Yanticaw Park
The township’s green spine along Yanticaw Brook — wooded paths, fields, and the kind of shade that makes a summer evening feel longer.
Essex County · New Jersey
Nutley
Three and a half square miles of tree streets, brick houses, and parkland along the Passaic — a river township twelve miles from Manhattan.
01 — The township
A small town that never left the city.
Nutley sits in Essex County, pressed between Belleville, Bloomfield, Clifton, and Lyndhurst, with the Passaic River as its eastern wall. It is 3.4 square miles. About thirty thousand people live here. From Franklin Avenue you can be in Midtown in under an hour.
The name is older than the township. In 1844 the Satterthwaite family planted an estate of nut trees along the river. Painters followed. Mills lined the Third River. In 1902 Franklin Township was reincorporated as Nutley — a field of nuts, written into the map.
What remains is unusually intact: a walkable downtown, a park within a half-mile of every house, five elementary schools that still belong to neighborhoods, and a commission government that has run the place since 1912.
- Residents
- 30,143
- Square miles
- 3.4
- To Manhattan
- 12 mi
- Township
- 1902
2020 census
Essex County
NJ Transit 192
Named for the nut trees
Looking north to the Passaic — the river that bounds Nutley and feeds its parks.
02 — Green space
More than a hundred acres of park.
Yanticaw Brook and the Third River cut through the grid. County and township parks follow them. No home is more than half a mile from a field, a path, or a playground.
All parks →Kingsland Park
Ten acres that hide a pond, a dam, and a waterfall. Across the water sits Kingsland Manor, a National Register house from the 1700s.
Memorial Park
Three adjoining parks (I, II, III) along the Third River — civic lawn, mill history, and the township’s gathering ground.
Booth Park
The athletic heart: baseball, football, basketball, lacrosse, soccer, and roller hockey. Youth sports live here.
DeMuro Park
A neighborhood park with fields and playgrounds tucked into the street grid.
Father Glotzbach Park
A quieter green on Park Avenue, named for a longtime parish priest.
03 — Since 1693
Mills, painters, and a circus for the Red Cross.
Dutch farms, brownstone quarries, an artists’ colony, a velodrome, and a pharmaceutical campus that once employed thousands.
Read the timeline →- Before 1600
Along the Passaic
The Lenni-Lenape hunted, fished, and traded along the river that still bounds Nutley on the east.
- 1693
Van Giesen
Dutch planter Bastian Van Giesen is the first recorded European settler. His son’s 1751 house still stands on Chestnut Street.
- 1902
Nutley
Reincorporated as Nutley on March 5. The name comes from the Satterthwaite estate along the Passaic — a field of nut trees.
07 — Visit
Franklin Avenue, then the river.
Walk the commercial spine, detour to Memorial Park, and if you have time follow the parks north to Yanticaw or east to the Passaic.