On Sundays from March to the end of July in 1913, thousands of striking silk workers climbed a hill in Haledon, New Jersey, to hear their organizers speak from the second-floor balcony of a house belonging to a family of Italian immigrants. That house, the Botto House, is now the American Labor Museum.

When the Ritz Theatre Company raises the curtain on Trolls and Men on Friday, October 9, the audience will be watching something no one has seen before: a world premiere about a small Norwegian theatre company that refused to be silenced during the Nazi occupation. The play's director, Lori Aleixo-Howard, is also the Ritz's full-time Director of Development, and she wears both hats with evident pleasure.

In a Victorian cottage in Island Heights, an American painter named John Frederick Peto spent his last years making pictures of old letters, worn books and hanging horseshoes. He sold almost nothing, and after his death unscrupulous dealers scraped his signature off his canvases and forged a more famous name onto them.

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, 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.