We sure do, honey. Love to keep the out-of-staters on their toes. 
Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers in New Jersey. He is now selling them on the internet.
I disdain in-and-outters who do not appreciate our bedrooms. It’ll cost you lots more to in-an’-out in the city.
Well, you could “ask” me. I might “answer.”
At any rate, although the area above metro NYC seems to be fairly well-to-do, it’s not nearly the size as that metro area. Isn’t that like saying a small town is quite well off, even though there are only a proportionally few rich folks in it?
I’m not sure how you could consider Newark anywhere but North Jersey. I would say that Princeton might be the North/Central border town, but Newark’s clearly in the North. As is Paterson, which is pretty close to the NY border.
I grew up in New Jersey. Love it – 45 minutes from my parents’ house to midtown Manhattan. When I was a kid you could get spring water in the next town, and apople orchards were on the other side. The license plates don’t say “The Garden State” for nothing. The refineries and chemical plants up in Elizabeth and Linden were there, but far enough away. As noted, the out-of-staters pick up their impressions of NJ from the route 1/Jersey Turnpike industrial corridor that runs from NYC to Philadelphia (and includes Newark Airport). At night, with the sodium vapor lamps going, and the torches burning off the waste gases from the refineries going the area around Jersey City looks like the openming shot of Bladerunner without the nifty architecture. But that stuff is far enough away. Someone (on this Board, I think) once said that NJ erected a great big scarecrow there, and it’s kept everyone out.
There’s more to the rest of NJ than High Point , the Shjore, the Pine Barrens, and Princeton. Most of the state is pretty good.
One last thing:
Inadequate Street Signage!!! NJ has great street signage. If you want to see woefullly inadequate labeling, come up to Masssachusetts some time. They save money here by putting up only one street sign at an intersection (it’s assumed you know which street you’re on). The whole nation has heard of Route 128, but almost all the signs label it as Interstate 95. They only inform you that it’s also 128 at the last moment.
I have to agree with you on that. Chicago has street signs everywhere, but it’s never clear if the name of the street is where you are, where you are turning on to, or where the diagonal street is. It is ridiculous.
And those infamous jughandles are only something I heard of when I went to school “down South” in Trenton. I don’t think we have them up north. On that topic, since I grew up in Ringwood, about 15 minutes from the NY state border, I consider everything south of Somerville ‘south’ Jersey. It’s a whole-nother-world down there.
How come no one has mentioned that without NJ, we’d have no John Travolta, Susan Saradon, Alan Alda, Jason Alexander, Michael Landon, Robert Sean Leonard or Bruce Willis, among many others?
Not to mention Whitney Houston, Lauren Hill, the guy from Naughty By Nature, Queen Latifah, and Tisha Cambell. In her song “Looking Back”, Lauren Hill gives a shot out to the apartment complex where I live. Yeah, boyyy!
I always consider North Jersey to be anything east and west of the Passaic-Hackensack river system. In other words, if you were to draw a line from the southernmost portion of Newark Bay and extend it westward, everything above that line would Northern Jersey.
I’d say that Central New Jersey extends down to Trenton, and of course below that you get South Jersey.
I think coastal NJ differs in flavor from inland New Jersey too. Can’t say that Warren County has much in common with Essex, even though both are northern.
I live in one of those bedroom communities (I can see the Empire State Building from my living room window) and it’s really quite lovely. Lots of 19th-century buildings (mine was built in 1829), as well as early 20th-century bungalows and a few new McMansions. Wide streets, gardens, trees, safe to walk around at night. Even has a very cool old graveyard.
And I pay 1/10 the rent my Manhattan friends do, and maybe 1/2 the rent of my Brooklyn friends.
Oh, puh-leez. The signs in Chicago are always parallel to the street that they identify. So if you can read the sign saying “Division,” that means you are crossing Division. It’s really very easy. I understand that you’ve only really been driving regularly in Chicago for about a year, but still, it’s not that hard.
And what’s so great about a state that doesn’t let you pump your own gas?
forgot 676, 76, 168, 130, 70, 30…
Hell, come 5:00 the entire south half of the state is nothing but a huge parking lot.
And if no one else has mentioned this…you can’t leave without paying.
Oh, shut up! Illini need not respond to this thread; you may only lurk. 
And it’s not to not pump your own gas when it is 30 degrees out and there’s a blizzard.
sure you can, if you take 95 to Yardley, or the bridge at Washington Crossing, or the bridge from Lambertville to New Hope.
676 and 76? You mean the Schuylkill Expressway and offshoot? 
I have two different mental geographic breakdowns for the state:
[ul]
[li]North Jersey: north of I-195[/li][li]South Jersey: south of I-195[/li][/ul]
or, to break it down further:
[ul]
[li]North Jersey: north of the Raritan Bridge [/li][li]South Jersey: south of Bayville[/li][li]Central Jersey: in between those two[/li][/ul]
Guess it’s pretty much a matter of perception. 