Upper Montclair, NJ

Upper Montclair's rail station, business district, and main park occupy adjoining blocks, a pattern rooted in the neighborhood's conversion from farmland to commuter suburb. Dutch farmers settled the northern part of present-day Montclair in the early 1700s, and their hamlet became known as Speertown. It remained agricultural until the Greenwood Lake Railroad arrived in 1873; fields and orchards were subdivided around the station near the turn of the twentieth century. That statistical area had 13,146 residents in 2020. Today the historic business district follows Valley Road and Bellevue Avenue, with Tudor-style shopfronts, restaurants, a cinema, the Bellevue Avenue library plaza, and the Upper Montclair station on NJ Transit's Montclair-Boonton Line. Across the tracks, 14.85-acre Anderson Park serves as the district's village green. The Olmsted Brothers completed its design in 1903; its broad meadow supports informal soccer, lacrosse, and volleyball, while three-fifths of a mile of paved paths accommodate walking, jogging, and wheelchair use.

The park also hosts the annual Art in the Park show. The Carnegie-funded Bellevue Avenue Branch Library opened in a 1913–1914 Italian Renaissance Revival building and still provides adult and teen computers upstairs and a children's room below; its Friends group schedules book sales, trivia nights, puppet shows, and seasonal concerts. Farther uphill, the Presby Memorial Iris Gardens maintains more than 14,000 irises representing about 3,000 varieties, with the principal bloom season typically running from mid-May into early June. The township's 2026 recreation directory lists a municipal pool and public tennis courts at adjacent Mountainside Park.