New Jersey
New Jersey is the suburban wasteland stretching between New York City and Philadelphia. Its lights twinkle anticlimactically across the Hudson from Morningside Heights. Where it is not covered in strip malls, it is rumored to be lethally toxic. It was nicknamed "the Garden State" by a bunch of wise guys devoted to both irony and omerta, so don't think joking about it makes you original.
Many Columbia students come from here, the vast majority from Bergen County, a wealthy enclave (though not quite, perhaps, as wealthy (and certainly not as WASPy) as Westchester or Connecticut) in the northern part of the state, or from the overachieving test-prep belt around Edison in the state's midsection. The southern part of the state is so culturally and environmentally stimulating that it has been dubbed "the barrens".
New Jersey also cradles darkest Princeton.
Major cities
- Newark - car theft capital of the world
- Atlantic City - rundown, geriatric-infested version of Las Vegas
- Camden - per capita homicide capital of the East Coast
- Trenton - the Governor works here, but would never want to live in it
Getting there
If for some reason one is forced to trek to New Jersey, it can be reached via bus across the George Washington Bridge or from Port Authority Bus Terminal, by ferry from several piers in Midtown, by NJ Transit from Penn Station, and via the PATH, a special subway that connects Manhattan, Hoboken and Newark.
