When I was a kid, Cherry Hill Mall was like Xanadu. The success of this attraction pretty much created the boom in surrounding Cherry Hill, giving birth to the Cherry Hill Mall, the Latin Casino (which booked A-level stars like Sinatra and Liberace), and numerous other developments. (I was 15.) Garden State Park was a horse-racing track. As you can imagine, this was huge news at the time. This photo shows the infamous Garden State Park fire of 1977. Rich Roesberg, a friend and reader of this blog, sent some photos of lost landmarks of the area that I thought I’d share. You heard it here first.)īut of course much has changed since I left 21 years ago, and since my boyhood. (Just to pass this along: The perfect nutritionally balanced meal is four dozen clams and a beer. I went fishing (to no avail) on the Great Bay, shooting out in the woods (four pistols: a 357, a 45, a 9mm and a 22, as well as my late father’s double-ought thirty side-by-side shotgun), canoeing, riding rides on the boardwalk and jumping waves in Ocean City, and of course spent lots and lots of time eating clams. Much remains as it was when I left 21 years ago. (Like the famously supernatural Indian Cabin Road, which you can read about here and here - newly haunted by an endearingly odd friend of mine who moved there.) It’s where I spent my salad days. It’s an area of rivers, beaches, swamps, rednecks, amusement parks, many many trees, and high weirdness.

I just came back from two weeks in my original stomping grounds: southern New Jersey, the area east of Philadelphia stretching down to become a peninsular shadow of Delaware.

Sweetwater casino ocean shores