Everything OddWay knows about. Narrow it down by what you're after, or where you're going.
Real events too strange to have made the textbook.
Atlantic City, NJ
First lit in 1857, Absecon Lighthouse is New Jersey's tallest lighthouse and contains a 228-step climb to the lantern room. The preserved keeper's complex provides an unusual historic counterpoint to Atlantic City's casinos and boardwalk attractions.
Brick Township, NJ
A bronze angel bends forward in grief as the central figure of Brick Township's September 11 memorial. The emotionally direct sculpture is surrounded by names and memorial elements honoring township residents lost in the attacks.
Shamong Township, NJ
This 1826 Greek Revival mansion was built during Atsion's ironmaking era in the Pine Barrens. The surrounding settlement largely disappeared, leaving the restored mansion as one of the clearest surviving structures from the old industrial village.
Washington Township, NJ
More than 40 surviving structures preserve a Pine Barrens industrial village built around ironmaking and later glass production. The grounds are open daily, with an 1852 post office, sawmill, mansion and other buildings forming a remarkably intact historic settlement.
Holmdel Township, NJ
Eero Saarinen's enormous mirrored Bell Labs building housed research that helped transform telecommunications and computing. The former laboratory has been reused as the publicly accessible Bell Works complex while retaining its vast futuristic atrium and distinctive architecture.
Jersey City, NJ
A memorial in Liberty State Park recalls the massive 1916 Black Tom explosion, when German agents sabotaged munitions stored on the New Jersey waterfront before the United States entered World War I. The blast shattered windows miles away and damaged the Statue of Liberty.
Cresskill, NJ
A 66-foot granite obelisk stands in a traffic circle near the center of the former Camp Merritt, the enormous World War I embarkation camp through which more than a million people passed. The monument especially remembers hundreds who died during the 1918 influenza epidemic.
Hardwick Township, NJ
This active Scout camp served as the primary filming location for the original 1980 Friday the 13th, standing in for Camp Crystal Lake. It is private property and closed to casual visitors, but officially sanctioned Crystal Lake Tours provide limited public access on specific dates.
Crosswicks, NJ
A Revolutionary War cannonball remains mortared into the second-story brick wall of the 1773 Crosswicks Friends Meeting House. Both British and American forces were exchanging fire in the area in June 1778, so exactly which side fired the embedded shot is uncertain.
Lower Township, NJ
The 1859 Cape May Lighthouse rises 157 feet above the southern New Jersey coast and can be climbed by visitors during operating hours. Its 199 steps lead to a panoramic view over Cape May Point State Park and the surrounding shoreline.
Tabernacle Township, NJ
Deep in Wharton State Forest, a stone monument marks the 1928 crash site of Mexican aviation hero Emilio Carranza. The roughly 12-foot memorial incorporates an Aztec-inspired design and a falling eagle, turning a remote Pine Barrens clearing into an international aviation memorial.
Jersey City, NJ
Millions of immigrants who had entered the United States through nearby Ellis Island continued their journeys through this enormous waterfront railroad terminal. The restored train sheds and terminal building survive inside Liberty State Park as a striking transportation ruin-turned-historic site.
Atlantic City, NJ
A historical marker identifies the stretch of Atlantic City beach that Black visitors were informally restricted to during segregation. The nickname came from the picnic food reportedly left behind by beachgoers; today the location is interpreted as an important piece of Jersey Shore civil-rights history.
Egg Harbor Township, NJ
Weathered stones mark the graves of dogs and other pets in a small, easily overlooked burial ground surrounded by later residential development. The cemetery should be observed respectfully from legitimate public access without crossing neighboring private property.
Berkeley Heights, NJ
Stone houses and other structures survive from a nineteenth-century mill community later reinvented as the summer resort Glenside Park. The abandoned settlement is preserved within Watchung Reservation and can be explored legally from public trails.
Hillsborough Township, NJ
Heiress Doris Duke buried a number of beloved dogs and other animals on her vast Duke Farms estate. Their individual markers form an unusual private-animal cemetery that can be reached only according to Duke Farms' public access rules and trail hours.
Berkeley Township, NJ
A former Pine Barrens company town survives inside Double Trouble State Park, where cranberry agriculture and Atlantic white-cedar logging once supported a small industrial community. Historic houses, a sawmill and other village structures remain along public trails.
Hillside, NJ
Romani musician Singin' Sam Stevens is memorialized with an extravagant black-granite monument featuring gold musical notes, a carved amplifier, electric guitar and oversized record. The grave sits inside Evergreen Cemetery, which has posted daily visiting hours.
North Brunswick Township, NJ
A tiny family cemetery survives in an unlikely island of grass beside modern commercial development. Old headstones belonging to early local families remain surrounded by the infrastructure that grew up around the once-rural burial ground.
Deptford Township, NJ
A public marker at Deptford Landing commemorates Jean-Pierre Blanchard's 1793 balloon flight from Philadelphia to New Jersey, generally recognized as America's first successful manned balloon flight. The original landing-site memorial behind the shopping center has become fenced and neglected, making the public marker the practical OddWay stop.
Pennsville Township, NJ
Massive concrete gun batteries remain along the Delaware River from a late nineteenth-century coastal-defense system built to protect approaches to Philadelphia. Visitors can walk among the fortifications and see the disappearing-gun positions from public park grounds.
Hoboken, NJ
A sidewalk star marks 415 Monroe Street, where Frank Sinatra was born in 1915. The original house no longer survives, so the marker serves as the physical stop connecting Hoboken with the singer's birthplace.
Lambertville, NJ
Revolutionary War officer George Coryell, later one of George Washington's pallbearers, is buried beside the First Presbyterian Church in Lambertville. A historical marker identifies the small graveyard, which also contains Samuel Holcombe, remembered locally as one of Washington's spies.
Barnegat Light, NJ
Sinbad served aboard the Coast Guard cutter Campbell for years, surviving combat and becoming one of the service's most famous animal mascots. A memorial and burial site at Barnegat Light preserves the story of the mixed-breed dog whose service career included World War II.
