The Fascinating Story of How One Law Made New Jersey the Richest State in America

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]New Jersey is the most densely populated state in America. Nearly 1,200 people per square mile. Yet a million acres of its southern interior are pine forest so empty that the iron furnaces built there two centuries ago simply vanished into the trees. It is the fourth smallest state by area and the 11th largest by population. A place where Bergen County alone contains 70 separate municipalities, some of them barely a square mile wide, each with its own mayor, its own police department, its own tax rate. And it was for a critical period in the late 19th century the legal home of nearly every major corporate trust in the United States.

[00:00:41]Not because its citizens worked in those industries, but because its legislature passed a single law that let one corporation own the stock of another.

[00:00:50]The revenue from incorporation fees got so large that New Jersey was able to eliminate its state property tax entirely. The nickname people remember is the garden state. The one they used in Congress was the mother of trusts and the traitor state. The story of New Jersey is the story of being between.

[00:01:08]Between New York and Philadelphia, between industry and suburb, between the place where things are made and the place where people who make decisions about those things choose to live.

[00:01:19]Benjamin Franklin reportedly called it a barrel tapped at both ends, drained by the two great cities on either side. And that description has been more or less accurate for 300 years. But what Franklin meant as an insult turns out to be the key to everything. The position between between powers, between markets, between identities is not a weakness. It is in fact the thing that made New Jersey one of the wealthiest and most consequential states in the country.

[00:01:48]Every canal, every railroad, every highway, every fiber optic cable connecting New York to the rest of America passes through New Jersey. Every time the nation needed to move something, goods, soldiers, ideas, electricity, data, it moved through this narrow corridor of land, and the people who controlled that corridor collected the toll. The Lenny Lape had lived in the region for thousands of years before Europeans arrived. Giovani de Veritano reached the coast in 1524, but nearly a century passed before colonization began in earnest. The Dutch established a trading post at Bergen, now Jersey City, around 1660, and Swedish settlers had been filtering into the southern river valleys since the 1630s. The English took the whole territory without a battle in 1664 when warships sailed into New York Harbor and Peter Stivverent surrendered. The Duke of York promptly gave the land between the Hudson and Delaware rivers to two supporters, Lord John Berkeley and Sir George Carter. They named it New Jersey after the English Channel Island where Carter had held out against parliamentary forces during the Civil War. From the beginning, New Jersey was two places. East Jersey, oriented toward New York, drew Puritans from New England and merchants from the Dutch trading world. West Jersey, oriented toward Philadelphia, became a Quaker settlement, one of the first in North America, predating William Penn's colony by 7 years. Salem, founded in 1675 by John Fenwick, was the earliest English town in West Jersey. Fenwick sold land at 5 per 100 acres, attracting Quaker craftsmen and merchants of modest means.

[00:03:31]The two jerseys had separate proprietors, separate capitals. Perth, Amboy for the east, Burlington for the west, and separate cultures. When Queen Anne merged them into a single royal colony in 1702, the structural tension between North and South was already locked in. It has never fully resolved.

[00:03:52]To this day, North Jersey watches New York television stations. South Jersey watches Philadelphia's. The boundary between the two spheres runs roughly along a line from Trenton to the shore.

[00:04:04]and people on either side of it will argue about where central Jersey begins or whether it exists at all. The colony prospered modestly in the 18th century.

[00:04:14]Wheat, corn, livestock, timber, but it remained, as Franklin suggested, a provisioner for other people's ports.

[00:04:22]Perth, Amboy, and Burlington had some maritime trade, but the big money flowed through New York and Philadelphia. In the Pine Baronss of the South, bog iron was already being smelted by the 1730s, and William Bradford established one of the colony's first paper mills near Elizabeth in 1726. But the colony's real economic identity was agricultural, and its farmers sold their surplus through merchants who were often based across the river in one direction or the other.

[00:04:50]The colony's location made it a thoroughare during the revolution. More than a 100 battles and skirmishes were fought on New Jersey soil, more than in any other colony. Washington's crossing of the Delaware on Christmas night 1776, and his surprise attack on the Hessian garrison at Trenton is one of the most famous moments in American military history. The Continental troops used Durham boats, shallow draft freight vessels designed for the river to cross through floating ice in a storm, and they captured nearly 900 Hesshess soldiers in an action that lasted barely 90 minutes. A week later, Washington won again at Princeton, routing British forces under Colonel Charles Mahood.

