Illustration: Ryan Olbrysh
Who needs a song out in Hackensack? Many artists besides Billy Joel, apparently. A long list of creators of popular music, as well as screenplays, stage plays and TV scripts, have made a point of including the Bergen County city in their work. From Joel’s “Movin’ Out” to the original Superman movie and more, the town has long resonated as the exemplar of a place where common folk live just a stone’s throw—yet a world apart—from big-city glamour.
Technically a city in its own right, with a population of 45,000 people, Hackensack has been showing up in cultural references since the mid-1920s, beginning with a foxtrot ditty and a Cole Porter tune and going all the way through Zoolander and beyond. More than a few of the scribes themselves maintain this is no accident.
“It’s not Park Avenue, it’s not San Francisco. Basically, it’s the city in the shadow of the city,” says Kristian Fraga, an Emmy-nominated filmmaker who grew up in nearby Leonia. “You could be in Iowa and hear, ‘Hackensack, New Jersey,’ and you know immediately it’s not Manhattan.”
Fraga has vivid memories of seeing Superman in 1978, shortly after it opened, and hearing Gene Hackman’s character, the villain Lex Luthor, announce the city as the target of his second missile (the first was California’s San Andreas Fault). “I was at a theater in Hackensack, and the place erupted,” he adds. “When Superman saved the day, the audience went nuts again. For a 4-year-old, it made it all feel so real.”
The only surviving Superman screenwriter, Robert Benton, 91, speculates that one of his colleagues—either script doctor Tom Mankiewicz or director Richard Donner—chose Hackensack “because the name sounded funny.”
But Stephen Borg—whose grandfather Charles “Charlie” Agemian, a banker and businessman whose Hackensack Trust Company merged with Superman-producing Warner Bros.— once said Charlie had told him the city “was chosen in his honor.” Borg told 201 magazine that “as a 10-year-old boy, I really never understood how he did it, but the story sure made me feel good.”
Either way, both Hackensack and the Man of Steel, played in that movie by New Jersey native Christopher Reeve, prevailed. Before Superman, Hackman’s detective Popeye Doyle in the French Connection (1971) hears from colleague “Cloudy” Russo (Roy Scheider) that a suspect they’re eyeing “probably sells insurance, owns a chicken farm in Hackensack.”
The city’s status as a less-than-first-class destination in disparate media began early, though in recent years the city, which has both urban and suburban portions, has undergone revitalization, with new construction and hip restaurants.
In 1924, it was the vocal refrain in the song “Back in Hackensack, New Jersey,” written by Art Beiner and Don Russo. Beiner and Russo’s geographic background, why they conjured “a shack” there, and how dance-hall staple Benson Orchestra of Chicago came to record the song, all remain a mystery. Then, the 1929 Billy Murray/Walter Scanlan recording of a tune called “Shut the Door” ushered in the Depression by modifying the original lyrics to say, “I live up in Hackensack in a house down by the sea/Oh, you live up in Hackensack/Well, why blame that on me?”
Their choice of Hackensack, miles from any beach, may be attributed to poetic license, but Cole Porter’s intention a year later was clear when he penned the musical The New Yorkers, a vehicle for Jimmy Durante. Its breakout number, “I Happen to Like New York,” includes the lines “I took a trip to Hackensack/But after I gave Hackensack the once-over/I took the next train back.” The show ran on Broadway for nearly a year and had several revivals; “Happen” became a Great American Songbook staple covered by Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli.
By the postwar period, Hackensack had seeped into live theater—namely, Death of a Salesman. In the 1949 Arthur Miller play, a waiter named Stanley tells Happy, Willy Loman’s son, that most diners avoid the quieter part of the restaurant, preferring “a lotta action around them…but I know you, you ain’t from Hackensack. You know what I mean?” To Stanley, and probably Miller, a Hackensack resident is likely to be the boisterous life of the party.
In the mid-1950s, Thelonious Monk hopped aboard the Hackensack train with a tribute to jazz engineer Rudy Van Gelder called, simply, “Hackensack,” after Van Gelder’s home-based recording studio. That same year (1954), Rear Window premiered. As Jimmy Stewart’s wheelchair-bound character, Jeff, and his nurse, Stella, spy on a neighbor apparently poised to take his own life, Stella, played by Thelma Ritter, declares that she “has handled enough rhodium triechonol pills to put everybody in Hackensack to sleep for the winter.”
