I love New Jersey! I spent every summer in south jersey as a kid. I love all the boardwalks, casinos, and slightly dirty beaches of south Jersey. I also like how you can always find birch beer (never been able to find it in Texas), decent cheesestakes and the best pizza in the world. I’m even marrying a Jersey girl. Guess where we want to go for our honeymoon.
Hey, those were all there when I got there!
New Jersey does the suburb better than almost anywhere else. They tend to be much less faceless than the massive tracts I’ve seen elsewhere, and they’re all within an hour of pretty much everything interesting you might want.
The cities are all blighted. Cities are not New Jersey’s major talent.
I was responding dan, to the particular words that you chose - “nothing but blight”. For you to make a blanket statement about such a huge area, with hundreds of municipalities and thousands of neighborhoods, smacks of ignorance.
Haven’t you ever heard that the more you know, the less you know?
I have spent a significant amount of my professional life canvassing entire neighborhoods - in the five boroughs of NY, and parts of NJ, and, for the past year, the southland (Ventura Cty, LA Cty, Orange Cty). I know more about these areas than most people, and know that I know practically nothing about any of them.
I’m sure that you’ve been to North Jersey many times. Was it many different places throughout the entire region or was it to one particular area many times? I won’t disagree with the fact that the negative stereotypes derive nearly exclusively to said region (which is it, the entire counties of Bergen, Passaic, Hudson, Essex, and Union, or a “nook”?). But these mobsters, hookers, and purveyors of toxic waste do not define me.
wow… I read a lot here, but don’t often post. This threat hit so close to home that I had to, though :). If you’ve counted out Jersey without visiting some of the nicer Bergen and Hudson county towns, you are missing out. I’ve lived in Paramus since the late 80’s, and it is one of the nicest suburban towns I’ve ever been to. There’s also lots to do- Paramus alone has something like four malls, and many restaurants (though mostly chains, they’re all pretty good chains). Thats not to say that Paramus is even the nicest north jersey town- a good friend lives in Alpine, the homes there are absolutely amazing (as a tradeoff, theres less to do… he spends most of his time over by us).
If that wasn’t enough, a rather famous rap artist lives down the street from me. When his house came on an episode of MTV’s “cribs” that all of my friends at college and I happened to be watching, I got the pleasure of exclaiming; “Thats my neighbor!!!@$&)@!”
I think the northwest corner is more upscale the the northeast corner (Sussex and Warren counties), but either way the north is far more dominated by dreary industry than anywhere else in the state.
And I’m not saying places in the north don’t have “interesting” sides, but interesting isn’t always good. It’s just… well… interesting.
jehovah68, I’m being hyperbolic. Certainly I don’t mean every square inch of the area is blighted. But it’s a sad truth that a lot of it is. A lot of it is gloomy, faceless, and unattractive. A lot of it is a cesspool.
I like Jersey. They pump my gas and are always friendly.
I can’t say anything else about it - for us, it’s just that stretch on the way to NYC.
I visited NJ for the first time in September for TruePisces’ wedding (Mr. HotB spent the first 12 years of his life in Englewood, I think). I kept thinking “What does this state have against left hand turns?”
It still befuddles me…
But gods forbid you need to take Route 17 on a Saturday afternoon past the Plaza. 
If you’re going to take a driving tour of Bergen County, do it on a Sunday. Just don’t expect anything to be open. Stupid Blue Laws. You run out of beer in Mahwah on Super Bowl Sunday, you gotta go to New York to get more! 
My contention dantheman, is that it is simply a small area, a particular nook, if you will, of the northeast part of the state. It merely happens that this nook is the most highly visible to passers-by. If all that I new of Newark was what I saw from the highways, the airport, and The Sopranos, then I would consider it a cesspool. However, Newark is home to the Ironbound, a lovely Portugese neighborhood that has some of the best food of its variety in the country - and it’s safe enough to walk its streets after dark.
Hey The_Duker! Did you go to Paramus High School? Don’t know how old you are, but my dad taught English at PHS from about '82-2000. I think he taught AP juniors and some freshmen.
Well, here ya go, OP. People in jersey consider going to the mall and chain restaurants as “lots to do.”
I’m not much of a Jersey fan. The major cities seem to be crap (let it slide for now that I haven’t really had much of a reason to do anything in Camden or Newark).
There is a distinct STINK as you drive up towards New York if not from the indutrial complexes then from the swamps.
