Bergen Turnpike

The Hackensack Plank Road, also known as Bergen Turnpike, was a major artery which connected the cities of Hoboken and Hackensack, New Jersey. Like its cousin routes, the Newark Plank Road and Paterson Plank Road, it travelled over Bergen Hill and across the Hackensack Meadows from the Hudson River waterfront to the city for which it was named. It was originally built as a colonial turnpike road as Hackensack and Hoboken Turnpike. The route mostly still exists today, though some segments are now called the Bergen Turnpike. It was during the 19th century that plank roads were developed, often by private companies which charged a toll. As the name suggests, wooden boards were laid on a roadbed in order to prevent horse-drawn carriages and wagons from sinking into softer ground on the portions of the road that passed through wetlands. The company that built the road received its charter on November 30, 1802. The road followed the route road from Hackensack to Communipaw that was described in 1679 as a "fine broad wagon-road."

Today there is little or nothing to be seen of the plank road in Hoboken, the urban grid of the city having expanded westward across landfilled marshes, though the alignment would be at Clinton Street in the city's northwest quarter. The route begins today in lower Weehawken at the town line and rail tracks now used by the Hudson Bergen Light Rail. A short street connects it to Willow Avenue, which functions as a local entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel. The only segment that retains the name Hackensack Plank Road (and locally called the High Road), ascends the face of the Hudson Palisades to Weehawken Heights and upon reaching the top is designated County Route 691. It travels on a northwest diagonal across Union City as 32nd Street, passing over the Lincoln Tunnel Approach and Helix, intersecting Bergenline Avenue, and creating the terminus of Summit Avenue. Crossing Kennedy Boulevard at Schuetzen Park it enters North Bergen, New Jersey, and as Bergen Turnpike descends to pass Weehawken Cemetery, Palisade Cemetery, and near the site of the colonial-era Three Pigeons joins Tonnelle Ave. There the route heads north through New Durham and Bergenwood between the western slope of the palisades and the border of what has become the New Jersey Meadowlands District. The portion called Hackensack Plank Road is one of few roads which travel along the face of the Hudson Palisades escarpment, other being the Paterson Plank Road, the Wing Viaduct, Pershing Road, and Bulls Ferry Road. It is joined at its midpoint by what some have called the Lombard Street of the East Coast, Shippen Street, which has double hairpin turn descending to the plank road. A similar street, Mountain Road, is a single hairpin between Jersey City Heights and Hoboken.

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