About Glen Ridge
The center of Glen Ridge is occupied by local stores including a coffee shop, pharmacy, automobile repair shop, cleaners, nail salon, yoga studio, florist, and restaurants. Fitzgerald’s 1928 is a lively place where neighbors run into one another.
The hub of town is the intersection of Ridgewood and Bloomfield Avenues, near the town’s train station, built in 1912. Only minutes away from the Township of Montclair’s Restaurant Row and downtown shopping, Glen Ridge is also located close to several major shopping malls including the Garden State Plaza, Short Hills, Livingston and Willowbrook centers. And for the ultimate shopping experience, Glen Ridge is just fourteen miles from New York City.
In 2010, Glen Ridge was ranked as the 38th Best Place to live by New Jersey Monthly magazine.
Of the many legacies left to the town by the founders, the one that has become its trademark is the gaslight or gas lamps. With only 3,000 gaslights remaining in operation in the entire United States, 665 of them light the tree-lined streets of Glen Ridge. In 1895, the Borough of Glen Ridge was chartered as an independent town and was one of the first communities to utilize a professional town planner. As a by-product of that planning, older portions of the Borough possess a museum quality having all the necessary elements of late Victorian and Edwardian “townscape”.
Glen Ridge Real Estate reflects all the major architectural styles from the mid-nineteenth century on. The earliest were simple farmhouses, which have since been altered or enlarged. As time progressed, the towers and turrets of the “Carpenter Gothic” appeared as well as the stone and half-timbered wood and stucco manor houses of the Medieval. The High Victorian period gave Glen Ridge Italianate “villas” with bracketed eaves and some Second Empire mansard roofs and arched dormers.
The “Queen Anne Cottage” and the “shingle style” are represented here and by the mid-1890’s there was a surge of interest in the American Georgian of early Federal style. Glen Ridge’s architectural legacy includes buildings of outstanding design quality for their time, and famous architects have had their hands in the creation of this legacy.
The most notable is the contemporary home designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Three homes of an earlier generation are attributed to Stanford White and one Georgian home is the work of John Russell Pope. To protect the architectural assets of the community, the Mayor and Council have created a Historic Preservation Commission. Construction which takes place in the Historic District and is visible from the street must be reviewed by the Historic Preservation Commission.
Other Facts
Glen Ridge is a residential community with a population of approximately 7,000. There are 2,200 houses in its 1.5 square miles which are bounded by Bloomfield, Montclair, Orange and East Orange. Glen Ridge is a borough in Essex County, New Jersey, United States. Glen Ridge was incorporated as a borough by an act of the New Jersey Legislature on February 13, 1895, from portions of Bloomfield Township. In 1982, the borough’s official name was changed to “Township of Glen Ridge Borough” to take advantage of federal revenue sharing policies that allocated townships a greater share of government aid on a per capita basis. Then on May 1993, the borough’s original name of “Glen Ridge Borough” was restored. The borough’s name comes from the ridge formed by Toney’s Brook Toney’s Brook, is around three miles long and no more than six blocks wide.
Let me (Jeffrey) help you with all your questions about Glen Ridge homes. Feel free to contact me directly via email or phone (call/text).
