Fort Lee's Moment: An Ode to the Town at the Center of Bridgegate: The New Yorker I grew up just down the hill from Fort Lee, New Jersey, the commuter town at the center of Chris Christie's Bridgegate scandal which will forever be linked to the phrase "time for some traffic problems." My heart goes out to the residents who got in their cars on the morning of September 9, 2013, and on the following three mornings, when the roads were clogged up. But, mainly, I am proud of my old neighbors in Fort Lee. In this story, the town comes out looking like a bastion of steadfastness in the face of relentless bullying, its first responders battling heroically to reach those in need, its children trying desperately to get to their first day of school. Then again, Fort Lee is used to being bullied. For years, it has been a punch line. Even New Jersey residents, who are accustomed to being mocked about living in a redoubt of boorish men and bad hairstyles - both "The Sopranos" and "Jersey Shore" played on this prejudice - are snobby about Fort Lee. When I was growing up, some of the jokes made reference to the perceived number of "Japs" who lived there, a knock to both its large Jewish population and its growing Japanese one. Indeed, so many Asian-Americans were moving in that some people in the adjoining towns began calling it Foto Lee. Other riffs played on the idea that, with its long-nailed ladies driving Mazdas and its close-but-so-far relationship to Manhattan, Fort Lee was about the least cool place on the planet. The screenwriters of the 1985 comedy "Desperately Seeking Susan" chose to make Rosanna Arquette's character, Roberta Glass, a bored housewife who becomes obsessed with Madonna's character, a resident of a Fort Lee high-rise. The movie repeatedly shows her gazing longingly out her window, across the Hudson, at the twinkling lights on the other side. Eventually, Roberta gets so bored that she leaves her husband, moves to downtown Manhattan, and shacks up with Des, a black-clad hipster played by Aidan Quinn. But I quite liked Fort Lee. Yes, it lacked both the grittiness of the Bruce Springsteen belt and the graciousness of New Jersey's preppy towns to the south and west. But it had an obliviousness about it, or maybe it was a lack of attitude, that was refreshing. No one who lived there seemed to care that their town or state were so unloved, or that most outsiders who passed through regarded it as nothing more than an approach route to the George Washington Bridge. As a young teen, I took tennis lessons at the Fort Lee Racquet Club, an indoor bubble, where before class I watched throaty-voiced tennis ladies named Marsha and Linda sip Tab and flirt with the head pro, a smooth-talking, good-looking thirtysomething in skintight lemon-yellow shorts. The assistant pro garnered somewhat less female attention, possibly because he claimed to live in his car. When I was in high school, I would sometimes visit a particularly charmless nineteen-seventies high-rise where a friend's elderly dad had recently retired from the shoe business. On summer weekends, we would "lie out" on a cement patio overlooking the building's over-chlorinated pool. Many of the sunbathers would be splayed on homemade beds of tinfoil, hoping to achieve that special charred look. My friend and I stuck to baby oil. Never let it be said, though, that Fort Lee doesn't have any history. Long before it became synonymous with a particular brand of New Jersey tacky, it was a Revolutionary War battleground. The Fort in Fort Lee dates to 1776, when the patriots were on the run from the British. George Washington and his men retreated straight through the heart of the town - down what is now Fort Lee Road - after Fort Washington, across the river, fell to the British in a surprise attack. In the early twentieth century, Fort Lee had another big moment: it became the center of silent-film production in the United States. Thomas Edison, the inventor and New Jersey resident, set up a movie studio there when Hollywood was still full of scrub brush. The location was attractive because it was both close to the city and possessed of a rugged terrain that was perfect for shooting Westerns and "women in jeopardy" films. The term "cliffhanger" actually owes its origins to Fort Lee, where scenes of actors duelling it out on the cliffs of the Palisades were a staple. As silent film went the way of the gramophone, and construction on the George Washington Bridge began, in the nineteen-twenties, Fort Lee's Wild West days gave way to simply wild ones. In 1929, a night club and Delmonico's outpost called Villa Richard was raided by the police, who suspected that it was a bordello. It was replaced by the Riviera, a den of gambling that also featured live shows with Eddie Fisher and Henny Youngman. Mid-century, Fort Lee was also home to the Coney Island-like Palisades Park Amusement Center, which featured the world's biggest Ferris wheel. Like so much else in the town, it was eventually levelled and replaced with a high-rise. Indeed, many people have come to regard Fort Lee, with its tangled maze of highways and residential developments, as a civics lesson in what happens when zoning laws are too lax. In the past twenty years, though, thanks to a large influx of Korean immigrants, the town has transformed itself yet again. On Main Street, which runs parallel to the bridge ramps, many of the signs are in Korean, and you can get a killer bibimbap. Bridget Anne Kelly, Christie's discarded deputy chief of staff, probably won't be dining there any time soon. But Fort Lee should feel proud of its latest moment in the spotlight. For once, the joke is on Trenton. Photograph by Bettmann/CORBIS.