The Sterling Hill Mining Museum in Ogdensburg, New Jersey, is a former underground zinc mine where you can walk through a tunnel and watch the rock walls erupt into neon color under ultraviolet light. It’s one of the only places on earth where fluorescent minerals occur in this kind of concentration, and the museum built…
Tuckerton Seaport: The NJ Maritime Village Built to Save a Vanishing Way of Life
Tuckerton Seaport is a 40-acre recreated maritime village in Tuckerton, New Jersey, built around 17 historic and reconstructed buildings that preserve the vanishing traditions of the Barnegat Bay “baymen” — the clammers, decoy carvers, and boat builders who once made a living entirely off the water. It started as a one-room decoy museum and grew…
The Museum of American Glass: Millville’s Hidden World of Fire and Sand
If you want to see a six-foot-tall glass bottle, a glass casket, a glass washboard, and a working glass factory where someone is pulling molten orange goo out of a furnace right in front of you, head to the Museum of American Glass at WheatonArts in Millville, New Jersey. It holds more than 22,000 glass…
The Golden Nugget: Lambertville’s 50-Plus-Year Flea Market Named After a Gold Rush
The Golden Nugget Antique Flea Market in Lambertville, New Jersey, is a sprawling, three-day-a-week market where roughly 200 outdoor dealers and dozens of indoor shops sell everything from depression glass to pinball machines. It’s been running on the same stretch of Route 29 along the Delaware River since 1967, which makes it one of the…
Space Farms Zoo and Museum: NJ’s Wildest Roadside Collection
Space Farms Zoo and Museum is a 100-acre family-run attraction in Sussex County, New Jersey, that mashes together a zoo of more than 500 live animals with a sprawling museum of antique cars, dolls, firearms, and farm relics. It started in 1927 as a roadside repair shop and grew, almost by accident, into one of…
Grounds For Sculpture: The Old NJ Fairgrounds Turned Art Wonderland
Grounds For Sculpture is a 42-acre sculpture park, museum, and accredited arboretum in Hamilton Township, New Jersey, built on the site of the old New Jersey State Fairgrounds. It holds nearly 300 contemporary sculptures spread across landscaped gardens and ponds, along with six indoor galleries, roaming peacocks, and a handful of spots where famous paintings…
Wild West City: New Jersey’s Only Old West Theme Park, Gunfights and All
Wild West City is a family-owned Old West theme park in Stanhope, New Jersey, built as a working replica of 1880s Dodge City, Kansas. It opened in 1957, stages live gunfight shows on Main Street every day it’s open, and bills itself as New Jersey’s only Western theme park. It’s also the site of one…
Luna Parc: The Psychedelic Art Castle Hiding in New Jersey’s Woods
Luna Parc is a hand-built art environment in Sandyston Township, in the far northwestern corner of New Jersey, where artist Ricky Boscarino has spent more than three decades covering a once-abandoned hunting cabin in mosaics, stained glass, taxidermy, and found-object sculpture. It’s part private home, part museum, part fever dream, and it only opens its…
Diggerland USA: The Jersey Theme Park Where You Drive the Excavators
In West Berlin, New Jersey, there’s a theme park where the main attraction isn’t a roller coaster. It’s an excavator. At Diggerland USA, you climb into real, diesel-powered construction machinery, grab the controls, and dig an actual hole in the dirt — and it’s the only place in North America where you can do that….
The Burlington County Prison Museum: Mount Holly’s 154-Year-Old Jail You Can Tour
The Burlington County Prison Museum in Mount Holly, New Jersey is a stone jail built in 1811 that locked up prisoners for 154 straight years, making it the oldest continuously operating prison in the United States when it finally closed in 1965. Today you can walk the same cell blocks, stand in the execution yard,…