The One Minute Geographer: New Jersey, The Garden State?
Forget the refineries and what you see 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) called the Pinelands, formerly known as the Pine Barrens as called on the map below.
The Pinelands are even more evident as the dark green area on the map of population density below. New Jersey has ocean beach towns that are vacation havens and a string of historic towns that beckon to tourists.
Think of New Jersey first as an island. To the east is the Atlantic Ocean and the Hudson River separating the state from New York. Along its western boundary is the Delaware River widening into the Delaware Bay separating New Jersey from Pennsylvania and the Atlantic again to the south. Only a 45-mile stretch of land connects the state to the mainland along its northern boundary with New York. That line of land connection is shown as a straight purple line on the map below. Save for bridges and tunnels, New…
