Jersey City

Jersey City is a city in Hudson County, New Jersey, on the west bank of the Hudson River facing Lower Manhattan. Its waterfront has views of the Statue of Liberty, and ferries to the statue leave from a park on its shore.

The Dutch settled the area as Pavonia in the 1630s, and the village of Bergen, founded in 1660 around a square that still exists, was the first lasting European town in New Jersey. Paulus Hook, a point on the river, grew into a ferry landing for New York, and Jersey City was chartered under that name in 1838. Railroads ended their lines at terminals on its shore, where passengers took ferries across the river. In the 1900s the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad opened tunnels under the Hudson, and its PATH trains still link the city with Lower Manhattan and Midtown. The Colgate soap factory stood on the waterfront for more than a century, and its large octagonal clock still faces Manhattan.

Verisk, a data analytics company that serves insurers, has its head office in Jersey City. Forbes, the business magazine, moved its offices to the waterfront in the 2010s.

Liberty State Park, built on old rail yards, keeps the Central Railroad of New Jersey Terminal, where immigrants from Ellis Island boarded trains to the rest of the country. The Loew's Jersey Theatre, a movie palace of the late 1920s, has a gilded lobby and a restored Wonder Morton organ, and it stages concerts and screenings of classic films. Mana Contemporary, an art center in a former tobacco warehouse, holds studios and galleries.