[00:05:31]These were not large battles in terms of numbers, but they came at the lowest point of the war when the Continental Army was dissolving and the cause looked finished. The strategic fact was geographic. New Jersey sat between the British stronghold in New York and the rebel capital in Philadelphia. So every movement between the two crossed its roads, its rivers, its fields. The state earned the title crossroads of the revolution and it ratified the constitution quickly. The third state to do so on December 18th, 1787.

[00:06:02]Its delegates pushed successfully for equal representation in the Senate through what became known as the New Jersey plan. ensuring that small states would not be swallowed by large ones.

[00:06:13]For a state perpetually squeezed between two larger neighbors, the principle was existential. What happened next at Patterson is one of the great early experiments in American economic planning. Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the Treasury, believed the young nation could not survive as a purely agricultural country. It needed to manufacture its own goods and it needed a place to start. In 1791, Hamilton helped charter the society for establishing useful manufacturers, the SUM, and chose a site at the Great Falls of the Payic River, where the water dropped 77 ft through a gap in the Wong Mountains. The town was named Patterson after Governor William Patterson, and the water power system was initially designed by Pierre Lthon, the same man who laid out Washington DC. The SUMM was a private corporation with quasi governmental support and it was meant to demonstrate that American industry could compete with Europe's. The early years stumbled. The first cotton mills failed.

[00:07:16]The initial management was incompetent and Lonfon's raceway design proved impractical.

[00:07:22]But the falls kept falling and by the early 1800s, Patterson's mills were running on a redesigned three- tiered water power system that was for its time an engineering marvel. Cotton came first, then iron, then locomotives. The Rogers locomotive works turned out engines that ran on railroads across the country. Samuel Colt manufactured his first revolvers in Patterson and then came silk. By the 1880s, Patterson was producing nearly half of all the silk manufactured in the United States. The looms ran day and night. Immigrant families, Italian, Dutch, English, Jewish, crowded into the neighborhoods around the mills, and the skills of weaving passed from parent to child.

[00:08:08]Patterson called itself Silk City, and the title was earned. The silk industry also produced one of the most significant labor conflicts in American history.

[00:08:18]In February 1913, roughly 25,000 silk workers walked off the job. The industrial workers of the world, the Wobblies, sent organizers, including Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Big Bill Haywood. The strike lasted 5 months. And though it ultimately failed to win its primary demands, it became a landmark in the history of American labor. The workers were protesting not just wages, but the introduction of the fourloom system, which doubled the number of machines each weaver was expected to operate. The strikes pageant staged at Madison Square Garden in New York, was one of the first attempts to use mass media to publicize a labor cause.

[00:08:59]Patterson never fully recovered. The silk industry drifted south, where labor was cheaper and unions were weaker, and by midentury, the great mills along the raceway stood empty. But even as Patterson's looms fell silent, the force that would define New Jerseyy's next century was already at work. The impulse to move through. The state's two great canals were both completed in the 1830s.

[00:09:23]The Morris Canal ran 102 mi from the Delaware River at Philipsburg to Newark Bay, climbing and descending more than 1,600 ft through a system of incline planes, essentially rail cars, that hauled canal boats up and over the hills of northern New Jersey. Its primary cargo was Pennsylvania anthraite coal pulled eastward to feed the furnaces and stoves of New York City. The Delaware and Raritan Canal 44 miles from Bordontown to New Brunswick was simpler and more profitable. It offered a direct inland route between Philadelphia and New York, avoiding the dangerous coastal voyage around Cape May. In its peak years, it was one of the busiest canals in the nation. Both canals were creatures of geography. New Jersey is the shortest path between the two largest cities on the eastern seabboard and anyone who controlled that path controlled an enormous volume of commerce. The railroads understood this instantly. By the 1840s, the Camden and Amboy Railroad had secured a monopoly on rail traffic across the state through a deal with the legislature in exchange for transit duties paid directly to the state treasury. No competing railroad would be chartered on the same route.

