Horseshoe, Jersey City

The Horseshoe section of Jersey City, New Jersey was the second ward, and was the home of the immigrants, tenements, and taverns.[1] The Republican-controlled Legislature gerrymandered the district in 1871 to concentrate and isolate Democratic, and mostly Catholic, votes, thus preserving Republican dominance in the rest of the state.[2] The curved shape of the district was said to resemble a horseshoe.[3]

Map showing District 2 in 1872

As competing railroads built cuts through Bergen Hill, they also built viaducts from the foot of the cliff which passed through residential districts to the waterfront. The district is often associated with the name Pavonia encompassing Harsimus Cove, Hamilton Park, Powerhouse and the former site of the Erie Railroad's Hudson waterfront Pavonia Terminal and the Pavonia Ferry, which since the 1980s has been redeveloped as Newport. Frank Hague was born in The Horseshoe, [4] and used it as his power base to become mayor of Jersey City and influential in local, state, and national politics.

References
  1. http://www.cityofjerseycity.org/hague/earlycareer/forward.shtml
  2. (Smith 1982, pp. 25–26)
  3. The Horsehoe and Hague
  4. "When the Big Boy Goes..." TIME. 1956-01-16. As the eight professional pallbearers hefted the 700-lb., hammered copper casket out of Lawrence Quinn's Funeral Home in Jersey City, a solemn voice called out to the pressing crowd: "Hats, men." Of the hundreds on the sidewalk, only four men were seen to lift their hats as a final gesture of respect toward Frank Hague, who died last week at 81. He was the last of the great machine bosses and the most absolute of them all. On a salary that never exceeded $8,500 a year during his eight terms as mayor of Jersey City, he came to reckon his personal fortune at more than $2,000,000, his homes at four (in Jersey City, on Manhattan's Park Avenue, on Miami's Biscayne Bay and on the Jersey coast at Deal).
  • Addresses within the Horseshoe district.


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