Gloucester City, New Jersey

Directly across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, Gloucester City is one of New Jersey's oldest European settlements. Dutch traders built Fort Nassau near here in sixteen twenty-three, and English Quakers arrived in sixteen seventy-seven, later naming the town after Gloucester in England. Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it served as a busy river port and ferry crossing.

For a brief period in the early eighteen hundreds, Gloucester Point was a resort destination, with racetracks and taverns catering to Philadelphians seeking a fast escape across the water. The city incorporated in eighteen sixty-eight as industry replaced recreation, with oil refineries and shipyards lining the waterfront. Today about eleven thousand residents call it home, and its compact streets still carry the street grid of a colonial river town.