Central Jersey
Encyclopedia : C : CE : CEN : Central Jersey
- This is about a region in the United States. For the island of Jersey, see Jersey.
Central Jersey is among the more suburban, relatively less urban, regions of New Jersey, but it is still far more urban than most of the rest of the United States. Traditionally, people never included Central Jersey as a region of New Jersey. Instead, people used "South Jersey" to describe the Camden, Atlantic City, and shore areas of the state, which are typically considered to be among Philadelphia's metro area. Likewise, "North Jersey" described the area of New Jersey that existed in the New York City metro area, namely only the counties immediately surrounding New York, which included Essex, Hudson, Passaic, Bergen, and Union counties. The important cities in Central New Jersey include Trenton, New Brunswick, Princeton and Asbury Park.
Because of New Jersey's rapid urbanization, sprawl, and population growth over the past half century, lines between "North Jersey" and "South Jersey" blurred, as both the New York and Philadelphia metro areas rapidly expanded. Within the past few decades, northern New Jersey's formerly rural counties, such as Hunterdon and Middlesex, have quickly become urbanized. Similarly, southern counties around Philadelphia, Camden, Atlantic City, Cape May, and Vineland, which were formerly either shore land or farmland, grew with Philadelphia.
Due to some counties' now being present in both the New York and the Philadelphia metropolitan areas, the need arose for the term "Central Jersey". These counties are all about equidistant between the two cities, and are seen as the area of the state that connects the two distinct metropolitan area, though lines are always becoming more blurry as both areas continue to grow and New Jersey's population (as well as the population of New York City and Philadelphia) tend to relocate and migrate to different parts of the state.
The counties of Central Jersey are typically now included as part of North Jersey, and often are not considered to be part of South Jersey, as they have come to more closely resemble New York cultually than Philadelphia. This is likely because the New York metro area is the largest in the country, far larger than the Philadelphia area, so its influence on New Jersey has been larger than that of Philadelphia. Many Northern New Jerseyans, as well as New York City residents, also have migrated within the past three decades to the Central Jersey counties, ironically to escape urbanization, which has also caused these newly urban counties to generally be more often grouped as Northern Jersey. This leads many North Jersey residents to claim that Central Jersey simply does not exist.
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| State of New Jersey
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| Capital | Trenton |
| Regions | Central Jersey | Delaware Valley | Jersey Shore | Meadowlands | North Jersey | Pine Barrens | South Jersey | New York metro area | Tri-State Region |
| Major Cities | Atlantic City | Bayonne | Camden | Clifton | Dover Township (Toms River) | East Orange | Elizabeth | Hackensack | Hoboken | Jersey City | Linden | Long Branch | New Brunswick | Newark | Passaic | Paterson | Perth Amboy | Plainfield | Princeton | Union City | Vineland | In addition to the major cities listed, All Municipalities (by Population) |
| Counties | Atlantic | Bergen | Burlington | Camden | Cape May | Cumberland | Essex | Gloucester | Hudson | Hunterdon | Mercer | Middlesex | Monmouth | Morris | Ocean | Passaic | Salem | Somerset | Sussex | Union | Warren |
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