New Jersey and You: Perfect Together was the Garden State’s marketing retort in the 1980s to “Virginia Is for Lovers” and “I Love New York,” but it was a tougher sell. Most people experience New Jersey from the highway, where we see blighted, dreary cities, massive oil tanks, and spots where Jimmy Hoffa might have been buried. Over the years, I’ve never written about a New Jersey museum. There’s plenty of good ones, but the grandest, the art museum at Princeton, has been closed for a few years as the university builds a new home for it, and in driving through New Jersey, I’ve often been rushing to get someplace. And we Vermonters get more than our fill of New Jerseyans who come to the Green Mountain State for skiing, summering, leaf peeping, speeding — oh, they’ll kill you — and behaving like churls. We don’t mind people from New York and Connecticut. Living in Ye Olde Arlington, which is very rural, we don’t see many New Jerseyans, and when we do, they marvel at our reserve, our precise directions, and covered bridges. All of us, alas, have a horror story about people from Jersey.
In late May, I made my slogan-for-a-day “New Jersey and Me: Together at Last.” Today, I’ll write about the lovely, little Montclair Art Museum in spruce, swanky Montclair.
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