Pomona, NJ

Pomona here is not the Californian city but a community in the New Jersey Pinelands — the venue decides the case, for the Stockton Performing Arts Center stands on the campus of Stockton University in Pomona, an unincorporated community of Galloway Township in Atlantic County (a locality note for the registry). The setting explains the character: this is the edge of the Pine Barrens, the vast and strangely wild forest of pitch pine and tea-coloured cedar streams that covers more than a million acres of southern New Jersey — a UNESCO-recognised biosphere region, home of the legendary Jersey Devil and of a cranberry-and-blueberry farming culture found nowhere else; the blueberry itself was first cultivated commercially in these barrens.

Stockton University, founded in 1969 and grown around a lakeside campus in the pines, is the region's public university and its cultural engine: the Stockton PAC, the hall documented in this archive, has for decades presented touring orchestras, opera, dance and chamber music to audiences drawn from the shore towns and the forest alike — Atlantic City and its boardwalk lie only fifteen minutes east, and the contrast is the point. Casinos on the horizon, silence in the pines, and a concert hall between them: Pomona, New Jersey, is an unexpected address that earns its page.