Jimmy and Sharon Williams' "1920s New Jersey Highways" has information about old roads statewide that cannot be found anywhere else on the internet. The illustration showing Route 17N in the 1920s was constructed from a 1927 map on their site. Interestingly, a comparison of this map with others from the 1930s and 40s shows that Route 17N crossed the future path of Route 4 east of Hackensack, several miles east of today's gigantic moxing bowl cloverleaf in Paramus. By 1933, as NJ 2, it ran along Paramus Road, which intersects Route 4 in Arcola, perhaps a mile to the west of the current cloverleaf.
A few overpasses and bridges on NJ Route 4 between the George Washington Bridge and the Route 17 interchange in Paramus still retain fragmentary deco architectural detail. Clean your windshield and don't blink if you're watching for them. Slightly further west, the bridge that carries Route 4 into Paterson has intact deco pillars and oblisks.Paradoxically, the hardest images to find on the internet are those of common sights. This rule applies doubly to once-commonplace structures that have faded into extinction. The Green Brook Bridge (1931), one of whose lanterns is shown in black and white above, is a rare example of lost highway deco memorialized online. The bridge, which linked several towns in Somerset and Middlesex counties, was demolished in 2001 for an Army Corps of Engineers flood control project. However, the Corps first commissioned a full historic preservation study of the original bridge, photographs from the which are online at its New York District website.
The National Register of Historic Places listed the Woodbridge Cloverleaf (1929), which connected present-day Routes 1, 9, and 35, as the first cloverleaf intersection verified to have been constructed in the United States. It was still in excellent structural condition when it was replaced by a safer, higher capacity interchange in 2002. To document it, the New Jersey Department of Transportation commissioned a full architectural survey, a historical booklet, and a video entitled "On-ramps to Innovation". Sica Productions, creator of the video, has many fabulous vintage and recent photographs of the cloverleaf on its website. The Green Brook Bridge and Woodbridge Cloverleaf each share distinctive stylistic features with the Route 17 bridge at Mahwah, including keystone ornamentation, luminary oblisks, and faux balustrade sidewalls.