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The Bergen County borough is a “solid, middle-class” place where “it’s easy to get to know people,” as one resident put it.
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Michael McCloskey was born and raised in Manhattan, and figured himself a lifer. “But everything changes once you have a kid,” he said. So early in the pandemic, Mr. McCloskey, now 48, his wife, Jillian McCloskey, 40, and their toddler left Washington Heights for the area where Ms. McCloskey was born and raised: the scenic Pascack Valley, in northern New Jersey.
They landed in Emerson, the southernmost of the valley’s eight communities and the one closest to the George Washington Bridge, 11 miles away. For $600,000 — a sum that would fetch “a great one-bedroom in the city,” Mr. McCloskey noted — the couple bought a four-bedroom, two-bath ranch house with a sun-filled playroom and a man-cave basement. The house is within walking distance of the train, which Mr. McCloskey, a sales director for a spirits company, sometimes takes to the city.
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By The New York Times
The Bergen County borough of 7,200 residents, a suburban idyll of green spaces and well-cared-for ranches, split-levels, Cape Cods and colonials, calls itself “The Family Town,” a nickname that graces its welcome signs.
“I was like, ‘Aren’t all towns family towns?’” said Ms. McCloskey, who grew up in nearby Washington Township and is a teacher in Hudson County. “But after being here two years, you get it. It’s the way the town caters to families, with parades, events at the library and little things like having someone else’s grandpa catch my daughter at the bottom of the slide at the playground we walk to.” (The McCloskey family grew by two when twins arrived in September.)
Daniela Musano, 46, the owner of a spa business, and Chris Spliedt, 49, a children’s book author and illustrator, are on their second Emerson home. In 2020, the couple, who have three children ages 6 to 15, paid $480,000 for a five-bedroom, circa-1910 Craftsman-style house in need of work — an upgrade from a similar but smaller place around the corner.
The family had thought of moving to the Jersey Shore, but Emerson’s relative affordability and coziness — Ms. Musano’s prerequisites of coffee, pizza and post office are all less than a five-minute walk from the house — won out.
“Emerson is small and manageable — it’s easy to get to know people and set up play dates,” Ms. Musano said. “It’s just a solid, middle-class town. What I see around me are smart people growing their lives in all sorts of ways.”
For Vivian and Norman Chester, arranging play dates did not factor in the decision to relocate to Emerson from a split-level in Oradell, N.J., Emerson’s more-affluent neighbor. “We wanted to downsize, and downsize our taxes,” said Mr. Chester, 68, who is semiretired from banking. They also didn’t want to walk up and down stairs anymore.
The Chesters looked at ranch houses in Paramus, where property taxes are low. “But the problem with Paramus is that any ranch that hits the market there gets bid on by developers who want to tear it down and build a McMansion,” Mr. Chester said. That happens less often in Emerson, which has an ample inventory of ranches in original condition.
For $481,000, he and Ms. Chester, 70, a retired teacher, bought a three-bedroom home near wooded land where they and their adult daughter, who lives with them, walk their four dogs. “The woods are right behind us, and there’s no border — you can spread out and the water company doesn’t care,” Mr. Chester said. “In essence, it feels like a larger property.”
And there’s a bonus: They reduced their annual property tax bill by $5,000.
An oddly proportioned 2.3 square miles, Emerson stretches from the Oradell Reservoir to Paramus, New Jersey’s retail capital. The borough shares its longest borders with Westwood, to the north, and Oradell, to the south.
Residents cite the proximity to Paramus and Westwood, the Pascack Valley’s hub for shopping and dining, as a great convenience. But Emerson has its own commerce: two shopping plazas, each with a supermarket and one with a Marshalls department store, and other businesses scattered along Kinderkamack Road, the valley’s heavily traveled main artery.
At what is considered downtown, the train station sits in a triangle where Kinderkamack Road meets the tracks and other roads branch out. “It’s a bottleneck,” acknowledged the mayor, Danielle DiPaola: “Unfortunately, we’re a pass-through community. We don’t have a traditional business district, but we do well with what we have.”
