2022 – Hackensack’s September 11 Shoots
……………………………………..(ignore April 30, 2017 publish date – this was published on September 13, 2022)
NOTE: More than half of these images are large and should be clicked to get the full effect.
From about 15 miles away, I took this photo from my Hackensack apartment on September 11, 2001, as Tower 2 collapsed and began to spread throughout lower Manhattan:
Last week on September 10, I photographed the Tribute in Light from my living room. It’s not the best shot of it I’ve ever taken………it was a cloudy evening, but it was supposed to rain the next day (the 11th), so I got what I could:
I was aware of a Tribute that was to be held on the 11th in front of the Hackensack Fire Department Headquarters……….
………but something else caught my eye on the morning of the 10th while I was out on Main St shooting at a construction site:
The HFD HQ is not on Main St, so what could be going on there from 10am – 2pm on the 11th that would require the street to be devoid of vehicles?
I called the HPD: I was told that “A 5K Remembrance Run that begins at the Atlantic St Park, heads up Main St and ends at Cranberry Junction” (an ice-cream place…………..a nice way to end a run):
I looked it up and found this nice-looking ad with a misspelled title:
I decided to go out on the morning of the 11th and walk down Main St towards the Atlantic St Park starting point – almost a mile away – at 10am. I apparently paid more attention to the sign on the meter (10am-2pm) and thought that’s when they started (the ad clearly stated ”11am – 1pm”).
My thought was that if I left at 10 when they supposedly started, I would see the huge crowd of runners coming at me somewhere along the way and would get a great shot of them all running toward me.
I got about 4 blocks from home and saw a cop blocking a side street. I asked him if he knew if they had started yet. He looked at me strangely and said “They don’t start until 11”.
Oops!
I went back home and repeated the same plan at 11am. SURELY, I would see the group coming up Main St then.
Starting at Passaic St, it was odd to see Main St without a single moving or parked car on it…………in fact, I had never EVER seen it like that before (and I’ve been here a long time). So I walked right down the center stripes of the road and started taking pictures of the long and empty street before the running mob showed up.
For all you locals, I started the pix at Berry St. You can see the construction site and the Emergency/No Parking cardboard signs on meters and poles that I had shot the day before:
Still walking on those center stripes a block later, I took another shot at Camden St by the library (on the left). The runners were going to show up at any minute:
Out of nowhere, I hear an engine behind me………….it’s a street sweeper! I managed to elongate it a bit with my phone’s PANO setting as it went by:
For the next couple of minutes, it kept going up and down the same two blocks and cleaning the same few feet by the curbs (but no other part of the street). I guess experienced 5K runners know to stick close to the curbs when they run so they don’t trip on microscopic things:
Just to be complete – in case someone someday writes a book about carless Main Streets – I turned around and shot the northerly view of what I had just traversed:
Finally, I reached the railroad tracks that cross Main St just before the intersection with Mercer St. I stood right in the middle of the tracks in the middle of Main St and tried to do a 360-degree PANO shot, but couldn’t pirouette fast enough or horizontally-perfect enough, but I DID manage to get both Main St directions and both RR directions (click this one twice):
I shouldn’t tell you this, but I wasn’t able to get the whole Dominican restaurant (on the right) in the PANO – meaning that I also didn’t get the east-facing tracks – so I took another shot that included those things and tried to stitch it to the PANO. Not everything lined up, but if you didn’t notice that until I just mentioned it to you, then I did an OK job.
So now I’m about 2’ past the tracks and facing the Mercer St intersection. Where are the runners? I need a good length of Main St fore and aft of them to get the shot I want and I’m now more than halfway there:
NOTE: I’m sticking in a shot I took 48 hours later just to show you what it normally looks like from behind the wheel and a little further back from the tracks. Now you know why carless Main looked SO uniquely odd to me:
I’ve just crossed the intersection and have turned around to shoot where I’ve been and to also include the relatively new instruction painted on the street (“BLOCK NOT DO”):
As I approach Atlantic St, I hear an HPD motorcycle behind me and (only semi-successfully) give him the PANO treatment:
I make a right onto Atlantic and see some people in the small park. I’m guessing that the crowd of 5K participants must be lining up around the corner, so I go into the park and immediately face east to take this shot:
I then do an about-face and take a much-wider PANO of the other 3 sides of the park (click this one twice to fully-enlarge):
Are these friends and family of the runners?
I decided to hang out between the park and Main St so I can get a wide shot when all the runners come out to line up.
15-20 minutes later, it happens:
That’s it? The friends and family are the runners? It appears there’s been a slight miscalculation on my part.
I immediately get back on Main St, but there’s no time to run up the street and shoot the runners head-on because they’re already coming around the corner onto Main (at 11:35am).
Here’s the most-populated shot I could get:
And here’s my favorite shot of the event:
I’m fortunate that Hackensack placed that electronic sign there.
Everyone’s now past me, so this shoot is finished.
But there’s still the tribute at the HFD HQ that’s scheduled for noon. It’s only a few blocks away, but I have something to do at home at noon, so I’ll see what I can get on my way home. It’s a little early, but a lot less crowded.
Here’s the entire scene about 15-20 minutes before show time (double-click):
I like getting setting-up shots, so I was right on time for this one:
Here’s a shot taken from underneath the covered seating for speakers and guests and the podium they spoke from (double-click):
I’m done……………and I made it home by noon.
I found a 19-minute YouTube video of the HFD HQ proceedings, but the sound is terrible:
It’s now the 13th. I just drove from Cranberry Junction to the Atlantic Street Park. It was 1.4 miles (5K is 3.1 miles). Even if they included the run back to the starting point, it’s still not 5K. And now I’m noticing that some of the ads say “5K” and some do not. The one I posted above does not.
Some ads say it’s a “Remembrance Run/Walk” and not 5K, so I’m guessing that’s what it actually was.
In the end, it really doesn’t matter, so congratulations to all the thoughtful people who participated.
Local curiosity: Has anyone else ever walked down the center stripe of Main St from Passaic St to Atlantic St (0.7 miles) when there was not a single vehicle – driven or parked – on the entire road?
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