40 Fun Facts About Bergen County, New Jersey

What name is given to the Sunday shopping bans that every New Jersey county except Bergen has voted out?

Blue laws still close Bergen County's clothing, furniture and electronics stores on Sundays, though food and gasoline can be sold. Repeated attempts by voters to repeal them have failed.

Which vanished Teamsters boss was long rumored to lie buried beneath an end zone at Giants Stadium in the Meadowlands?

Jimmy Hoffa disappeared in 1975, just as the stadium was going up, which fed the legend. Sportscaster Marv Albert once joked that a team was kicking toward the Hoffa end of the field.

Which Bergen County borough, mostly covered by an airport, counted just 61 residents in the 2020 census?

Teterboro takes its name from Walter Teter, a New York banker who bought the land in 1917 to build a racetrack. Neighboring towns have tried several times to dissolve the tiny borough and failed.

Satin Dolls, the go-go bar filmed as the Bada Bing in The Sopranos, stands in which Bergen County borough?

Lodi owes its name to the Italian city of Lodi in Lombardy. Satin Dolls served as the filming location for the fictional club where the HBO drama's mobsters did business.

Which Hudson River crossing, the busiest in the world for motor vehicles, links Bergen County with Upper Manhattan?

The George Washington Bridge is the only suspension bridge in the world with 14 lanes of traffic. It opened in 1931, eight months ahead of schedule.

Which future vice president married the widow Theodosia Prevost at The Hermitage, a house in Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey?

Aaron Burr married her there in 1782, after her husband died during the war. Lafayette and Alexander Hamilton had both visited the house during the Revolution.

Which pop band's members were raised in Wyckoff, New Jersey, before finding fame through the Disney Channel?

Jonas Brothers Kevin, Joe and Nick left Wyckoff for Little Falls in 2005, where they wrote their first record for Hollywood Records, a Disney-owned label.

Which Bergen County borough, site of Edwin Armstrong's FM radio tower, did Forbes rank as America's priciest ZIP code?

Alpine topped the 2012 Forbes list with a median home price of $4.25 million. Armstrong built his tower and laboratory there after RCA evicted him from the Empire State Building.

Which Bergen County borough rings up over $6 billion a year in retail sales while banning almost all work on Sundays?

Paramus forbids even office work on Sundays under a borough code stricter than the county's own law. One of its shopping centers was built on old celery farms.

Which Bergen County borough was America's motion picture capital in the 1910s, before the studios moved to Hollywood?

Fort Lee hosted studios for Fox, Goldwyn, Biograph and Pathé in the 1910s and 1920s. A forerunner of Universal built the first one there in 1909.

Which Bergen County township was the first place in America where a white majority voted for school integration?

Teaneck integrated its public schools in 1965 with no court order forcing the change. Its Board of Education had approved a bussing plan by a 7–2 vote the year before.

Which venue in the Bergen County Meadowlands is home to both of New York's NFL teams, the Giants and the Jets?

MetLife Stadium hosted Super Bowl XLVIII in February 2014, the first Super Bowl played at an open-air stadium in a cold-weather city.

Which city of about 46,000 people is both the county seat and the most populous place in Bergen County?

Hackensack was chosen as county seat in 1710 because most of the county's residents could reach it easily. The city was officially named New Barbadoes Township until 1921.

Which assassinated US president gave his name to a Bergen County city that used to be called East Passaic?

James Garfield had just been elected when, by one account, the town's founder told people to stop saying East Passaic. He was shot seven months later, but the name stayed.

Which former US president spent his final years in the Bergen County boroughs of Saddle River and Park Ridge?

Richard Nixon moved to Saddle River in 1981 after 18 months in a New York City townhouse. He suffered his fatal stroke in 1994 while preparing to eat dinner at his Park Ridge home.

Which Native American nation, including a subgroup called the Tappan, lived in Bergen County when Europeans arrived?

The Lenape homeland, known as Lenapehoking, took in New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania and eastern Delaware. English colonists named them the Delaware Indians.

Bergen County's first known colony, Vriessendael, was founded in 1640 by settlers of which nationality?

Dutch settler David Pietersz de Vries bought 500 acres from the Tappan people for the New Netherland colony. Parts of it were destroyed in a war just three years later.

Which line of sheer cliffs along Bergen County's Hudson River shore was saved from quarrying by a 1900 park commission?

The Palisades rise almost straight up from the river, reaching about 540 feet at their northern end. In the 1800s they were being blasted apart for railroad ballast.

Which NHL team played at the Meadowlands arena in Bergen County from 1982 until moving to Newark in 2007?

The New Jersey Devils arrived as the relocated Colorado Rockies and clinched two of their three Stanley Cups on home ice there, in 1995 and 2003.

Which Bergen County borough of about 10,000 people has been home to five professional sports teams at once?

