New Jersey: Under the Geographer’s Microscope

By Jim Fonseca

I’m a geography professor who will be writing a series on what’s unique or different about each of the fifty states. Follow me on Medium.com for more coming shortly.

New Jersey: The Garden State

Forget the refineries and what you see driving along the I-95 corridor as you approach New York. Sure, New Jersey has gritty towns and congested freeways lined with oil refineries and their acrid plumes of burning gas. But New Jersey has quaint towns and some of the most elite suburbs in the United States. It has agriculture and the wilderness (by Eastern standards) known as the Pinelands. It has ocean towns that are vacation havens and a string of historic towns that beckon to tourists.

Consider New Jersey as an island. To the east is the Atlantic. To the northeast is the Hudson River separating the state from New York. To the west is the Delaware River widening into the Delaware Bay, separating New Jersey from Pennsylvania. Only a less-than 50-mile stretch of land connects the state to the mainland along its northern boundary with New York. Bridges and tunnels connect New Jersey to the mainland. It’s really a peninsula but almost an island, and a garden island at that. It is The Garden State, but you have to get off the freeways and away from the metropolitan New York and Philadelphia sprawl to see the real greenery.

How is New Jersey different from other states? It’s a small state in territory, the fifth smallest, but with almost 9 million people (rank…