This is New Jersey’s most depressing highway

There are stretches of roads around New Jersey that look like the land that time forgot.

Some manage to carry it off with a bit of charm and nostalgia.

Others look like time not only forgot about it but abandoned it, too.

The White Horse and Black Horse pikes used to be the main route from Philadelphia to Atlantic City back in the day. It was before the Atlantic City Expressway with its wide nonstop lanes took you into Atlantic City.

They have plenty of traffic lights and plenty of small towns, along both pikes.

There is a stretch of the White Horse Pike from the end of Atco to about Waterford that passes through a town called Chesilhurst that is as depressing as a tearjerker country song.

Once you drive over the overpass just after the exit for Ancora psychiatric hospital things start to look better.

You'll start to see plenty of active farmland and family farm stands that have been there for generations and are still going strong. Then you enter the town of Hammonton, which is bustling with shopping centers, restaurants and plenty of activity.

Once you drive through Hammonton and into Mullica Township, (not to be confused with Mullica Hill), things get depressing again with abandoned buildings, houses, farmstands, and gas stations.

Once you get to Egg Harbor City, things start to look alive again and then it becomes kind of wide open and rural.

But then once you get to Pleasantville, all bets are off. Things get kinda ugly again. Keep going and you enter the back end of Atlantic City.

Back in its heyday before the late '60s, AC itself and the road leading to it was a promising-looking route drive. Today it’s a land that time and everyone else seems to have forgotten.

Opinions expressed in the post above are those of New Jersey 101.5 talk show host Dennis Malloy only.

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