Passaic County was built around a waterfall. Alexander Hamilton looked at the seventy-seven foot drop of the Great Falls and imagined the young republic's first planned industrial city, and Paterson became exactly that, a place of silk mills and locomotive works whose immigrant workforce turned it into one of the most creatively restless cities in America.

Bergen County is the most populous county in New Jersey and the largest anywhere in the state by number of municipalities, seventy boroughs, townships and cities packed into the corner of land that faces Manhattan across the Hudson. That proximity has shaped its art.

Every cultural institution is a decision about what a society will keep. It is therefore also a decision about what it will let go, and that second half is rarely written on the wall.

American glassmaking begins in Salem County. Caspar Wistar lit the furnaces of the Wistarburgh Glass Works at Alloway in 1739, the first commercially successful glass factory in the country, and the craft never left: Salem Community College now teaches it from a purpose-built glass facility at Carneys Point, and traces its own lineage back to 1961, when a young Paul J.

The Jersey Cape is a summer place, but its art lasts all year. Cape May, the nation's oldest seaside resort, holds Victorian house museums and two professional Equity theatres; Ocean City has its own arts centre and Pops orchestra; and the barrier-island galleries and a small-town heritage museum round out a scene shaped by sea light and salt air.

Atlantic County is best known for its boardwalk and its casinos, but its art runs deeper and wider than the shore lights suggest. Stockton University has built a genuine arts district in Atlantic City, the glass-and-brick towns of the mainland hold historic theatres and galleries, and free museum spaces turn up from the beach to the edge of the Pinelands.

Camden County packs an unusual amount of art into a small, dense corner of South Jersey. A university arts centre anchors the Camden waterfront, the walkable boroughs of Collingswood and Haddonfield brim with theatres, galleries and outdoor sculpture, and historic movie houses have been reborn as stages.