A place like Princeton is nice, but kind of a high cost of living, and offers nothing that you don’t really get in an Ithaca or Amherst or something.
South Jersey is flat and dull and agricultural. The pine barrens are ugly and boring and only people from a state like Jersey would claim them as nice. Furthermore, I was camping there once with my wife, and got my tent SLASHED by a guy with a KNIFE.
As for the shore, AC is what it is. Wildwood is filled with arrested-development meatheads. Ocean City, NJ is nice, but “dry” – no liquor. LBI is nice too, but the beaches are run by some modern day version of the gestapo so basically you spend $5 a day per person to stay on one strip of beach and it’s impossible to relax because you’re worried about wandering out of bounds or waking up from a nap to fish out your beach tag for some power tripping hump.
What’s left? The burbs? A place like Morristown?
Great tomatoes. Great corn. The Boss. Definitely some good diners.
Fair enough.
The image a lot of outsiders have of the state is cultivated by what they see on TV and when they fly into Newark or JFK or LaGuardia. Endless late-night-comic routines are built on this image. I don’t disbelieve that there are plenty of good nooks and crannies, though.
I did go to Paramus High School. I graduated in 2003, so theres a good chance I’ve at least heard of your dad. I don’t believe I actually had him though, as three of my four english teachers were female, save for one who was too young to be the dad of anyone that would read the SDMB. Shame I’m not a few years older, as I actually WAS an AP english student, so I probably would have had him for sure.
Either way, my sister is somewhat older than I am, so whoever your father may be, she probably knows of him for sure.
But geez, if you wouldn’t mind telling me who he was, I’m more than curious. I’m racking my brain trying to figure out who this man could be
Duker, I sent you an email so you can check there. But think short Italian guy. Last name starts with a L.
I haven’t been to East Coast, except for layovers at a few Eastern airports travelling to and from Europe. But I always assumed that when people talk about “Jersey” as a place to be fashionably disdained, they just meant the bedroom communities in a relatively small portion of the state, across the river from NYC.
My one and only excursion to New Jersy was to visit a friend who lived in Tom’s River. I ate Real New York style pizza. I not only saw ice thick enough to drive your car on (in the back bay) but actually walked on it. Rather a novel experience for me – I’d never been anywhere you could go ice skating outdoors before.
All in all, NJ seemed like a pretty nice place (yeah, I know a one-week visit to one town does not a statistically significant sample make :rolleyes: ). I guess NJ is a traditional butt of jokes. Wise people should note that if it was such a G-dawful place to live, the only residents would be poor folks – all the rich folks would commute from somewhere else.
–SSgtBaloo
Two words: Suburban sprawl. New Jersey is mostly two small regions and one large one. Rural: the Pine Barrens, famrs, and the shore. Urban: Camden, Trenton, etc. And then, the rest of the state is sprawl. Miles and miles of cul-de-sacs and streets filled with identical homes.
I live in the ‘special’ part of NJ. There’s a wee little bit of Camden County that really, we’re not from NJ. We’re from Philadelphia. I tell people I live in a suburb of Philly when asked. To me, ‘the city’ isn’t NYC (though god knows I’ve gone on enough school trips there), it’s Philly.
Unfortunately, I think the rest of NJ resents us for this (they know we’re better), and our PA brethren, of course, want nothing to do with us Jerseyites.
Being from the NE corner of the state and, sitting here right now as I write, I can say that, there always has seemed to be confusion as to what is North Jersey and South Jersey.
I believe that’s the confusion that “dan” has when he condemns the North East. As someone said, the North East corner IS, in fact, arguably one of the most well-to-do areas. But, where’s the line?
I sit now in Westwood (check a map). As far as I’M concerned, anything below Route 4 is Central New Jersey and anything below the Raritan Bridge is Southern NJ.
So, is “dan” referring to Newark-Kearny-Patterson, as Northern New Jersey? That would be inaccurate, I think. Just my two cents.
I’m glad that I ran the one season of cross country when I was in high school - it exposed me to the beauty of Paterson’s Garrett Mountain (where I broke 17 minutes), as well as tours through Oradell, Haworth, River Edge, Paramus, Ridgewood, Emerson, Ho-Ho-kus, Westwood, etc.
BTW, while Nassau County’s Levittown is often regarded as the first planned community, my hometown, Fair Lawn, has a section called Radburn that predates Long Island’s cookie cutter town.