East Rutherford got its teams when the Meadowlands Sports Complex rose on its marshland. The racetrack and the football stadium there both opened in 1976.

Which Bergen County township, the county's largest by area, houses the New York Stock Exchange's data center?

Mahwah covers about 26 square miles, roughly two and a half times the area of the county's next-largest town. Ford built six million cars there before its plant closed in 1980.

Radburn, a 1929 planned community billed as a town for the motor age, lies within which Bergen County borough?

Fair Lawn's Radburn was designed to keep walkers and traffic apart, with a footpath system that never crosses a major road at street level.

The Sugarhill Gang, makers of the first hip-hop single to reach the Top 40, formed in which Bergen County city?

Englewood was home to all three members: Big Bank Hank, Wonder Mike and Master Gee. Their breakthrough single, Rapper's Delight, came out in 1979.

Which Prussian-born Revolutionary War general was given a confiscated Loyalist house in River Edge, New Jersey?

Baron von Steuben received the sandstone house from the New Jersey Legislature in 1783 and sold it back to the Zabriskie family in 1788. It had been seized from the Loyalist Jan Zabriskie.

Which astronaut, honored as the first New Jerseyan to orbit Earth, grew up in the Bergen County borough of Oradell?

Wally Schirra circled the planet six times in October 1962. He remains the only astronaut to have flown in the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs.

Which carmaker has its North American headquarters in Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey, on land Ingersoll Rand once occupied?

BMW took over the property after Ingersoll Rand moved its world headquarters out of the borough in 2004. The site lies on Chestnut Ridge Road.

Which New York county, home to Nyack and Nanuet, lies directly north of Bergen County across the state line?

Rockland and Bergen were split into separate political areas in June 1664, when the Berkeley-Carteret land grant set up the colony of New Jersey.

What nickname stuck to the 2013 scandal in which Chris Christie's allies shut toll lanes to jam a Bergen County town?

Bridgegate began on September 9, 2013, when two of three toll lanes at a local entrance closed for the morning rush. The Supreme Court unanimously overturned two convictions in 2020.

Which Bergen County mall, first planned as Meadowlands Xanadu, opened in 2019 with an indoor ski slope?

American Dream took 15 years to build. Work began in 2004 and stalled in 2009, when a Lehman Brothers subsidiary missed its payments and other lenders pulled out.

Which NFL coaching legend began his career in 1939 at Saint Cecilia, a Catholic high school in Bergen County?

Vince Lombardi stayed eight years, teaching Latin, chemistry and physics alongside his coaching. His 1943 team was recognized as the best high school side in the nation.

Bergen County held all ten of the US municipalities with the highest share of which Asian American group in 2010?

Korean residents made up 53.7% of one of those boroughs in 2022, and South Korea has been the leading birthplace of the county's foreign-born residents.

Bergen County's Fairleigh Dickinson became the second men's 16 seed to beat a 1 seed by stunning which team in 2023?

Purdue fell 63–58 to a Knights team that had needed a First Four play-in game just to reach the main bracket of the NCAA tournament.

Which women's suffrage leader tried and failed to cast a ballot in Tenafly, New Jersey, in 1880?

Elizabeth Cady Stanton had bought a country house there in 1868, an hour by train from New York City. It is now a National Historic Landmark.

Which World War I army base in Bergen County sent about a million soldiers on their way to the Western Front?

Camp Merritt is marked by a granite obelisk bearing the names of 578 people who died there in the influenza epidemic of 1918.

Which famous harness race for three-year-old trotters moved to the Meadowlands Racetrack in Bergen County in 1981?

The Hambletonian honors Hambletonian 10, a stallion known as the Father of the American Trotter. It forms one leg of trotting's Triple Crown.

Which nickname describes the 1890s craze that split Bergen County's townships into 26 new municipalities in two years?

Boroughitis took off after an 1894 state law made it easy for a community to break away and keep control of its own school.

Which 1917 disaster at a Bergen County munitions plant, long suspected as German sabotage, left all 1,400 workers alive?

The Kingsland explosion killed no one because switchboard operator Tessie McNamara stayed at her post, calling each building to warn the workers as the fire spread.

Which NFL team crushed the Denver Broncos 43–8 in the first Super Bowl ever played in New Jersey?

Seattle Seahawks defenders forced a safety just 12 seconds into the game, the quickest score in Super Bowl history, on the way to the franchise's first title.

Which actor, born in Westwood, New Jersey, and raised in Park Ridge, won three Emmys playing a mob boss on HBO?

James Gandolfini graduated from Park Ridge High School in 1979. In 2013 his hometown renamed part of the street he grew up on in his honor.

Which Bergen County community of about 26,000 people is one of only two in the county governed as a village?

Ridgewood became a village in November 1894, keeping the boundaries of the old township, which lived on only as a school district.