MARIN BOULEVARD OVERPASS

I live in Jersey City. For most people, it is a place synonymous with urban blight. Once a bustling hub of ships and trains — think Elia Kazan’s masterpiece On The Waterfront — Jersey City rapidly declined from a gritty maze of factories and warehouses and cobbled streets and railroad tracks to a tired and foreboding accumulation of detritus lurking in the shadow of the majestic skyscrapers of Manhattan. But in the last quarter-century all that has changed. Now Jersey City is a destination for Millennials and Baby Boomers, an oasis of trendy restaurants and luxury apartments. The docks and wharves are gone, the smoke-filled skies have made way for kite festivals, the steam whistles have been replaced by jazz concerts. And yet vestiges of what once was can still be found.

The railroad and trolley tracks have been repurposed for modern air-conditioned commuter trains and European-designed LightRail. But many of their bridges remain. Two of them cross over Marin Boulevard, just north of Eighteenth Street. If you stand under them pretty much anytime of the daytime hours, you will hear the slow rumble and rattling of the passenger cars. The sounds are not much different than they were a century ago, nor has the light that streams through the slats of the bridges changed. Interspersed between the steel supports and stone abutments, the rays of sunshine create a magical world of shapes and shadows.

For several years now — as I would drive beneath these overpasses — I’ve kept on saying to myself that I need to come back here with my camera. I finally did.