Jersey City, New Jersey

• 1. Introduction

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  Jersey City sits on the western bank of the Hudson River, separated from Manhattan by less than a mile of water, and that proximity has shaped almost everything about it. With a population of 292,449 as of the 2020 census, it is New Jersey's second-most populous city. But raw numbers barely hint at what makes the place unusual. More than 40 languages are spoken in more than 52% of Jersey City homes. As of 2020-42.5% of residents were born outside the United States. By that measure, it is the most ethnically diverse city in the country.

  So how did a patch of tidal marshland become one of the great immigrant crossroads of the Americas? The answer runs through Dutch traders and Lenape people, through Revolutionary War spies and Underground Railroad conductors, through a political boss who dressed in royal suites and paid himself less than nine thousand dollars a year, and through a waterfront reinvention so dramatic that bankers gave the place a nickname: Wall Street West. Jersey City's official motto reads 'Let Jersey Prosper' - a phrase born from a 19th-century border dispute with New York City that the city has been winning, in its own way, ever since.

• 2. Lenape Land and Dutch Pavonia

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  Henry Hudson anchored his ship, the Halve Maen, at Sandy Hook, Harsimus Cove and Weehawken Cove in 1609 while searching for an alternate route to East Asia on behalf of the Dutch East India Company. He spent nine days surveying the area before sailing as far north as Albany, claiming the region for the Netherlands. It was the first recorded European contact with the land the Lenape called Lenapehoking.

  Michael Reyniersz Pauw received a land grant in 1630 as patroon, on the condition he populate the territory with at least fifty persons within four years. He purchased the land from the Lenape for 80 fathoms of wampum, 20 fathoms of cloth, 12 kettles, six guns, two blankets, one double kettle, and half a barrel of beer. The grant, dated the 22nd of November 1630, is the earliest known land conveyance covering what are now Hoboken and Jersey City. Pauw proved to be an absentee landlord and sold his holdings back to the Company by 1633.

  The Dutch named the colony Pavonia - a Latinized form of Pauw's name meaning 'land of the peacock.' By the 1640s, Director-General Willem Kieft was attempting to intimidate and tax the Lenape into leaving. On the night of the 25th of February 1643, Kieft ordered a massacre at Pavonia without his advisory council's approval and against the wishes of the colonists themselves. Approximately 120 Lenape people were killed, including women and children. The violence triggered retaliatory raids that left the west bank settlement in near-total ruin.

  Peter Stuyvesant arrived in New Amsterdam on the 11th of May 1647, to replace Kieft. In 1660, settlers wishing to return to the Hudson's west bank established the village of Bergen - designed by Jacques Cortelyou, the first surveyor of New Amsterdam - around what is now Bergen Square, considered the first town square in North America. Stuyvesant officially chartered the village on the 5th of September 1661, as the state's first local civil government. Bergen's Dutch word origin means 'place of safety', a fitting name given what the settlers had survived.

• 3. Revolution and Espionage

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  In 1776, before the first shots were even widely exchanged, General George Washington ordered the construction of several forts along the Hudson's western bank. One stood at Paulus Hook, a naturally defensible position protecting the river channel and the gateway into New Jersey. When British forces took New York City on the 15th of September 1776, they turned toward the fort. American patriots abandoned it on September 23, leaving Paulus Hook as the first New Jersey territory to fall under British occupation.

  Three years later, a 23-year-old Princeton University graduate named Major Henry Lee proposed a daring counterattack. On the 19th of August 1779, Lee led roughly 300 men through swampy marshland toward the fort shortly after midnight. Some soldiers got lost in the march. The main contingent reached the gate unchallenged, possibly because the British mistook them for allied Hessians returning from patrol. The attacking Patriots took 158 British prisoners and damaged the fort, though they could not destroy it or spike its cannons. As daylight approached, Lee withdrew before British reinforcements could cross the river. The assault is remembered as the Battle of Paulus Hook.

  The same summer, General Washington met the Marquis de Lafayette in the village of Bergen to discuss war strategy over lunch, purportedly under an apple tree at the Van Wagenen House on Academy Street. A nearby 'point of rocks' at the east end of the street offered a clear view of British movements on the Hudson. Then in September 1780, a local farmer named Jane Tuers was selling goods in British-occupied Manhattan when she stopped at Fraunces Tavern and spoke with the owner, Samuel Fraunces. He told her that British soldiers were toasting General Benedict Arnold, who was planning to hand West Point to the enemy. Tuers returned to Bergen that same day, told her brother Daniel Van Reypen, who rode to Hackensack to alert General Anthony Wayne. Wayne sent Van Reypen directly to Washington. The intelligence confirmed Washington's suspicions about Arnold and led to the arrest, trial, conviction, and hanging of co-conspirator John Andre for treason. Arnold defected to the British to escape prosecution. By 1925, a plaque honoring Jane Tuers had been installed at the site of her former home, now Hudson Catholic Regional High School.

• 4. Gateway for the Nation

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  Alexander Hamilton, writing in 1804 as a private citizen, predicted that 'one day, a great city shall rise on the western banks of the Hudson River.' He helped create the Associates of the Jersey Company, a consortium of 35 investors, most of them Federalists swept from power in the election of 1800. They purchased large tracts at Paulus Hook and laid out the street grid still visible in the neighborhood today, naming streets after war heroes - Grove, Varick, Mercer, Wayne, Monmouth and Montgomery among them.

  Hamilton died in July 1804, but the city's momentum continued. Robert Fulton began steam ferry service between Paulus Hook and Manhattan in 1812. The New Jersey Rail Road and Transportation Company opened the city's first rail line in 1834. That same year, the Morris Canal was extended from Newark to Jersey City, linking the Delaware River with the Hudson and channeling Pennsylvania coal and anthracite iron into the growing city's industries.

