My father was a hunter. He knew the woods of Atlantic County the way most people know their own backyard — every trail, every creek, every forgotten corner of the Pine Barrens that never made it onto a modern map. And every so often, he’d come home with a story that stopped you cold.

One of those stories was about a place he stumbled across west of Mays Landing sometime in the 1950s or ’60s. Wide streets cut through the woods, he said. Or at least what were meant to be streets — overgrown by then, reclaimed by the pines, but still unmistakably there if you knew what you were looking at. Streets with names like Los Angeles and Baltimore and San Francisco. Avenues called Broadway and Market and Venice. All of it going nowhere. All of it going back to nature.

He called it Gigantic City. And he wasn’t wrong.

ALSO SEE: The 1880 Mays Landing train wreck: NJ’s forgotten rail disaster 

Gigantic City | Wikimapia Screenshot by EJ

Gigantic City | Wikimapia Screenshot by EJ

The city that existed only on paper

Gigantic City is real — or at least, it was supposed to be. Located about a mile west of Mays Landing along Route 40 in Atlantic County, it appears on old Champion Maps as a fully planned municipality, complete with a grid of wide streets named after major American cities and grand urban avenues. Someone, somewhere, once dreamed of building something enormous here in the South Jersey pinelands.

The dream never survived contact with reality. The streets were platted. Some were likely partially cleared and graded — which is exactly what my father was walking across decades later without knowing it. But the buildings never came, the people never arrived, and the city that was supposed to be gigantic stayed exactly the size of an idea.

Land fever, Pine Barrens style

What likely doomed Gigantic City was the same thing that killed dozens of ambitious South Jersey schemes in the late 1800s — a combination of over-optimism, speculative land fever, and the brutal Panic of 1893, which wiped out development projects across the region almost overnight. This stretch of Atlantic County along Route 40 was littered with forgotten dreams. Within a dozen miles sat the lost settlements of Royalton, Hebron, Rotham, Ruskville and half a dozen others — names that appear on old maps and nowhere else.

The land meant to become Gigantic City was eventually absorbed into what became Mizpah — itself a fascinating footnote, originally established as a small Jewish agricultural colony by New York cloak makers in the early 1890s, before the economic collapse ended that dream too.

The sun shines through snow-covered pine trees in the New Jersey Pinelands in Manchester Dec. 11, 2013

(AP Photo/Wayne Parry)

What’s left — and what I wish I still had

If you drive Route 40 west out of Mays Landing today, you won’t see a skyline. You won’t find a corner deli or hear traffic. What you’ll find is what my father found in the pines all those years ago — quiet, trees, and if you know where to look, the faint ghost of a street grid that was once going to change everything.

My dad passed away in 1991. I’m grateful the internet has helped fill in some of these mysteries he left behind. But I’d give anything to sit across from him one more time and ask him what it really looked like out there — what he felt when he realized those overgrown paths were actually streets with names, in a city that never got to be.

Some cities get built. Some cities just get remembered. And some stories only get better when you finally find out they were true all along.

Small towns in New Jersey you didn’t know existed

There are so many small towns in New Jersey that you may have heard of, especially in our listening area of Central and North Jersey. In the southern part of the state, where we have less reach and interaction, there are towns almost guaranteed, you’ve never heard of. Many of them in Atlantic, Cumberland and Salem Counties. Some are even in Burlington and Camden County. Here’s a quick look at just of few of them.

Gallery Credit: Dennis Malloy