Silver Lake CDP (Essex County), NJ

Silver Lake is an Essex County CDP shared by Belleville and Bloomfield, in the dense inner-ring landscape just west of Newark. The name sounds like a water body, and it once was one: Jasper Crane built a dam in 1730, creating a lake about 300 feet wide and half a mile long. A storm in 1889 destroyed the dam, and the lake disappeared by the 1920s. The old name stayed on the map after the water was gone.

Today Silver Lake is a neighborhood boundary and a local address within Belleville's southern end and Bloomfield's edge. Newark Avenue, Bloomfield Avenue, and the old lake site frame the area, while Belleville's long shift from farmland to manufacturing and housing gives the surrounding streets their layered look. The Silver Lake post office operated from 1899 to 1915, another small piece of evidence that the name once marked a distinct local center. Now the place is woven into two municipalities, with the vanished lake still doing the naming work.