Best Of Jersey

The recent death of its charismatic founder, Percy Leach, marked the end of an era, but the fate of the historic village and arts center had already been sealed....
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Other states may try to claim him (Texas, Massachusetts), but “Big Tuna” was born in Englewood. Both his Super Bowl rings (for XXI and XXV) came from coaching a certain misnamed NFL team that played “power football” over in the Meadowlands....
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The “Jackie Robinson of tennis,” Gibson was the first black woman on the world tour (1950). In 1975, the East Orange resident was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame and was named New Jersey’s state athletics commissioner. Gibson died in 2003 at age 76....
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In 1942, the 17-year-old Paterson native played second base for the Negro League’s Newark Eagles. The second African-American to play major-league baseball, he signed with the Cleveland Indians three months after the Brooklyn Dodgers inked Jackie Robinson....
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The funny man reaches out to at-risk Jersey kids with his Positive Impact Foundation...
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Few restaurants would call attention to this kind of ambiance: brick walls crumbling, lights flickering, dead bodies turning up. But there’s method to the madness of owner and chef John Caiola....
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The easier it is to draw the shape of a state,” says comedian Demetri Martin, “the harder it is to live in.”...
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His fingers move effortlessly over the fretboard, his body language as relaxed and soothing as his voice. In his white cowboy hat, Brick resident Jim Murphy, 75, may not look quintessentially Jersey, but he embraces his home state, singing in one of his country-inflected tunes, “Go New Jersey/and you’ll be sure to find/a people great/who give the state a Jersey state of mind.”...
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As a kid, I’d go to Mario’s Barber Shop in Bloomfield. On his wall were pictures of the Pope and Frank Sinatra. Mr. Sinatra’s picture hung higher. My dad played his music, but he stressed to me how important he was for italian-Americans....
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It’s October, and the leaves in Frankie Valli’s manicured backyard are drifting from the trees, exactly as they do in New Jersey. Except Valli’s home is in a gated community in Calabasas, California....
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It has been remade in punk, salsa, country, and rock versions. It has been recorded in Turkish, Japanese, Russian, Korean, French, and Portuguese....
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Seated at his pedal steel guitar, Robert Randolph gets a thrill leading his Family Band and the crowd into a musical party. He gets an equal charge speaking to inner-city kids, encouraging them to seize life’s opportunity. He practices what he preaches....
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The alt-rock band Fountains of Wayne famously took its name from an outdoor furniture store on Route 46 in Wayne. Bassist Adam Schlesinger, who grew up in Montclair, got his driver’s license at the DMV office, which is next door to the Fountains of Wayne store. “We just thought it was funny,” he says....
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I hated Bruce Springsteen. I know it’s heresy to say that, especially in the pages of this magazine, but it’s finally out there....
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Gregory Hines, a candidate for the title himself, once called Glover “the greatest tap dancer that ever lived.” ...
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Born in 1934 as Everett LeRoy Jones, the lifelong Newarker founded the Black Arts Movement in Harlem in the 1960s and gained fame for his Beat-influenced poetry and jazz criticism....
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In 1967, before “ecotourism” and “green living” became buzzwords and before legislation protected the state’s undeveloped tracts, this son of a Princeton doctor wrote The Pine Barrens, a slim, understated, magically detailed portrait of an unspoiled realm and its reclusive denizens....
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The prolific writer, who has taught at Princeton University since 1978, is scary in more ways than one....
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The Jersey City-born actor has often been compared to Zero Mostel because his Tony Award-winning roles—as endearingly sly Max Bialystock in The Producers and wisecracking Roman slave Pseudolus in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum—were in revivals of shows in which Mostel starred....
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When a chunk of the New Jersey State Fairgrounds in Hamilton went up for sale in the 1980s, we were… Read the rest