Just off the Asbury Park Toll Plaza, at mile marker 104 on the Garden State Parkway North, is a cemetery of sorts, where rusting hulls of metal with "TOMS RIVER" or "EATONTOWN" on the frames jut up like tombstones and a Springsteen song is just waiting to happen.

It's the place where tollbooths go to die.

Here lie the steel-and-glass boxes of toll lanes past.

"They call it the Tollbooth Graveyard," said Bob Quirk, who has spent a career in and around tollbooths, first as a collector who breathed fumes and made change at Exit 14C on the New Jersey Turnpike in 1978, and now as director of tolls for the Turnpike and Parkway.

As they decide whether to hit the cash or E-ZPass express lanes, drivers wouldn’t necessarily notice the resting place for tollbooths in the shadows of the busy plaza.

The New Jersey Turnpike Authority, which oversees the Parkway and Turnpike, will one day have to figure out what to do with the highway boxes that became casualties when one-way tolling arrived on certain sections of the Parkway.

For now, similar to a dearly departed organ donor providing body parts for the still-living, tollbooths in the graveyard can be scavenged by Parkway maintenance workers for, among other useful parts, their windows and air conditioning and stainless-steel "Dutch doors" that were at the waist level of toll collectors.

In addition, some of the 32 tollbooths in the graveyard could be resurrected with new paint and parts if other toll booths on the Parkway become severely damaged.

"If, God forbid, something were to happen to the toll plaza and a whole booth went out or something, it would be easy to rig one of these up to put in," said Tom Feeney, a spokesman for Turnpike Authority.

THE FUTURE OF TOLLING

The plan is to eventually go to all-electronic tolling on the Parkway, perhaps as soon as summer 2013, eliminating manned tollbooths.

Then what?

Could the instantly recognizable symbols of what George Carlin called "The Tollbooth State" be used for scrap metal? Barrier reefs?

Tree houses for kids? Sold on eBay to nostalgic New Jerseyans, like baseball fans who bought their old seats at Yankee Stadium.

"At some point, when we switch to all-electronic tolling and this will no longer be necessary, then there will be a decision made on how to dispose of them," Feeney said from the yard. "And by dispose, I don’t necessarily mean throw out — a decision will be made at that point on what to do with them."

Many of the graveyard booths ended up there in 2004 and 2005, when the Parkway started going to one-way tolling at certain plazas. Going to one-way tolling helped the flow of traffic by stopping travelers only in one direction instead of both directions, and also made it cheaper to administer the plazas because fewer transactions were necessary.

Other booths were brought to the yard when express E-ZPass lanes arrived.

The ones that made it to the yard were portable ones — some were previously bolted into pre-cast concrete — that were able to be lifted by a crane and trucked away. But they were in the minority.

"The original Parkway booths are all built into the plaza structure, so when they come down, they knock them down like they’re knocking down a building," Feeney said.

Most of the corpses in the yard were from "branch lanes" — booths accessed by the far right lanes and set aside from the rest of the toll plazas, as a way to make better use of the limited lane capacity.

But among the dearly departed are five booths that were never used.

In the 1990s, officials decided to add tolls to five exit ramps in Ocean County. The new booths were delivered to the yard next to the Asbury tolls, then moved as needed. Because the decision was eventually made not to toll the Barnegat ramp at the time, those booths never left the yard.

A walk through the graveyard is a trip back in time. Some of the booths have signs noting that the toll was 35 cents. In 2008, 35-cent tolls became 50 cents. On Jan. 1, those 50-cent tolls became 75 cents, as tolls were increased another 50 percent on the Parkway.

Other signs on the rusting booths — taken from plazas in Eatontown, Asbury Park, Raritan North, Toms River and Union — included "NO PENNIES PLEASE" on the outside and reminder signs next to switches for toll collectors such as "FAN RECEPTACLE," "BOOTH LIGHT ‘A’ LEVEL 1" and "CYCLE RESET."

On one side of the yard was part of a telephone. The remainder of the phone was on the other side.

A stray rubber glove was in one of the 8-foot-by-3-foot-booths, along with old receipts, pamphlets and an empty cash till.

Ironically, the yard was originally a place where new tollbooths were delivered before they were put in service.

"It started as a place to store tollbooths that were just arriving," Feeney said. "Now, it’s a place where we store tollbooths that are on their way out."

Staff writer Jeanette Rundquist contributed to this report.

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