[00:10:33]The arrangement was so lucrative that for a time the transit duties from the Camden and Amboy paid a substantial share of New Jerseys state budget. Other states had nothing like it. The monopoly was eventually broken, but it established a pattern. New Jersey would extract revenue from the traffic that crossed it and the traffic would keep crossing because there was no alternative. Deep in the southern half of the state, a radically different economy had been operating for a century. The Pine Barons, a million acres of sandy, acidic soil covered in pitch pine and scrub oak, looked barren to farmers, but the streams running through them carried dissolved iron. Bog ore accumulated along riverbeds and in swamps. And beginning in the 1760s, iron masters built furnaces to smelt it, using charcoal from the surrounding pines and lime from coastal oyster shells. At its peak, more than 30 furnaces and forges operated in the pines. Batsto Ironworks, founded in 1766, produced munitions for the Continental Army during the revolution.

[00:11:36]Cannonballs and camp kettles shipped down the Mullica River to privateeers who ran the British blockade. Entire villages sprang up around these furnaces. Company towns with workers housing, a general store, a school, a church, all owned by the iron master.

[00:11:52]When Pennsylvania's superior iron ore and coal reserves made bog iron uncompetitive in the 1850s and 1860s, the furnaces went cold, the workers left, and the forest swallowed the villages whole. The pine barons became a landscape of ghost towns, and the people who stayed, the pineies as outsiders called them, were subjected to decades of condescension and pseudocientific stigma. Meanwhile, on the coast, a very different kind of economy was being invented.

[00:12:22]Atlantic City was incorporated in 1854, the same year the Camden and Atlantic Railroad completed a line from Philadelphia to the shore. A physician named Jonathan Pittney and an engineer named Richard Osborne had lobbied for the railroad specifically to create a seaside resort. And from the start, Atlantic City was a manufactured destination. Not a town that happened to attract visitors, but a place built for the sole purpose of drawing them. The boardwalk came in 1870, costing half the town's tax revenue. It was originally 8 ft wide and taken up each winter. By 1900, Atlantic City had over 27,000 residents, up from fewer than 300 just 45 years earlier. The Grand Hotels, the Marlboroough Blenheim, the Traymore, the Chalante Hadenh Hall were enormous structures designed to project luxury at a scale that middle-class visitors from Philadelphia and New York had never seen. Saltwater taffy, rolling chairs, the steel pier with its diving horse.

[00:13:22]Atlantic City did not just sell the beach, it sold spectacle. The resort thrived into the 1920s. During Prohibition, the rules were treated as suggestions. Enoch Nucky Johnson, the Republican boss of Atlantic County, ran a political machine that kept the liquor flowing and the tourists spending for more than two decades. His organization controlled the police, the courts, and the city commission, and the hotels and nightclubs operated as though the 18th amendment applied to some other coastline. The city hosted the first Miss America pageant in 1921, an event conceived specifically to extend the tourist season past Labor Day. A 16-year-old from Washington DC, won the crown, and the pageant became a national institution that ran in Atlantic City for decades. Convention Hall, which opened in 1929, had the largest room in the world without structural posts, enough clear floor space to hold an entire football field, and it drew political conventions, boxing matches, and trade shows that kept the off season alive. But the post-war era brought commercial air travel, and suddenly vacationers could reach Miami or the Caribbean for not much more than the cost of a train ticket to the shore.

[00:14:36]Atlantic City's hotels aged without renovating.

[00:14:40]The 1964 Democratic National Convention held there produced scathing press coverage of a city visibly in decline.

[00:14:48]By the early 1970s, blocks of the boardwalk were shuttered and the grand hotels that had once drawn visitors from across the eastern seabboard were closing or crumbling. The rescue plan was gambling. In 1974, New Jersey voters rejected a statewide casino proposal by a wide margin. Two years later, a narrower measure. Casinos restricted to Atlantic City, framed explicitly as an urban redevelopment tool, passed with 56%.

[00:15:18]Resorts International opened on the boardwalk in May 1978 and reportedly took in more money in its first day than some Las Vegas casinos made in a week.

[00:15:28]More casinos followed. Caesars, Bally, the Tropicana, Hara, the Trump Taj Mahal. By 2006, Atlantic City's gross gaming revenue peaked at $5.2 billion.

[00:15:40]It was the only legal casino market east of the Mississippi. And for nearly 30 years, that monopoly held. Then it broke. Pennsylvania legalized slot machines in 2004, and table games in 2010. Maryland, Delaware, and New York followed. Suddenly, the drive-in gamblers from Philadelphia, and North Jersey had closer options.