  By the late 1880s, three passenger railroad terminals stood along the Hudson waterfront: Pavonia Terminal, Exchange Place, and Communipaw. They made Jersey City the terminus for the nation's rail network. Tens of millions of immigrants processed at Ellis Island - roughly two-thirds of all those who passed through - entered the United States through Communipaw Terminal before dispersing into the city, its neighboring towns, or the western interior. German, Russian, Polish, Scottish, Irish and Italian immigrants found work at the docks, railroads and factories for companies such as American Can, American Sugar, Colgate, Clorox, and Dixon Ticonderoga. Cornelia Foster Bradford founded Whittier House in Paulus Hook in 1894, the first settlement house in New Jersey, which pioneered free kindergarten, a dental clinic, a visiting nurse service, and a public playground. The city's water supply added one more milestone in 1908: the first permanent chlorinated disinfection system for drinking water in the United States, devised by John L. Leal and designed by George W. Fuller at the new Boonton Reservoir.

• 5. Boss Hague's Iron Grip

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  Frank Hague governed Jersey City from 1917 to 1947, thirty years during which his name became, in one historian's description, 'synonymous with the early twentieth century urban American blend of political favoritism and social welfare known as bossism.' He was elected first as a reform candidate, then became the thing he promised to reform. He shaped governors, United States senators, and judges to his preferences while serving as a close political ally to Franklin D. Roosevelt.

  Hague was loud and vulgar but dressed with studied elegance, earning the nickname 'King Hanky-Panky.' His annual salary never exceeded eight thousand five hundred dollars, yet he maintained a fourteen-room duplex apartment in Jersey City, a suite at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan, a summer home in the Shore community of Deal, and traveled to Europe yearly in the royal suites of the best ocean liners. In his later years he routinely dismissed political opponents as 'reds' or 'commies.'

  The boss also built things. His tenure saw the construction of Journal Square and its theaters, the Holland Tunnel, the Wittpenn Bridge, Lincoln High School, Snyder High School, five public housing complexes, the Jersey City Armory, and Roosevelt Stadium, among others. He funded many of these projects with WPA money secured by congresswoman Mary Teresa Norton, who served from 1925 to 1951 and was the first woman elected to represent New Jersey or any state in the Northeast. After Hague retired, a series of mayors tried to inherit his machine - John V. Kenny, Thomas J. Whelan, Thomas F. X. Smith - but none could replicate his reach. The city and Hudson County carried a reputation for political corruption for decades to come.

• 6. Sabotage, Riots, Decline

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  On the 30th of July 1916, an explosion at Black Tom killed 7 people, damaged the Statue of Liberty, and caused millions of dollars in damage across Jersey City and the wider metropolitan area. The blast registered as an earthquake measuring between 5.0 and 5.5 on the Richter scale and was felt as far away as Maryland. German spies of the Office of Naval Intelligence had sabotaged an American munitions depot to prevent ammunition from reaching the Allies in World War I. The Black Tom attack, combined with the 1915 torpedoing of the RMS Lusitania that killed 136 Americans, helped push the United States into the war in 1917.

  Decades later, the city's social tensions surfaced differently. From August 2 to 5, 1964, race riots broke out in the predominantly African American Lafayette neighborhood. They began when Delores Shannon was arrested for disorderly conduct and Arthur Mays was arrested for intervening at the Lafayette Gardens housing complex. Clashes between police and residents continued for three days. By August 5, at least 46 people had been injured, 52 arrested, and 71 stores and businesses damaged.

  By the 1970s, deindustrialization was hollowing out the city's economic base. Former industrial anchors relocated or declared bankruptcy. From 1950 to 1980, Jersey City lost 75,000 residents. From 1975 to 1982, the city lost 5,000 jobs, or 9% of its workforce. Meanwhile, on Flag Day 1976, Liberty State Park opened on New York Harbor to mark the nation's bicentennial. Built on the former railyards of the Central Railroad of New Jersey and the Lehigh Valley Railroad, the 1,212-acre park with its two-mile waterfront walkway was the product of years of advocacy by Jersey City residents Audrey Zapp, Theodore Conrad, Morris Pesin and J. Owen Grundy.

• 7. Wall Street West

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  Beginning in the 1980s, artists moved into warehouses in what became the Powerhouse Arts District. Brownstones in Paulus Hook, Van Vorst Park, Hamilton Park, Harsimus Cove and Bergen Hill were being restored. The waterfront, once a graveyard of abandoned railyards and factories, began its transformation. From 1995 to 2003, Jersey City led the 100 largest cities in the United States in job growth and poverty reduction.

  Financial institutions including UBS, Goldman Sachs, Chase Bank, Citibank, and Merrill Lynch filled prominent towers on the waterfront. As of 2011, the city's 18 million square feet of office space gave it the nation's twelfth-largest downtown and New Jersey's largest office market. The Exchange Place financial district took on the nickname Wall Street West. From 1996 to 2011, NJ Transit built the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail, one of the largest public works projects in state history, threading through the city along former railroad corridors.

  the 11th of September 2001 arrived with particular force here. Thirty-eight Jersey City residents died in the World Trade Center attacks. The Jersey City Fire Department was the only New Jersey fire department to receive an official call for assistance from the FDNY. The Jersey City waterfront became the largest triage center in the area for survivors escaping Lower Manhattan by ferry. From 2005 to 2023, Jersey City led New Jersey and the Northeastern United States in housing construction with a 43% increase producing twice as much housing as the rest of the state. In 2024, the city ranked third in the New York metropolitan area for new apartment construction behind only Brooklyn and Manhattan. The city whose motto references a 19th-century boundary dispute now regularly matches or surpasses the number of housing units built in Manhattan in a given year.