The Lincoln Highway was the first transcontinental road established in the United States. Initially conceived as a centennial Memorial to Abraham Lincoln in 1908, the highway was designed for recreational driving from New York to San Francisco and paid for by private donations.

Through this series of paintings and drawings I am documenting the lingering images in architecture and landscape that drivers on the roadway would have experienced as they passed through New Jersey.

The New Jersey Central Railroad owned the Weehawken Ferry in Lincoln Highway days. It was part of their extensive waterfront rail yard that sprawled along the Jersey shore of the river, hemmed in by the high cliffs of the Palisades. West from the ferry, the Lincoln Highway followed the twisting curves of Pershing Road to the top of the palisades and into the densely settled neighborhoods of what is now Union City. Avoiding the congested and commercial Bergenline Avenue, the Lincoln Highway was route south into Jersey City along Hudson Boulevard. Hudson Boulevard, since renamed John F. Kennedy Boulevard, was inspired by the City Beautiful Movement, and laid out in 1894 as a broad, winding carriageway along the crest of Bergen Hill.

PJ Carlino

Original paintings and drawings

Lincoln Highway

Edison Collage        

The Edison Memorial Tower  commemorates the site where Edison perfected the incandescent light bulb among other electric inventions including a version of the electric train.  The top right panel is of Union County Park. Travelers on the highway would have passed by the Rahway Poor Farm, which preceded the park. The center right image is of the bridge over the Lehigh Valley railroad bringing coal from Pennsylvania to Perth Amboy and New York. The Merchants and Drovers Tavern, built around 1795  on the country road to Elizabethtown at the intersection of the road to Westfield operated continuously as an inn from 1798 until the mid-1930s,

Watercolor on paper

14 x 22

Edison, NJ