[00:16:02]Atlantic City's casino revenue fell nearly every year after 2006. In 2014, four casinos closed in a single year.

[00:16:10]The Atlantic Club, the Showboat, the Trump Plaza, and the Revel, which had cost $2.4 billion to build and had been open for barely 2 years. Atlantic County became the foreclosure capital of the country. The lesson was stark. A monopoly is a business plan, not an economy. And when the monopoly ends, the plan ends with it. But the most consequential law New Jersey ever passed had nothing to do with gambling. In 1889, the state legislature enacted a statute allowing one corporation to purchase and hold the stock of another corporation. It sounds technical. It was revolutionary. Before that law, the corporate trust, a legal device in which stockholders surrendered their shares to a board of trustees who managed multiple companies as a single entity, was the dominant form of industrial consolidation in America, and it was under sustained legal attack. The Standard Oil Trust had been ordered dissolved by the Ohio Supreme Court.

[00:17:08]Other states were hostile to the arrangement. New Jerseys 1889 law offered a clean alternative. The holding company, a corporation chartered in New Jersey, could simply own other corporations legally and openly.

[00:17:21]Standard Oil noticed immediately. In 1899, its executives reorganized the entire enterprise as Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, a holding company that controlled 41 subsidiaries from an office that was technically in the state even though its real operations were in New York. The floodgates opened between 1889 and 1913. The largest trusts in America, US Steel, American Tobacco, American Sugar Refining, the copper trusts, the railroad holding companies incorporated in New Jersey. The state charged incorporation fees and annual franchise taxes, and the revenue was so large that in 1905, New Jersey was able to abolish its state property tax. The state's residents were in effect being subsidized by the nation's biggest monopolies. Muckraking journalists called New Jersey the mother of trusts.

[00:18:10]Lincoln Stephins labeled it the traitor state, selling legal shelter to the very combinations that other states were trying to regulate. The arrangement ended with Woodro Wilson, who had come to the governorship of New Jersey in 1911 as a conservative favorite and promptly turned reformer. Wilson pushed through a package of antirust laws, the Seven Sisters Acts, that revoked the state's hospitality to holding companies. Corporations began leaving for Delaware, which had been quietly building its own permissive incorporation framework. By the time Wilson left Trenton for the White House in 1913, the trust era in New Jersey was over, and Delaware had captured the business that New Jersey had invented.

[00:18:51]It has never given it back. Today, more than half of all publicly traded companies in America, and more than 60% of the Fortune 500 are incorporated in Delaware. New Jerseys incorporation revenue collapsed. The state property tax eventually returned and New Jersey residents have been paying some of the highest property taxes in the nation ever since. That property tax, the highest in the country, averaging over $10,000 a year per household is one of the defining facts of modern New Jersey life. The reason is structural. New Jersey funds its public schools primarily through local property taxes and it has 565 separate municipalities and over 600 independent school districts, most of them quite small.

[00:19:39]Each bureau, each township, each tiny municipality maintains its own government, its own services, its own school system. Bergen County alone has 70 municipalities. The state has more local governments per capita than any state in the nation. This fragmentation, sometimes called buritis, exploded in the 1890s and early 1900s when villages broke away from larger townships to control their own schools, their own zoning, their own tax base. In some cases, the motivation was practical. A growing village wanted services that a rural township would not fund. In other cases, it was explicitly about exclusion, separating communities by race or class through the mechanism of municipal boundaries. The result is a patchwork of tiny jurisdictions, each fiercely protective of its autonomy, each with overhead costs that larger units could share. Reform commissions have been recommending consolidation for a century. Almost none of it has happened. The thing that changed New Jersey more than any law or any industry was concrete. In January 1950, construction began on the New Jersey Turnpike. It took 25 months and cost $225 million. The 118 mile highway opened in segments through 1951 and 1952, running from deep water near the Delaware Memorial Bridge to the George Washington Bridge approaches in the north. In its first full year, the turnpike carried 17.9 million vehicles and generated $16.2 million in toll revenue. Expansion was not expected to be needed until 1975. It was needed by 1955. The turnpike did not just move traffic. It reorganized the state. The exits became addresses. A cultural fact so embedded that the old joke, "What exit are you from?" is both a punchline and a genuine marker of identity. At exit 4 in the southern half, the highways access created development pressure that transformed rural Burlington County into a logistics and office park corridor. Where the turnpike cut through Elizabeth, it destroyed 450 homes and bisected neighborhoods that never recovered. The refineries and chemical plants along the northern stretch, visible from the highway as a landscape of steel towers and flare stacks became the image of New Jersey for millions of drivers passing through to somewhere else. The 5 years later, the Garden State Parkway opened, connecting the dense suburbs of the north to the Jersey shore, and the modern geography of the state was fixed.

