Central Railroad NJ Terminal

A few weeks ago, I went to Liberty Park in New Jersey.  I came across a very intriguing train station.

Its train tracks are home to a forest of plants that grow as high as fifteen feet. It looks as though the concrete and steel that were designed and built in 1889 were just the prelude to this perfect balance between hard and soft, man and nature. The rusted tracks are still visible in certain places while the gray concrete platforms have cracked to allow luscious green to flourish. A couple of old train cars and locomotives still occupy their places on the tracks, but they look like they belong to the earth that is slowly reclaiming the iron they are made out of. The big wheels that used to move across thousands of miles do not give a single hint that they are tools of transportation. It was the first time I saw anything be so still and yet so alive.

 After marveling at the sight of these twenty tracks for a good while, I finally decided to look around me. The building of the old train station, as I discovered later, was built by Stearns and Peabody, a Boston based firm that created this brick structure in response to the transportation needs in the area. This station was also used to accommodate about 80% of immigrants that entered the United States through Ellis Island. In fact, the ferry terminal east of the building is still used today for the visitors of the museum at Ellis Island. The decoration on the outside looks very Victorian while on the inside, the building is decorated with many details of steel to celebrate the American Industrial age. In the 1960s the Railroad company declared bankruptcy and the train station was abandoned in 1975. 

In my opinion, this place is a jewel, not only for its history, but also for the experience of this occurrence that allows people to see nature in an uncommon light: that of reclaiming what was once taken from the Earth.