Opening Up The Sopranos Time Capsule

Steel yourself for a drive across the Pulaski Skyway.

The Sopranos wanted to film a scene in my Dad’s business and he declined – true story. He also had no desire to watch the show because he grew up in Hudson County, NJ and knew of guys like that in real life. He lived his own life on a path as far away as possible from them (which extended to his TV viewing). I avoided The Sopranos all these years, probably because of Dad’s aversion to it… until January of this year.

Tom and I opened up the time capsule that is The Sopranos and have been savoring it, slowly, and with just a few episodes to go I don’t want it to end.

I didn’t expect to feel so nostalgic, but much of the series overlaps the area and place I have known all my life. I marvel how the show was seemingly written for locals, and yet it has global appeal. At one point Tony says that his Uncle Junior “could wander off the Palisades for all I care.” You have to be from here to know what the Palisades even are (a high cliff that runs along the Jersey side of the Hudson River). There’s an authenticity to the show with its shooting locations and the actors from the area that combine to make this particular part of New Jersey a character in its own right in the show.

TAKE A DRIVE

My Dad would point out the Pulaski Skyway to me when we were driving on the New Jersey Turnpike. It’s something I always associate with him, and yet his association with the Pulaski Skyway was particularly negative – he hated being driven on it as a kid. And I get it, when he was young it didn’t even have a divider between the opposing lanes of traffic! Some of the on ramps merge into speeding traffic from the left. In the old days you had to hope your car didn’t stall on the steep incline, and even today once you are up there 135 feet in the air there’s only a little 3-foot railing keeping your car from careening off the edge and plunging into the rivers below, not to mention there is no shoulder (my Dad despised highways without a shoulder, now I know why). Sounds wild, right?

Last week we drove on the Pulaski Skyway for the first time and yeah, I held on to the steering wheel for dear life, but what a thrill to be up high surveying the urban landscape and waterways below and beyond, with New York City taking up the horizon. I definitely need to drive it again, perhaps next time at night to see all the glittering lights in all directions.

I’ve been spending my evenings lately engrossed in The Last Three Miles by Steven Hart. If you want to immerse yourself into the decision making, corruption, good intentions and absolutely disastrous consequences of building this 92-year-old roadway, get your hands on this book! I also think it is essential reading for anyone who has ever worked or lived in Hudson, Essex and Bergen Counties or commuted under or above the Hudson River. You’ll never see our roadways the same way, and you’ll have a much deeper understanding of the whole mess that, for the most part, works.

From page 166: The Pulaski Skyway is “a failure rooted not in recklessness, but in lack of background knowledge. The designers of… the Skyway… were visionaries doing something that hadn’t been done before. They weren’t the only ones thinking in terms of superhighways – the first German autobahn was completed the same year the Skyway opened – but they were under the gun, and they had little experience in the field of traffic engineering to draw upon. The result was one of the most visually spectacular and functionally impaired mistakes ever made.”

So, to come full circle, it’s thanks to my Dad that I ever noticed the Pulaski Skyway, and thanks to finally watching The Sopranos that I started looking at the area with a nostalgic eye and started taking photographs of the Skyway, and thanks to The Last Three Miles by Steven Hart that I learned about a shooting location last used by Alfred Hitchcock in 1937 that resulted in me cold-calling a business owner in Kearny to request to shoot the Skyway from his property where, as it happens, The Sopranos rented one of his warehouses for craft services when they were filming the scene down the road when Christopher gets shot under the Pulaski Skyway. Does that 3.5-mile-long sentence make sense? Marone, only in New Jersey!

ART DROP #12 CLOSING

This latest art drop is closing soon. Maybe I’ll keep revisiting the Pulaski Skyway, maybe there’s a zine to make one day, or maybe I’ll just see it now and then when I drive by, feel satisfied with what I’ve done and call it a day. I’m not sure yet.

Pulaski Skyway
Kearny, NJ, USA
by Diana Pappas

Prints of Pulaski Skyway are only available until midnight on May 7, 2024, with no further production of this work for at least a year. To read more about the paper, sizes, and pricing click the button below to visit the art drop page on our website.

It’s hard to believe we’ve now done a full year of monthly art drops. A year-in-review newsletter seems like a good idea, so look out for that in a couple of weeks, and then it will be on to Art Drop #13 on June 1!

Until next time,

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