Wednesday’s Star-Ledger has a quirky story about what happens to all those New Jersey Turnpike and Garden State Parkway tollbooths after they’re decommissioned by E-Z Pass technology.

They’re put out to pasture in a yard near the Asbury Toll Plaza in Tinton Falls, the Sledger reports.

From the Sledger article, by Mike Franinelli:

“They call it the Tollbooth Graveyard,” said Bob Quirk, who has spent a career in and around tollbooths, first as a collector who breathed fumes and made change at Exit 14C on the New Jersey Turnpike in 1978, and now as director of tolls for the Turnpike and Parkway.

As they decide whether to hit the cash or E-ZPass express lanes, drivers wouldn’t necessarily notice the resting place for tollbooths in the shadows of the busy plaza.

The New Jersey Turnpike Authority, which oversees the Parkway and Turnpike, will one day have to figure out what to do with the highway boxes that became casualties when one-way tolling arrived on certain sections of the Parkway.

For now, similar to a dearly departed organ donor providing body parts for the still-living, tollbooths in the graveyard can be scavenged by Parkway maintenance workers for, among other useful parts, their windows and air conditioning and stainless-steel “Dutch doors” that were at the waist level of toll collectors.

In addition, some of the 32 tollbooths in the graveyard could be resurrected with new paint and parts if other toll booths on the Parkway become severely damaged.

“If, God forbid, something were to happen to the toll plaza and a whole booth went out or something, it would be easy to rig one of these up to put in,” said Tom Feeney, a spokesman for Turnpike Authority.

More here.

Last night’s smoky fire on Newman Springs Road was caused by a minor car accident in which a vehicle struck a guy wire to a utility pole at the Spirits Unlimited liquor store, knocking loose a live electrical wire, police and fire officials said.

The live wire came down on parked tractor trailer, a moving company vehicle that was filled with household goods, setting it on fire, Red Bank Fire Marshal Stanley Sickels tells redbankgreen. The fire in turn set off a series of loud pops and explosions as the truck’s gasoline tank, tires and a motorcycle in the trailer burned, he said.

The driver of the truck was not in the vehicle at the time of the incident, which was first reported as a power outage notification from the Community YMCA at 3:47p. The truck fire was reported two minutes later.

What was left of the truck Monday morning.

Firefighters were unable to attack the raging blaze for almost an hour as they waited for employees of power utility Jersey Central Power & Light to arrive and cut electricity to the wire, Sickels said. A JCP&L spokesman said last night that power to 486 customers was off for 20 minutes as a result.

The cab and entire contents of the 40-foot trailer, which included furniture, clothing and household items, were incinerated.

The truck was owned by a James Donnelly of Red Bank, said Red Bank police Capt. Steve McCarthy.

The driver of the car was Anthony Guarino, 44, of Tinton Falls, who was uninjured. No summonses have been issued, McCarthy said.

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So he’s got an upside-down Christmas tree in the window of his store. Don’t read anything into it, says Michael Bonney of Red Bank News.

“It’s upside-down because it’s upside down,” Bonney told a puzzled customer of his newsstand this morning. “What else would you expect in this place?”

Before the conservative harpies descend upon him, Bonney wants it known that the tree is not indicative of an anti-Christmas sentiment. He just finds it amusing.

Besides, he said, his mother gave it to him. How’s he not supposed to put it up?

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First, our apologies to Deborah Harry for blowing her cover—if that’s what we’re doing. But surely all flame-haired singers and actresses who patronize the Red Bank Post Office on Broad Street know that some day, one way or another, they’re gonna get outted.

It seems the frontwoman for Blondie has a house on The Green. Records on file in Freehold show that Harry paid $1 million for a 2.1-acre property on Shadow Lake in the River Plaza section of Middletown in April, 2003. The seller was the Edwin J. Dobson III Trust.

OK, so this is three-year-old news. But searches in Google and area newspaper archives turn up just one reference to Harry’s domicile buried deep in an article about a fundraiser that ran last September in one of the Greater Media weeklies. And OK, so one of Harry’s neighbors tells us, in a what-cave-do-you-live-in tone, that Harry’s been a fixture in these parts for way longer than than three years. Still, her presence is news to us and every one of the other townies we asked about it, so we’ll score this as a mini-scoop. And we eagerly await a torrent of clicks from Blondie fans for whom no scoop is too mini.

But we digress. The property is nominally on West Front Street, but if you want a peek at the house, take a canoe, because you can’t see it from the road. It’s at the end of a long private drive that disappears into the woods. Other than trees and gravel, a cluster of mailboxes (there are three other homes back there with Harry’s) is pretty much all there is to look at.

Local mail delivery, of course, doesn’t obviate the need for an occasional visit to the post office, which is where redbankgreen got onto Harry’s semi-secret. A couple of weeks ago, just seconds after Max Weinberg left the facility in gym shorts, dark socks and loafers (think "Conan skit"), a postal service employee who clearly couldn’t contain herself announced to a long line of customers that Debbie Harry was also someone who "comes in here all the time."

And really, knowing that the place has become a virtual East Coast branch of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, who could ever again grumble about the wait for stamps?

For those readers wanting more than just a fleeting glimpse of a parcel-toting Debbie Harry—or her mailbox—Blondie’s Road Rage Tour with The New Cars (formerly, The Cars) skids into the PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel on Saturday, June 10.