Deborah Sirico, a lifelong borough resident and a sales associate at Coldwell Banker in Hillsdale, N.J., said the ease of public transportation to New York and a shorter commute than in other Pascack Valley communities are selling points for Emerson. As for the tangle of road and rail in the middle of the borough, Ms. Sirico said residents learn to “zig and zag” to avoid the grade crossing, especially at rush hour.
Driving through the borough likely won’t get any easier, as a major development project — a four-story complex called Emerson Station that will include 147 rental apartments and 15,000 square feet of retail space — is in the early stages of construction next to the train station.
With home prices starting in the $400,000s, Emerson is a good option for first-time buyers, said Robert Dzienis, a sales associate with Better Real Estate, who specializes in the Pascack Valley.
“Because the houses tend to be smaller and at a smaller price point, you get more of a blue-collar resident” than in neighboring communities, said Mr. Dzienis, who calls Emerson a “sleeper” town that budget-conscious buyers may not have on their radar. “There aren’t a lot of properties that reach the $700,000 to $800,000 range.”
From Sept. 1, 2021, to Aug. 31, 2022, 80 single-family houses in Emerson sold at a median price of $582,500, compared with 92 sales at a median price of $560,215 during the same period a year earlier, according to the New Jersey Multiple Listing Service. On Sept. 29, the service’s website showed seven single-family houses listed for sale, from $449,000 to $1.19 million.
Emerson’s average property taxes in 2021 were $13,154, about $700 higher than the Bergen County average, but still among the lowest in the Pascack Valley.
Nightlife in Emerson means the Emerson Hotel, which began feeding and housing travelers 150 years ago, after the railroad came through. Today, the rambling restaurant and bar specializes in sliced steak. Pimaan, serving Thai cuisine, completes the limited fine-dining scene.
Among the borough’s recreational offerings are two golf courses — the private Hackensack Golf Club and the county-run Soldier Hill — and Emerson Woods, a municipally owned forest open to hikers and dog walkers. The 19-acre preserve is a buffer for the Oradell Reservoir, a destination in its own right; the local water company sells permits that allow fishing from the shoreline and bird-watching.
Children’s activities include a borough-run summer camp; an Easter egg hunt sponsored by the Fire Department; and the Enchanted Forest, a whimsical annual event organized by volunteers and held in the woods on school district property.
The “Family Town” does not overlook grandparents: Police officers do the cooking at the senior center’s pasta night. And all ages come together at the borough picnic that kicks off summer.
The Emerson public school district serve about 1,060 students in three schools: Memorial Elementary School for prekindergarten through third grade; Patrick M. Villano School for fourth through sixth grade; and Emerson Junior-Senior High School for seventh through 12th grade. Two-thirds of those students identify as white, 20 percent as Hispanic, 8.5 percent as Asian and 1.5 percent as Black. At the high school, average SAT scores in 2020-21 were 576 in reading and writing and 568 in math, versus 557 and 560 statewide.
After the passage of a $13.3 million referendum in 2018, the school district built a 12-classroom wing and gymnasium at Memorial School and a science wing at the junior-senior high school, and made other improvements.
Emerson is one of two Pascack Valley municipalities that are not part of a regionalized school district. “We look at our district as an educational ecosystem,” said the superintendent, Brian P. Gatens. “There’s a private-school vibe — we’re small enough where every student is well known.”
Traveling to Midtown Manhattan takes a little over an hour, whether by rail on New Jersey Transit’s Pascack Valley Line, or by bus on New Jersey Transit’s No. 165 route. The train fare is $9.25 one-way or $270 monthly; the bus fare, $7 one-way or $199 monthly.
Driving to Midtown, a distance of about 20 miles, can take anywhere from 40 minutes to well over an hour, depending on traffic.
Emerson was originally named Etna when it broke off from Washington Township in 1903. The name, however, had nothing to do with the famed Sicilian volcano and predated the arrival of the area’s first Italians, although it did become identified with that growing community. In 1909, the Dutch and German political establishment decided to rename Etna. Emerson was the choice of a councilman who admired the Boston-born poet Ralph Waldo Emerson; it won out over Sunridge and Bellaire.
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