In the town of Clinton, two nineteenth-century mills face one another across the Raritan. One is red and holds the county's industrial past.

Somerset is horse country and corporate campus, rolling farmland pressed up against office parks, and its art has taken root in the gaps between. In Bound Brook stands the only surviving vaudeville house in the county, one of just eight left in New Jersey, opened in 1927 and twice nearly drowned by the Raritan.

Monmouth County makes music. William Basie was born in Red Bank in 1904, learned the organ from Fats Waller, and went on to lead one of the greatest bands in the history of jazz; the town's 1926 theatre now carries his name.

Almost all of Middlesex County's art is concentrated in a few walkable blocks of New Brunswick, and those blocks are extraordinary. Livingston Avenue is known locally as theatre row, and along it sit a Tony-winning company founded to stage the voices of the African diaspora, a playhouse that sends work to Broadway, and a 1921 house that is Central Jersey's largest nonprofit presenter.

The bridge over the Delaware at Trenton carries a slogan in electric letters: Trenton Makes, The World Takes. For a century that was literally true of pottery.

Warren County sits on the Delaware, at the western edge of the state, and it makes its art in small rooms. There is no great museum here and no concert hall seating three thousand.