ABOUT MONTCLAIR

Montclair is a northern New Jersey suburb, 12 miles from Manhattan (Exit 151 on the Garden State Parkway for the typical NJ parkway exit joke). The township's approximately 40,000 residents sustain six distinct business districts, mostly clustered around its six NJ Transit train stations.

We are populated by grandparents, hippies, hipsters, millennials, and tons of spirited kids. Some of us commute daily to the city and others work remotely (no surprise cafes are crowded midday on weekdays). We are black, white, mixed, gay, straight, immigrants, parents, married, divorced, single, and unlabeled. In our 6.3 square miles, we have places of worship for every faith. Across this vast diversity, we grumble in unison about our high taxes.

Montclair is notoriously home to legends in theater, space, sports, comedy, jazz, dance, magnet public school education, culinary arts, audiobooks, a successful beauty mogul, and more recently, even friendly toothpaste and clean pacifier companies. Self-dubbed where the city meets the suburbs,  it serves as a veritable literary/writers hub with two independent bookstores and enough writers and literary figures to effortlessly create a spin-off podcast (Bookclair anyone?). In a year that saw mega-giant Toys-R-Us file for bankruptcy after 70 years, Montclair boasts not one, but three independent toy stores. We are home to the oldest privately owned and operated bus company in NJ; a newly renovated 2,000-plus seat  performance hall from the 1920s; a museum dating back to 1914 with Free First Thursday nights; and a public university.