Bundikin · Discovery city
Jersey City
The other skyline · New Jersey, United States
Settled by the Dutch in the 1630s; a city from 1820
Jersey City looks at Manhattan across the Hudson and has always been a place people arrive. Paulus Hook was a ferry point. Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty sit in its water. Railroads, docks, and brownstone streets made it a 19th-century engine room for New York without being New York.
The waterfront warehouses became offices; the stoops stayed. At 11:47 p.m. the lights still tell you who is awake. PATH trains run under the river, but the old brick neighborhoods keep their own gossip, their own corner stores, and a skyline that belongs to someone else and somehow also to them.
Things worth knowing
- Ellis Island and Liberty Island sit in Jersey City's waters, even when the postcards say New York.
- The PATH system began as the Hudson & Manhattan Railroad in 1908, a subway before most American cities had one.
- Brownstone and brick stoops in Downtown and Van Vorst are leftover 19th-century worker and merchant housing.
- The Colgate Clock on the waterfront, a 1924 landmark, still faces Manhattan with a 50-foot minute hand.
- Jersey City is one of the most linguistically mixed cities in the United States — a stoop can hear four languages before midnight.
