Carlstadt: Named for a King Who Never Came
New Jersey
Carlstadt sits on the Hackensack Meadowlands in Bergen County and has one of the more unusual origin stories in New Jersey. German immigrants formed the community around eighteen sixty and, by most accounts, named it for Carl Klein, one of their leaders. It attracted enough German families to incorporate as a borough in eighteen ninety-four.
The town spent much of the twentieth century as an industrial and warehouse district, close enough to the Hudson crossings to be useful for distribution. Today Carlstadt is best known to New Yorkers as the location of MetLife Stadium and the surrounding sports complex in the Meadowlands, which technically sits in East Rutherford next door, but Carlstadt's address marks the approach.