[00:22:13]the turnpike for commerce, the parkway for commuters and vacationers, and a web of smaller highways feeding both. The highway era accelerated what the railroads had started a century earlier, the transformation of New Jersey into the nation's premier suburban state.

[00:22:30]After World War II, the GI Bill, federal mortgage guarantees, and the new highways sent families pouring out of Newark, Jersey City, Patterson, and Camden into the towns along the rail lines and the new exit ramps. Employment in New Jersey had doubled between 1939 and 1945. As the state's factories mobilized for war, Patterson's Curtis Wright Corporation built 139,000 aircraft engines. New Jersey shipyards produced a quarter of the Navy's destroyers. Camp Kilmer near New Brunswick became the largest processing center for troops heading to the European theater, handling over 2.5 million soldiers. Fort Dicks trained 1.3 million more. When those soldiers came home, they did not return to the old neighborhoods. They moved to Levittown style developments in places like Cherry Hill and Paripony and Edison, towns that barely existed before the war. The cities they left behind hollowed out.

[00:23:28]Newark's population fell from 438,000 in 1950 to 275,000 by 1980. Camden, which had been a genuine industrial powerhouse. Campbell Soup had been there since 1869. RCA.

[00:23:45]Victor manufactured phonographs and radios. The New York Shipbuilding Corporation built aircraft carriers on the Delaware River waterfront. lost its factories and then its tax base. The people who moved in were largely black and Puerto Rican families who had come north during the Great Migration in the post-war years, drawn by the same factory jobs that were now disappearing.

[00:24:06]The 1967 Newark uprising, which lasted 5 days and killed 26 people, was both a consequence of decades of disinvestment and a cause of further flight. By the 1970s, the old industrial cities of New Jersey were among the poorest in the country, while the suburbs around them ranked among the wealthiest. The gap between Camden and Cherry Hill, separated by a few miles of highway, was one of the starkkest in American metropolitan life. Through all of this, New Jersey kept inventing, not in the dramatic way of a gold rush or an oil strike, but methodically in laboratories.

[00:24:40]Thomas Edison had come to Menllo Park in 1876. a 29-year-old with a handful of telegraph patents and an idea about how invention itself should work. He bought two tracks of land for $5,200 along the Pennsylvania railroad line, close enough to New York for business, far enough for quiet, and built a two-story wooden laboratory stocked with every chemical, metal, and material he could think of.

[00:25:05]He called it the invention factory, and the concept was genuinely new. Not a lone genius tinkering in a workshop, but a team of specialists, machinists, glass blowers, physicists, chemists working on multiple projects simultaneously under systematic direction. The phongraph came in 1877. The practical incandescent light bulb came in 1879 after thousands of filament experiments. The carbon button telephone transmitter, which made Bell's invention commercially viable, came from Menllo Park 2. Edison moved to a larger facility in West Orange in 1887, but the model he built, organized industrial research driven by teams funded by investors aimed at commercial products, became the template for every corporate laboratory that followed. The greatest of those laboratories was Bell Labs, which moved its headquarters from New York to Murray Hill, New Jersey in 1941.

[00:26:01]The 225 acre campus nestled beneath the Wong Mountains became arguably the most productive research facility in history.

[00:26:10]On December 23rd, 1947, in a second floor laboratory in building 1, physicists John Bardin and Walter Bratton demonstrated the first working transistor, a tiny device made from a sliver of germanmanium, two gold contacts, and a bent paperclip that could amplify an electrical signal without the bulk heat and fragility of a vacuum tube. Their supervisor, William Shockley, had theorized the possibility.

[00:26:37]The three would share the Nobel Prize in physics in 1956.

[00:26:41]The transistor is arguably the most important invention of the 20th century.

