutt's is also, and since as far back as six decades ago, the first place I can recall in NJ which served foreign-brewed beers, in both bottles and on draught.
Eventually, however, the highway leading south to Newark past Rutt's was built and somehow, by some engineering process I don't pretend to understand, Rutt's was suddenly on a sort of bluff high above the Passaic River, where it'd previously hugged the shoreline. Neilley's disappeared but Bertlin's also survived, for some years until it eventually was transformed into a now-departed Chinese restaurant. The Trinity is down to one member, has only seemed, thanks to TV coverage, to grow in fame since then. But it doesn't seem to have translated into an increase in business. Truth is, Rutt's often seems relatively deserted, both at the counter and inside in the "formal" (vaguely, that is) restaurant. Lunch, let alone Friday and Saturday nights, is no longer SRO, no longer requires thrust-forward shoulders and an aggressive mien. The meek have inherited Rutt's, perhaps because the aggressive have headed off somewhere else.
Today...
The counterpeople at Rutt's are famously irascible. Not as cranky as, say, civil servants in NYC's courts system, but none too helpful. Brusque, too. Inside, the actual restaurant waitstaff is worse, Much worse. Where diner waitresses in Jersey often seem possessed of a world-weary wisdom only acquired after years of late shift service, the waitpersons and bartenders at Rutt's merely seem impatient to get home themselves and back to the misery of their own private lives. You don't go here for a gracious meal, nor even for shared happy reminiscences of the time a crew from PBS came in and raved about the rippers.
The walls, too, are caked - and I mean this literally, run your fingernails across its walls if you doubt it - with the accumulated grime of decades upon decades of hot dog grease. (Legend has it that Rutt's was once even one of Babe Ruth's favorite filling stations after his playing days.) Even the normal-sized cannot turn around in the men's room stalls, so you have to back into them. And it's at least three years since the automatic doors into the counter area have worked. The prevailing impression one gets at Rutt's Hut is of exceedingly tight-fisted ownership. Of folks unwilling to add even a fresh coat of paint. And I honestly don't think this is because ownership fears its establishment will lose some of its charm if things are changed and/or updated. Rutt's has no charm. It instead has efficient charmlessness. If Hell in fact has a company cafeteria, it might look and feel like this place.
As for the food, it remains what it's always been. Meaning passable. Great dogs, fantastic carrot relish, cottony buns. Onion rings with an appalling grease level, thus the delight of cardiologists. "Barbecued" beef and pork sandwiches which are really no such thing unless you count one slice of meat as a "sandwich." But a decent selection of both domestic and imported beers for what is fundamentally a hot dog stand, one which seems to hearken architecturally back to the time of the 30 Years War and seems destined to someday soon collapse in upon itself. (Thereby freeing into the Passaic River below all that accumulated cooking oil, thus creating a reptilian evolutionary cycle the likes of which we haven't seen since the last "Godzilla" movie.)
And yet...and yet...Even I own a Rutt's Hut t-shirt. And you can wear it most anywhere in these United States and attract both those who've been there and those who still aspire to. And should any of these fools of the latter sort ever be there when I am, I promise to take their pictures for them. Even with some things utterly lacking for the most part in this dismal place: graciousness and an honest smile.
A relatively quick jab at the casino industry
Yea verily, four AC casinos have closed over the last year. The usual defense/alibi/explanation from the casino industry blames competition by other states' casinos.
Which doesn't make much sense for several reasons. No one else remembers, back when AC was planning its fleshpots, the claim that the combination of the Atlantic Ocean beaches and casino gaming would prove irresistible? Does anyone even recall now, so determined were casino interests and their political allies (we look for good example at you, the Brendan Byrne administration of yore), that New Jerseyans actually voted twice on this one? That the pro-casino gambling referendum actually lost the first time out?
"Help us help ourselves" was a frequently chanted mantra during the nascent days of casino gaming in NJ. Well, "they" may have in fact helped themselves (to all sorts of then free-flowing monues and state aid) but they didn't do much for the actual city of AC proper. Much of it remains a mordant slum. Especially as one moves back off the Boardwalk area into neighborhoods where people really live. Casino interests also selfishly said "screw you, jack" to other then-struggling shore towns like Asbury Park and Long Branch which might at the time have used the (only temporary, alas) boost gambling provided to AC's economy.
And the casinos have time and again whined and whined some more when they've wanted legislative favors. I still remember, for instance, when the casinos demanded and got an exemption on the casino floors against NJ"s ban on smoking in public areas. Some dopily saw this as casinos being socially "tolerant." I saw it, rather, as their cynical estimation that their true customer base was probably composed of suckers who just happened to add smoking to their general air of social boobishness and boorishness. (Along with the blast furnace-like puffing, to the point of ash gray and choked skin, Asian gamblers for whom AC casinos often run "special," impossible-to-comprehend-for-anyone-who-grew-up-in-Western-type-culture games, and even sometimes actively discriminate against "Westerners" who want to try their hand at, say, Fan Tan.)
Even the Revel Casino and Hotel whose travails were so widely publicized - really, who lends out $2 billion in a shaky economy to build such a place? Who wen dares spend that kind of money in a struggling industry? What great financial brains saw this one as potentially wildly profitable? (And have their heads since been cut off by their corporate bosses?) We even gave NJ's casinos the horror of online gambling - because nothing says "class" quite like pissing away the mortgage payment via a few computer key taps - and thus even cluttered up Facebook with their pleas to genuine suckers. None of it, however, has worked well.
I suspect that the real reason four AC casinos went down recently is very simple: bad, extremely bad and likely very shortsighted and unimaginative marketing. They could not sell these places as necessary or at least fun destinations. Not enough people out there accept any longer the casinos' self-definition of themselves as places with "class." And the heyday of those seniors-centric buses with the truly fantastic day tripper benefits is long, long gone.
Can Atlantic City "come back?" Really, who cares? It's had its day twice. Mothering twice! If it wishes to help itself, it should be forced at this juncture to do it all by itself. If Atlantic City in fact can't do so, it deserves to remain what it seems to have become, Seaside Heights with slot machines and bigger name acts. A step up from Rutt's Hut, maybe. But not a terribly big step.
