Tonight Denise and I went on a short drive and I found myself directing the car towards an old high school “hang out” site. We used to call the place Chamberlin & Barclay, after the words on a huge billboard that we normally couldn’t see anyway since it was always dark when we made the trip. In fact it was so dark, Bryan lost his keys there once… I think.
Anyway, to get there, you go on a couple of back roads in H—town and head towards what used to be called Cranbury Station (the defunct train station, not the restaurant). We took the road as I remembered it, but discovered it does not go the entire distance any longer. Since they added the H—town Bypass, the road to Chamberlin & Barclay comes to a dead end. In fact, the field itself seems to be mostly replaced by the freeway.
Since the world wide web didn’t exist while I was in high school, I took the opportunity to do some quick research on C&B. Apparently the location I’ve visited in the past is listed as a superfund site with the Environmental Protection Agency, which obviously means an area of land that contains unsafe levels of toxic waste.
Some might say, “That explains a lot.”
Cranbury Station Road is still easily accessable, just not from behind the housing development – as you noted, that road dead-ends at the bypass. You CAN, however, pick it up from Wycoff’s Mill Road. Incidentally, C&B is still there. And I suspect that the reason it’s a superfund site is because they moved a lot of fertilizer though there, the chemicals and such must have seeped into the ground. There are sites like that all over NJ. The Mid-State Mall (home to Borders #42) in East Brunswick is also a superfund site, because prior to being a shopping center, the land was a farm, which used heavy pesticides.