[00:26:46]The foundation of every computer, every smartphone, every piece of digital technology in the world. It was born in New Jersey in a building that most Americans could not find on a map. Bell Labs went on to produce the solar cell, the laser, the charge coupled device, information theory, the Unix operating system, the C programming language. At its peak, it employed 15,000 people including multiple Nobel laureates, and its budget exceeded the research spending of most countries. The culture was deliberate. Hire the best scientists in the world, give them resources and freedom, and trust that commercially valuable discoveries would emerge. It was Edison's model refined to its highest expression. And it was in a sense perfectly suited to New Jersey, a state that had always made its living not from natural resources, but from being the place where smart people did useful things between New York and Philadelphia. The pharmaceutical industry followed a similar logic. New Jerseys chemical industry had roots in the 19th century. Dye works, paint manufacturers, oil refineries clustered along the waterways of the Northeast Corridor. As modern drug manufacturing evolved from crude chemical compounds into sophisticated molecular science, the existing infrastructure and workforce attracted company after company. Merc established its American subsidiary in 1891 and built a plant near Rawway in 1900 on 120 acres of wooded countryside. Johnson and Johnson had been in New Brunswick since 1886.

[00:28:21]The Squib Institute for Medical Research opened in New Brunswick in 1938, making breakthroughs in antibiotic production.

[00:28:28]By the 1970s, New Jersey led the nation in pharmaceutical and chemical manufacturing.

[00:28:34]The corridor from the Hudson River to Trenton became the densest concentration of drug companies on Earth. Not just American firms, but global ones.

[00:28:44]Novartis, Seni, Roach, Byer, all maintaining major operations in the state. The phrase used in the industry was that New Jersey was the medicine chest of the world. At its peak, the pharmaceutical sector was one of the largest drivers of the state's gross domestic product alongside financial services. The pattern repeats across industries and eras. New Jersey does not produce the raw material. It processes, refineses, manufactures, and distributes. It is the place between the source and the market. The laboratory, the factory, the warehouse, the truck terminal, the switching station. Port Newark and the Elizabeth Port Authority Marine Terminal together form one of the busiest container ports on the East Coast. Newark Liberty International Airport handles tens of millions of passengers. The rail lines that once carried Silk and Coal now carry commuters on New Jersey Transit, one of the largest statewide public transportation systems in the country.

[00:29:43]and Amtrak's Northeast Corridor trains pass through on their way between Washington and Boston. The infrastructure built to connect other places to each other is in aggregate the largest single employer and economic engine in the state. Rutgers, the state university, embodies the same betweenness and institutional form.

[00:30:03]Founded in 1766 as Queen's College 10 years before the Declaration of Independence, it is one of the nine colonial colleges and the only one that is also a land grant institution and a state university. The land grant designation won over Princeton in 1864 brought federal money for agricultural and mechanical education. But Rutgers did not become a true state university until 1945 and 1956 when legislative acts finally gave it that status. Even then, New Jersey drove a hard bargain in exchange for roughly $6,900 a year.

[00:30:43]Ruters was expected to maintain new programs, build new facilities, purchase an experimental farm, and provide 40 free scholarships annually. The state wanted a public university. it did not particularly want to pay for one. That tension between demanding public services and resisting the taxes to fund them runs through New Jersey politics like a fault line. The state constitution rewritten in 1947 consolidated executive power in the governor. One of the strongest governorships in the country with broad appointment authority and a line item veto. New Jersey is one of only two states, the other being Virginia, where the governor does not share a ticket with the lieutenant governor in the traditional sense. In fact, New Jersey had no lieutenant governor at all until a constitutional amendment created the position in 2005 after acting governor scandals made the absence untenable. The capital Trenton sits at the geographic center of the state on the Delaware River, a compromised location between the old East Jersey and West Jersey capitals. It has never been the state's largest or most important city. Newark, Jersey City, Patterson, Camden, all at various times more populated, more industrial, more economically vital.

[00:31:58]Trenton is the seat of government, but the centers of power are the corporate campuses along Route 1, the pharmaceutical corridors of Middle Sex and Morris counties, the financial firms in Jersey City that can see the Manhattan skyline from their windows.

[00:32:12]Jersey City itself tells the late chapter of the story. For most of the 20th century, it was a workingclass city of docks and rail yards dominated by the Hague machine. Frank Hey, who served as mayor from 1917 to 1947, ran one of the most powerful and corrupt political organizations in American history, delivering votes and jobs while enriching himself and his allies.

