Lyndhurst: Meadowlands Borough

You are passing through Lyndhurst, New Jersey, a borough that grew up on the western fringe of the Hackensack Meadowlands. Lyndhurst was incorporated in eighteen fifty-two as Union Township and took the name Lyndhurst in a nineteen seventeen referendum. The name honors an English lord chancellor, but the town's character was always working-class and industrial.

The Meadowlands that surround it were once among the most productive wetlands on the East Coast, then heavily industrialized and used as dumps through most of the twentieth century. Today they are a protected wildlife management area, and Lyndhurst sits on their edge, still compact and tight-knit, home to about twenty-two thousand people.