'Bridgegate' takes small New Jersey town from obscurity to headlines

• Fort Lee%2C N.J.%2C faded from prominence years ago%2C but now it%27s back in the news
• Town on west end of George Washington Bridge was paralyzed in September by traffic gridlock sparked by a political vendetta
• %27I don%27t know if this is the best way to get publicity%2C%22 Chamber of Commerce chief says

FORT LEE, N.J. — George Washington camped here. D.W. Griffith filmed here. Frank Sinatra sang here. But until "Bridgegate,'' this was just another place on the Jersey map that you drove through en route to someplace else.

Now, Fort Lee is a boldface destination on the nation's political landscape.

If aides to Gov. Chris Christie did, in fact, close access lanes to the George Washington Bridge to punish the mayor for political reasons, then this ethnically diverse, densely-settled borough on the Jersey Palisades is the crime scene.

The scandal may derail Christie's presidential bandwagon. It's already restored some of Fort Lee's past prominence.

"I don't know if this is the best way to get publicity,'' says Margaret Maclay, director of the Chamber of Commerce. "But all eyes are on us.''

And all ears, especially the hilarious Bruce Springsteen-Jimmy Fallon performance on Fallon's TV show of a version of Springsteen's Born to Run with the refrain "stuck in Governor Chris Christie's Fort Lee New Jersey traffic jam.''

Fort Lee has a proud history. In the Revolutionary War, it supplied Washington's army in New York and provided the avenue of retreat through which he led his army toward Trenton to fight another day.

Fort Lee was Hollywood before anyone heard of Hollywood. In the decade before America's entry into World War I, this was where New York filmmakers came in large numbers to make many of the first big silent films. "It was the motion picture capital of the world,'' says Tom Meyers, director of the Fort Lee Film Commission.

And it was home of the famed Prohibition Era night club and speakeasy, Ben Marden's Riviera, a sleek playland overlooking the Hudson River where mobsters like Murder Incorporated capo Albert Anastasia partied and entertainers like Sinatra performed.

Fort Lee in recent years largely receded into the relatively boring anonymity of life west of Twelfth Avenue.

So Jimmy Viola, 86, commander of the local chapter of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, was happy to receive a phone call last week from his son, a retired Fort Lee cop living in Fort Myers, Fla. "He said, 'Pop, everyone down here's talking about it. Now they know where Fort Lee is!' "

"We're tired of being a spot on the map on a highway that runs through a town,'' says Viola, whose mother was a film editor and whose father worked in a motion picture vault. "It's about time people knew what this borough is.''

It's the antithesis of white-bread suburbia – laced with very tall apartment towers, graced with some good restaurants and leavened by several ethnic immigrant groups, including Koreans and Russians. About a third of Fort Lee residents are of Asian descent.

The bridge looms large here, literally – its great gray towers helped provoke the architect Le Corbusier's comment that "finally, steel architecture seems to laugh" – and figuratively. After the GW opened in 1931, the sleepy, bucolic town that preceded it disappeared. Today, the high school teams are called "The Bridgemen.''

There is also a diversity of political opinion on what Christie, who carried the town in last year's election, knew about the bridge closings, and when he knew it.

"No way this happens and Christie doesn't know,'' says Stu Ragusa, a baker. "He's a micromanager.''

Donna Brennan, president of the local historical society, isn't sure. "I want to wait and see the facts come out,'' she said. "So many people have a lynch mob mentality.''

Viola is of two minds: While he holds Christie responsible for the lanes being closed under the subterfuge of a traffic study, he doesn't think the governor knew about the plan, and "I like the way he took the blame. He showed a lot of'' ... fortitude, Viola says.

Until Bridgegate, Fort Lee's primary claim to political fame dated to the early 1970s, when its mayor – brace yourself, Jersey bashers – refused a $500,000 bribe from a developer and informed the FBI, spurring a major corruption investigation.

That was Burt Ross, who moved to Malibu two years ago. He thinks Christie knew about the lane closings and can't understand why the governor didn't crack down: "If someone brought a plan like to me, I would have thrown him out the window.''

When it's pointed out that Bridgegate will obscure his moment of fame, he's philosophical: "I have no desire to be in the history books. But what they did belongs in the hall of fame of dirty tricks. Right at the top.''