[00:32:38]The waterfront declined with the shipping industry. But beginning in the 1980s and accelerating sharply after 2000, Jersey City became the overflow valve for Manhattan. Financial firms relocated operations across the Hudson to take advantage of lower rents and New Jerseys urban enterprise zone tax incentives. Goldman Sachs built a tower on the waterfront. The skyline of Jersey City is now visible from lower Manhattan, a wall of glass and steel that would have been unimaginable to Frank Hey. The population, which had been declining for decades, surged past 290,000.

[00:33:15]Jersey City became in effect a sixth burrow of New York, connected by the PATH train, competing for the same workers, but governed by a different state with different tax laws and different zoning. This is the paradox at the heart of New Jersey. It is one of the wealthiest states in the country.

[00:33:32]Median household income consistently in the top three. And yet its cities contain some of the deepest poverty in the Northeast. It has produced more inventions per square mile than almost any place on Earth. Yet its cultural identity is perpetually overshadowed by the two cities on its borders. Its residents commute in enormous numbers to jobs in New York and Philadelphia, earn their salaries there, and bring the money home to New Jersey, where it funds schools and services through property taxes that are the highest in the nation. More than 300,000 people cross the Hudson to work in Manhattan every day. North Jersey is sacrificed, by one estimate, more than 30% of its land area to the roads, highways, rail lines, and terminals that carry those commuters.

[00:34:17]The state's two NFL teams play in East Rutherford, New Jersey, in a stadium that seats more than 80,000, and both are called the New York Giants and the New York Jets. When Governor Brendan Burn insisted in 1972 that the Port of New York Authority add New Jersey to its name, the change was more than bureaucratic. It was an assertion of identity from a state that has spent its entire existence being defined by what it sits between. The Pine Barons still occupy the southern interior, a million acres of forest sitting on top of an aquifer that holds 17 trillion gallons of some of the purest water on the east coast. In 1978, Congress designated the area as the country's first national reserve under the Pinelands Protection Act, creating a planning commission with authority over development in the region. The aquifer alone makes the Pinelands one of the most valuable pieces of undeveloped land in the Northeast Corridor, and the tension between conservation and development has been a running political fight for nearly 50 years. The cranberry bogs that replace the iron furnaces are still operating. New Jersey is the third largest cranberry producing state in the country and the blueberry was first commercially cultivated here in the sandy pine baron soil by Elizabeth White and Frederick Kovville in 1916.

[00:35:37]What New Jersey is finally is the infrastructure. Not just the physical kind, the roads, the ports, the rail lines, the pipelines, the fiber optic cables, but the institutional kind, the corporate charters, the pharmaceutical labs, the university research facilities, the financial back offices, the warehouses and distribution centers that make the consumer economy of the eastern seabboard function. It is the state that other states pass through, and that fact has made it both indispensable and invisible. The wealth is real. the property values, the school budgets, the per capita income. The problems are real, too. The taxes, the congestion, the decayed cities, the environmental legacy of two centuries of industrial chemistry concentrated in a space the size of a large county in Montana.

[00:36:26]14 super fun sites line the waterways of northern New Jersey alone. The residue of the die works and chemical plants that once made the state a manufacturing powerhouse. The old Silk City Mills in Patterson are being converted to apartments and studios. The Great Falls, Hamilton's original source of power, became a national historical park in 2011. The 397th unit of the National Park Service. The water still dropped 77 ft. The same force that turned the looms and the locomotive wheels and drew a Secretary of the Treasury to stand at the edge of the gorge and imagine a nation that could make its own goods. On summer weekends, families from the surrounding neighborhoods, many of them recent immigrants from the Dominican Republic, Bangladesh, Turkey, countries Hamilton could not have imagined, gather at the overlook and watch the Payic pour through the Basalt Gorge. The raceway that once powered the cotton mills is dry. The brickmill buildings still line the old canal, their windows dark or lit now by startup offices and art studios, renting space where silk looms once ran three shifts. A few miles south in the suburban quiet of Murray Hill, the former Bell Labs campus still stands. A sprawling complex of low buildings and manicured lawns that looks more like a university than a place that reshaped civilization.

[00:37:49]In the lobby of building one, behind glass sits the original transistor, a triangle of gold foil on a sliver of germanmanium held together with a bent paper clip and a dab of glue. It looks like something a child might build. The entire digital age grew from it in a secondf flooror laboratory in a New Jersey suburb between New York and everywhere