Steven DeRosa, the author of Writing With Hitchcock, calls Stella a “down-to-earth person with a Brooklyn accent for whom New Jersey would be a natural reference,” compared to Jeff’s socialite girlfriend, played by Grace Kelly. DeRosa points out that Ritter started her career in theater stock in Elizabeth, “but Elizabeth doesn’t have the same ring to it that Hackensack does.”
Or ease of rhyme. Paired with “heart attack” in Long Island-bred Joel’s 1977 “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song),” Hackensack also lined up nicely in a 1962 country tune called “I’ve Been Everywhere,” whose laundry list of locations includes Cadillac (Michigan). The song was penned by Hank Snow and later covered by Johnny Cash. Vina Moses, a spokeswoman for the Hank Snow Home Town Museum in Nova Scotia, marvels at Snow’s facility, despite having completed only fifth grade. “It didn’t matter where he was singing about, he rhymed everything off, including your town,” says Moses.
Hackensack has “a certain ring to it,” says city redevelopment director and unofficial city historian Albert Dib. That sentiment was echoed by late composer Peter Schickele, aka P.D.Q. Bach, a classics satirist responsible for “O Little Town of Hackensack.” Asked about his inspiration, his daughter Karla says Schickele “replied, with his customary chuckle, that he just liked the sound of the name.”
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The name Hackensack comes from the language of the Achkinckeshacky tribe who inhabited the region; it translates to “mouth of a river.” This definition is fitting, since it is located along the banks of the approximately 50-mile-long Hackensack River.
The city figures in another novelty song, 2018’s “If I Never Get Back to Hackensack” by veteran singer/songwriter Tom Rush, a New Hampshire native, who had a memorable gig in Hackensack; and in “Lost in Hollywood,” a 2005 heavy-metal banger by California-based System of a Down (“The lines in the letter said/We have gone to Hackensack.”)
Musically speaking, nearly every modern decade is represented, especially the 1970s. On Life and Times, the last album Jim Croce released before he died, the song “Roller Derby Queen” describes the queen as “my big blond bomber, my heavy-handed Hackensack mama.” Steely Dan put their own stamp on the major metro vs. Hackensack contest with “Daddy Don’t Live in That New York City No More”: “Driving like a fool out to Hackensack/Drinking his dinner from a paper sack.”
In the aughts, alt-band Fountains of Wayne intoned, “And if you ever get back to Hackensack/I’ll be here for you” on … wait for it … “Hackensack”; late Fountains songwriter Adam Schlesinger hailed from Montclair.
“In my opinion, it’s just a great word to sing, and I know Adam once said the same thing,” explains former bandmate Chris Collingwood of the Welcome Interstate Managers track, later covered by Katy Perry.
Movie-wise, the 1980s saw Brewster’s Millions, with late comedians Richard Pryor as a minor league pitcher and John Candy as catcher for the Hackensack Bulls, whose playing field is bisected by railroad tracks.
On the small screen, The Cosby Show, the most-watched TV series of the late 1980s (despite subsequent controversy), name-checked Hackensack as well.
A season 6 episode saw Vanessa and her friends playing a drinking game in which each player must call out a city starting with a letter of the alphabet. The girl who gets H bypasses Hollywood, Honolulu and Houston for the Garden State’s most oft-cited burg.
In the 2001 Ben Stiller comedy Zoolander, Will Ferrell’s fashion-executive character is threatened, “Perhaps you’d like to go back to turning out novelty neckties in Hackensack.” Bride of Chucky (1998), from the slasher-comedy franchise Child’s Play, reveals that Chucky’s human body is allegedly buried in a Hackensack cemetery; the related TV series Chucky, which came out in 2021 on Syfy, employs the city as a frequent plot location.
Then there’s the video game staple Grand Theft Auto, which premiered in 1997; its alternate universe comprised a district called Hackenslash.
There are enough mentions to fill a house—at least, one in Hackensack.
Pamela Weber-Leaf, a writer for more than 25 years, grew up a few miles from Hackensack, in New Milford.
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