Based in Union and Clifton, respectively, these home-accessories superstores sell everything you’d expect (from shams to soap pumps) and some things you wouldn’t (remote-control cat exerciser, anyone?). Between them they have more than 1,300 stores, 54,000 employees, and combined assets of more than $4 billion. People across the United States and Canada have made these Jersey giants the No. 1 and No. 2 places to shop for housewares....
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The company started in founder John F. Dryden’s basement in 1875, selling burial insurance as the Prudential Friendly Society. Today its headquarters are still on Broad Street in Newark. Prudential Financial has about $616 billion in assets, and not only does its building stand as Newark’s structural icon, the new arena will be called the Prudential Center....
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The company that invented Band-Aids and morphed into a wellness colussus, last year gobbled up a division of Pfizer and its top-selling mouthwash, Listerine. Worldwide sales reached $53.3 billion in 2006, and J&J ranked 36 on the 2007 Fortune 500 list. The company’s headquarters in New Brunswick, built in 1982, attest to its ongoing commitment to the city, where, as far back as 1886, it revolutionized healthcare....
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The Goldman Sachs Tower in Jersey City may as well be a 24-carat ingot. The standard-bearer of investment firms amassed a reported $37.7 billion in revenue in 2006, shelling out bonuses that, if shared among all employees, would come out to $623,418 for each one. Maybe Gov. Jon Corzine, former chairman and CEO, should have postponed his governorship for a year or two....
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Forbes magazine. Forbes on Fox. “Forbes for President.” You know the name, and you probably recognize the face that nowadays goes with it—that of Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Jr. But “Steve” Forbes, 60, the current head of the family, is a piker when it comes to fame and flamboyance. You should have seen his old man....
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The 26-square-mile Ocean County municipality was recently named America’s safest city, after it had hovered for six years among the top five safest cities with a population of at least 75,000. The annual study by Morgan Quitno Press factors in six types of crime: murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, and motor-vehicle theft....
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Petula Clark had it right when she sang, “The lights are much brighter there, you can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares....” It was 1964, and everyone understood the allure of that one-word title, “Downtown.” It was a glamorous, skyscraping, urban beehive where “all the noise and the hurry seems to help.”...
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Ira Kaplan is not a religious man. So, when he and the members of his indie band, Yo La Tengo, decided to create a year-end series of benefit concerts during Hanukah in 2001, it had nothing to do with celebrating the Festival of Lights....
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Learning to decode and leverage "micromessages" can give you a leg up on the competition, says consultant Stephen Young....
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The humble snack was American long before Columbus stepped off the boat.Now a New Jersey company is giving it a designer makeover,and a mom-and -pop go wide. ...
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I can still taste the best blueberry I ever ate. It was big and squatly round and deep blue, with that periwinkle dusting that the ripest blueberries have. And it was stolen. It went directly from the bush to my mouth, never to be weighed at the shed a quarter mile across the blueberry farm....
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Gisele and Mario DiNatale’s oldest child and only daughter, Alicia Rose, was diagnosed with adenocarcinoma, an aggressive form of cancer, within days of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks....
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After more than half a century of debate and bureaucratic tussling, Ellis Island’s ferry terminal is about to reopen. It will become the first building on New Jersey’s side of the island to reopen to the public since the U.S. Coast Guard closed the terminal in 1954. From 1892 to 1954, this was the spot where millions of immigrants waited to board the ferry to mainland America after their ocean crossing....
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Elisabeth Shue and her brother Andrew had a dream to honor their brother’s memory with a film about family and soccer. They didn’t trust Hollywood to get it right, so they financed and filmed it here at home....
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Tasha Smith grew up in a hardscrabble neighborhood of east Camden, where the temptations of the streets seemed to outweigh those of the classroom. During her freshman year at Camden High School, she dropped out, turned to drugs, and forged friendships with people who would wind up in jail or dead....
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Newsweek Columnist Jonathan Alter interprets history as it happens.At home,he steeps himself in the past ,including the edigree of his Victorian dream house....
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It is said that playing golf at the highest level takes imagination—the ability to visualize a ball in flight before hitting it, then tailor and even invent shots to execute that vision and make galleries explode in cheers....
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Russel Simmon's saddle River home is for sale,and it's just one example of Bergen County's over-the-top boom. ...
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The opening of the George Washington Bridge in 1931 put Fort Lee on the map. The panic over the state’s first high-rise boom in the early 1970s put the borough in the headlines. But only in the last twenty years—as the Korean community has grown to just under a third of the total population of 40,000—has Fort Lee become a dining destination....
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Attention, foodies! Add these gustatory bastions and new sensations to your to-do list. Gentlemen, and ladies, start your forks....
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