Football Fans, Do Not Forget, It's New Jersey

NEWARK - As the rest of the world streamed into the colossal Prudential Center on Tuesday for a religious service known as Super Bowl media day, a singular, defiant voice called from black loudspeakers propped outside a nearby tractor-trailer.

'My friend, I'll say it clear,' that voice sang, cutting through the polar chill. 'I'll state my case, of which I'm certain.'

The disembodied Sinatra was calling out from the New Jersey Hall of Fame's mobile museum in a tone just short of a threat. And what the kid from Hoboken was telling these Bowl-besotted visitors was: Not for nothing, 'friend,' but you ain't in Manhattan.

Super Bowl XLVIII - that's gladiatorial for 48 - takes place Sunday at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J. It is geographic fact that East Rutherford is in New Jersey. But in the last week, it seems, the Hudson River dried up and New York City extended westward by dozens of miles to claim selective glory.

For example, the contracting company called the National Football League recently helped to construct a fan-dazzling roadway in Midtown Manhattan called Super Bowl Boulevard, a thoroughfare paved with the golden dust of fallen Doritos. It has souvenir shops, activities for kids, autograph opportunities - even a 60-foot-high toboggan run, because when you think football, you think toboggan.

The boulevard also has tag teams of streetwise Cookie Monsters and Tickle-Me-Elmos serving as unofficial greeters. That is because this Brigadoon boulevard, along with much of the Super Bowl bacchanalia, runs through Manhattan's Times Square. There's not a Garden State Parkway tollbooth in sight.

The honor of serving as host to the Super Bowl, then, has played into New Jersey's complex about being That Place Next to the Capital of the World. A few days ago, its two United States senators and one of its United States representatives even held a news conference to bemoan the collective slight.

'The Big Apple may have Super Bowl Boulevard, but no one is going to score any touchdowns in Times Square,' Senator Robert Menendez said.

So there.

All of this explains why the New Jersey Hall of Fame chose to park itself on some prime New Jersey soil and remind visitors to New Jersey that they are, in fact, in New Jersey.

Where, you ask?

Very funny.

How about after the Garden State rearranges your face, it responds by saying: Thomas Edison. A New Jersey guy. He invented the first long-lasting and practical electric light bulb that will help you see what you look like now, wiseguy.

The tennis great Althea Gibson, the astronaut Buzz Aldrin, the poet William Carlos Williams, the suffragist Alice Paul, the singer Sarah Vaughan, the baseball player Larry Doby and the actor Jack Nicholson.

Bud Abbott, from Asbury Park. And Lou Costello, from Paterson. Now who's on first?

Bruce Springsteen. A singer. Ever hear of him? Freehold.

These were among the many inductees in the New Jersey Hall of Fame who joined Sinatra in a New Jersey cri de coeur. Each of them inhabited this 53-foot-long tractor-trailer-cum-museum parked just outside the Super Bowl news media contrivance granted to Newark, right beside the Dinosaur Bar-B-Que tent.

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The hall of fame was founded in 2005 in part 'because we were always getting bashed,' said Steve Edwards, the president of the hall of fame's foundation and a product of Union.

Standing beside a glass display case containing a sacred New Jersey relic - a denim jacket once worn by Jon Bon Jovi - Mr. Edwards acknowledged that the state was sometimes its own worst enemy (see Gov. Chris Christie, George Washington Bridge and traffic cones).

But he became the only person in the immediate area to drop the name of Aristotle, who was not from New Jersey, in explaining the hall's lofty message to schoolchildren: 'Actualize your highest sense of self.'

In other words, he said, 'Yeah, we've got the mobsters, we've got the corrupt politicians. But did you know?'

Did you know? That another philosopher, Yogi Berra, lives in Montclair? That the actress Susan Sarandon went to Edison High? That the novelist Mary Higgins Clark lives in Saddle River? That the singer Queen Latifah and the writer Philip Roth were born right here in Newark?

Did you know that the singer Dionne Warwick knows her way to San Jose, but is from East Orange? She was planning to be at the mobile museum Tuesday, in the flesh, but couldn't get back in time from the Grammy Awards ceremony in California.

Ms. Warwick may not have made it, but the hall of fame inductee and four-time Olympic track star Joetta Clark Diggs - Columbia High School in Maplewood - did. She stood before a video display that featured, among others, another Columbia alum, the actor Roy Scheider, in battle with a certain shark.

'When something gets a bad rap, it's hard to shake,' Ms. Clark Diggs said. To counter that rap, she rattled off several New Jersey positives, including a reference to the lush beauty beyond the refinery tanks of Linden and Elizabeth.

'This is the Garden State,' she said, as another recent inductee, the comedian Joe Piscopo, stepped in from the cold to provide punctuation.

If the New Jersey sensibility has been part of Mr. Piscopo's shtick over the years, he comes to it honestly, by way of Newark, Bloomfield, and now pastoral Hunterdon County, where he lives. And he is put out by New York's insistence on dancing with New Jersey's date at the Super Bowl prom.

'This is the only thing,' he said, gesturing to the mobile museum's 983 square feet. 'And no one cares.'

Through the day, several dozen of the thousands who came seeking Super Bowl pieties and gift bags stopped in at New Jersey's pride on wheels. Among them was a man who introduced himself as Rocky the Colorado Leprechaun. Befitting the formality of the day, he wore an orange-and-blue tuxedo, top hat and Spock-like ears.

But Mr. Leprechaun had no interest in the firmament of Dr. Carl Sagan, the artistry of Dizzy Gillespie or the voice of Whitney Houston. He just wanted a place to store his bag and orange-and-blue umbrella.

It was tucked beneath a display featuring an Edison incandescent light bulb - in what you, 'friend,' might call yet another act of Jersey hospitality.

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