Sultan, Jersey City School Traffic Guard
The corner on which Sultan works, where Highway 139 doglegs through Kennedy Boulevard and dumps onto the Pulaski Skyway, is a most unpleasant place to walk. Traffic in all directions is desperate and unceasing, a five-lane cataract of jitney buses, city buses, commuters gunning for the Turnpike, battered delivery vans full of sausage and drywall and toilet sinkers. Taxi drivers shout to each other across the lanes.
And yet against these currents moves a steady parade of pedestrians, heads down, on the ragged little sidewalks past the boarded-up car dealerships, enroute to LIttle India or White Castle, Journal Square or middle school or home. Twice a day, for these pilgrims, there is Sultan.
One gets the sense that Sultan has risen, survival-of-the-fittest-like, through the ranks to this particular post. Many of the city’s traffic guards are grandmotherly types. Sultan (pronounced with the emphasis on the second syllable, Sul-TAN) is young. He is quick and wiry and has a neat goatee. In addition to his regulation fluorescent vest, he wears two baseball caps, one on top of the other, the top one of which is faded blue and embroidered with the initials of his employer, J.C.S.T.G. He has worked this corner for two and a half years, and responds to the timing of the light changes without looking at them, like a muscle memory.
On a recent grey afternoon he was at his post with an assistant, Carlos, and elderly guard in large glasses who was shuffling gingerly into the crosswalks. “I try to get him out there a little,” Sultan says. “He can’t move as good as he used to.”
Sultan is from Jersey City, “born and raised. I grew up in the Lafayette project, down on the east side.”
He got the job as a guard six years ago, when he ran into a couple of women from his neighborhood patrolling a crosswalk. As it turned out, many of the city’s guards were from his project, and they took him under their wing. “I was trained by the best. You know the saying, it takes a village to raise a child? The women who trained me, they were part of that village.”
Lest the position be confused for charity work, this is “a good living,” he says. “Health benefits. We work for the police department. They do a background check, a urine test, fingerprints.”
He was assigned to his current post after three years on Old Bergen Road. “If you can work Kennedy Avenue, you can work anything.” To maintain order in his crosswalks, he uses “a calm tone,” and occasionally, pantomime. “I have a lot of nationalities. They might not speak English, but they see my face. It’s not a mean expression, it’s a, you about to get hit expression.”
The job’s hours — roughly 90 minutes each shift, morning and afternoon — let him raise his son Joshua, now ten, who lives with him in the same project where he grew up. “I was not the running street type, and my son is not the running street type. We get the homework done, and then we watch movies.”
A man with a purple knit cap and a gold tooth walks by, grinning and pointing at Sultan. “How was Atlantic City?” he says.
Sultan raises a hand back. “You get to know everybody out here,” he says. Between 2003 and 2006, he lost both his parents. “I balled up inside. It froze up my conversation for a year.” His job, he says, brought him out of it. “Now I’ve gotten to the point where I can stand here and talk to you, talk to everyone.”
Nor has his stint on the corner of Kennedy and 139, with its relentless exposure to the petty rule-breakers and risk-takers of the world, soured him on human nature. If anything, he radiates the supreme goodwill of someone who has found a way to put his part of the world right. “We all have to work together out here,” he says. “We’re all in the same boat.”
Out on Kennedy, the left-hand arrow has turned green, and Carlos has gotten stranded halfway across with a couple of women in heels and pencil skirts. Sultan springs between the lane of cars and the women, who start hobbling at a trot, clutching their bags and giggling. “Ok Carlos,” Sultan calls. “Bring ‘em home.”
