Leonia: The Artist Borough

Leonia incorporated as a borough in eighteen ninety-four, one of the small towns that sprang up along the Northern Railroad of New Jersey once the line made Bergen County commutable to Manhattan. What set Leonia apart was the community of artists and writers who settled there in the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds, drawn by cheap rents, large yards, and the train to New York. The illustrator Harvey Dunn founded the Leonia School of Illustration there in nineteen fifteen, and in the nineteen forties the physicists Enrico Fermi and Harold Urey lived in town.

The borough's grid of modest Victorian houses and broad elm-shaded streets fostered a serious artistic life incongruous with its small size. Leonia today has about nine thousand residents and remains one of the quieter, greener corners of Bergen County.