Author: Eric Levin
Fries Poll: Windmill Rules
December 20, 2007
We asked you who makes the best French fries in NJ. Sports teams should only have fans as loyal as WindMill’s.
Seen in: Cheap Eats, Eat & Drink
Petula Clark had it right when she sang, “The lights are much brighter there, you can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares....” It was 1964, and everyone understood the allure of that one-word title, “Downtown.” It was a glamorous, skyscraping, urban beehive where “all the noise and the hurry seems to help.”
Seen in: Best Of Jersey
I can still taste the best blueberry I ever ate. It was big and squatly round and deep blue, with that periwinkle dusting that the ripest blueberries have. And it was stolen. It went directly from the bush to my mouth, never to be weighed at the shed a quarter mile across the blueberry farm.
Seen in: Best Of Jersey
Writer in Residence
December 19, 2007
Newsweek Columnist Jonathan Alter interprets history as it happens.At home,he steeps himself in the past ,including the edigree of his Victorian dream house.
Seen in: Best Of Jersey
In 1967, before “ecotourism” and “green living” became buzzwords and before legislation protected the state’s undeveloped tracts, this son of a Princeton doctor wrote The Pine Barrens, a slim, understated, magically detailed portrait of an unspoiled realm and its reclusive denizens.
Seen in: Best Of Jersey
For almost three decades he’s been a bankable star, the kind who can, as the saying goes, open a movie. Now the question is whether he can also produce one.
Seen in: Best Of Jersey
Many of the talk-show tropes we think of as hip and new—turning the camera on the stagehands, savaging the empty suits in TV’s executive suites, quick-cutting to sight gags—originated with this Trenton native who started on radio there and was a columnist for the Trentonian.
Seen in: Best Of Jersey
The 1954 Manasquan High School “class clown” got his break in horror films, then catapulted to fame in 1969’s Easy Rider as an insouciant rogue unlike any seen before. Who else has that lizardly mien, that puckish bravado, that trip-hammer temper, that sexy sinister smirk, that...well, you get the idea. You do know Jack, the one and only.
Seen in: Best Of Jersey
A tarpaper shack that could be rotated to catch the sun was America’s first motion picture studio. Thomas Edison’s 1888 “Black Maria” put New Jersey at the center of a revolutionary new medium and big-time business.
Seen in: History, Towns & Schools
The Newark lad’s spasmodic dimwit shtick and signature shriek (“Laaaady!” was the “Dyn-o-mite!” of its day) are a love/hate thing. But his gutsy turn in Scorsese’s kinky The King of Comedy is a keeper, and so is his legacy as a Muscular Dystrophy fundraiser– $2 billion since 1952.
Seen in: Best Of Jersey