Last week’s Where, showing a terraced hillside retaining wall, triggered a spate of fond memories of a now-gone Rumson bridge.
First, there were some erroneous guesses – testimony, perhaps, to the prevalence of wood-tie retaining walls. The locations given were Tower Hill Condos in Red Bank; Riverside Gardens Park in Red Bank; behind the Hovnanian building on Maple Avenue in Red Bank; behind the Grove shopping center in Shrewsbury; the NJ Transit parking lot on Chestnut Street in Red Bank; “the east side of Lincroft-Middletown Road.”
As Rick Gill correctly writes: “It is where the McCarter’s Bridge on Ridge Road near the Fair Haven and Rumson town lines use to be before it was removed in September 1988.”
He adds: “My mother, while driving in the 1950’s when we went under the bridge would hit the horn and throw her hands in the air and it would make a neat echo sound.”
Jenn Woods sent us the undated photo, at right. And the grafitti-scrawled structure prompted a little reminiscing.
Someone writing in as marykateandrich wrote:
It’s “the retaining wall on Ridge Road where RBC and Rumson used to ‘paint the bridge’ on the nights of football games! As I did with some of my senior class mates on the eve of Thanksgiving 1984. Go Caseys!!”
Vera Hough writes: “I remember after Live Aid someone graffiti’d on it, ‘Bruce, Where Were You?'”
Sandra Talarico admires the rose bushes in the terracing, and Lindsey Hintelmann says the wall garden is “pretty, but not as cool as the bridge.”
Thanks to Rick (and his mom), Vera, Jenn, marykateandrich, Sandra, Lindsey, Peggy Robinson, Cindy Burnham, Pamela Stockham, Tim Lake, Diana Munro, Heather O’Brien, Christine Jahnig, Parker Trasborg, Nick Lenczyk, Shauna Ehlers, Margery Cohen, Al Zager, Pete Neczesny, Bill McKenna, Mike West, Courtney Peduto, Robert Ebner, Ted Moss, the Colmorgen Kids, marykateandrich, Walt Cuje, Todd Edwards, Chris Babiak and Trish DePonti.
How about the object in this week’s photo: think you can ID the location? Please send us an email and tell us Where you think it is.
