Madison New Jersey
Get to know the town of Madison New Jersey. Madison is a borough in Morris County, New Jersey, in the United States. MADISON, N.J., is so quaint and charming that people often say the downtown could pass for a movie set — which probably explains why it has done duty as a setting in films like The World According to Garp and The Family Stone, and in episodes of The Sopranos.
But there is much more to Madison than its manicured facade. As home to two colleges — Drew University and Fairleigh Dickinson University's College at Florham — this borough of 16,000 residents, 25 miles west of New York, has an international flavor. And by the end of the summer, the area that includes Madison will gain the New York Jets football team, which is completing a corporate headquarters and training facility in Florham Park, on Madison's western border, and a number of executives and players are expected to become Madison residents.
It's like a little U.N. around here sometimes, and I mean that in a good way, said Adrienne Kern, a mother of two, who has lived here 11 years with her husband, David. People think there are just Wall Streeters living here.
Of course, diversity is a relative term in the suburbs, as revealed by numbers from the 2000 Census — the most recent available: 6 percent of the borough's population counted themselves as Hispanic and 4 percent as Asian. Of the students in Madison schools last year, 7.5 percent cited Spanish as their native language, and 1.7 percent cited Korean.
All of these assets — in addition to Madison's accessibility to Manhattan via New Jersey Transit — have helped buffer real estate prices somewhat, despite the general downturn. The schools are good, and crime is low, Ms. Holden said. The hot topic at the last borough council meeting, she added, was the possibility of changing the Memorial Day parade route.
Yes, Starbucks has moved in, and there is a Jaguar dealership on Main Street. But then again the shops at the center of town, near a tall clock, include an old-time independent pharmacy, a photo shop and a family jeweler. A hot-dog vendor works the sidewalk.
Main Street, in particular, can become crowded, even on days when there are no parades, and Ms. Holden is hoping to get a developer to build a parking garage in the downtown area. (Street parking is not always plentiful.)
It's quiet here, and you can't go out at 2 in the morning and go to the diner, said Jennifer Catrini, a stay-at-home mother. But there's no anonymity here, and a lot of people really like that.
Route 124, or Main Street, runs east-west through town and is lined with grocery stores, car dealerships, restaurants and shops. To the west of the town center is Drew University, on a picturesque wooded campus. The Fairleigh Dickinson campus straddles the border with Florham Park.
The train line runs parallel to Route 124, one or two blocks to the south, and the town hall, the train station and a Presbyterian church, with a pretty white spire, are near one another. Madison could pass (and sometimes has passed, in the movies) for a New England town.
The mix of houses, while relatively heavy on colonials, remains fairly eclectic. Interspersed among the center-hall homes on Prospect Street and its surrounding neighborhood are sprawling brick 1950s and '60s homes and impressive Victorians.
The feel of the town is very pleasant, said Patricia Bowers, a Prudential New Jersey Properties agent based in Verona, because the land surrounding the houses tends to be slightly larger than what you would expect for small colonials.
Madison, named after President James Madison, was nicknamed the Rose City because of a 19th-century rose-growing industry started by wealthy residents drawn to Madison by its location on the Morris & Essex train line. The town's seal includes a rose; its Web site is rosenet.org.