Hudson, the Sixth Borough of New York?

Staten Island whilst just across the Bay from Brooklyn doesn't share a land border with any of the other boroughs and being closer to New Jersey has always seemed a little odd to me. A little while back however I ran across a mention of Hudson County and Bergen County of New Jersey originally having been a part of the New Netherlands and it got me thinking, what if it hadn't become part of East Jersey but like Staten Island instead ended up with New York? This is a rough idea of what I was think of.


0 Capture 2.png


Basically Hudson County less Kearny, Harrison, and East Newark west of the Hackensack River as shown by the left hand red line, the upper red line being our timeline's modern day northern boundary. Or slightly more extensively also include part of Bergen County as well - Leonia, Fort Lee, Palisades Park, Ridgefield, Edgewater, Fairview, Cliffside Park - east of Overpeck Creek which would be up to the blue line. So not really knowing much about New York or New Jersey I was wondering what this might do to things.

0 Capture 2.png
 
Last edited:
NJ becomes more white and loses some influence in the House and EC.
Also, this butterflies the case of New Jersey v. New York.
 
When Britain conquered New Netherlands, it split it into New York and New Jersey. It could have kept it intact, which, besides essentially rerolling the dice on any personality from the 18c onward (Nappy, George Washington, George III, some Austrian guy with a weird mustache, etc.), would have massive effects on the city's urban development.

In the situation of the 17c - or for that matter the early 19c - there was no real reason for a split to put what is now Jersey City on the New York side. It was separated from the city by a wide river, and only started developing as a suburb of New York around the same time as Brooklyn, in the middle of the 19c. Maybe New York and New Jersey could have exchanged some territory in the mid-19c, the way Rhode Island and Massachusetts did as Providence's urban development sprawled into Massachusetts... but at the time New York had no land of comparable value to give to Jersey.
 
When Britain conquered New Netherlands, it split it into New York and New Jersey. It could have kept it intact, which, besides essentially rerolling the dice on any personality from the 18c onward (Nappy, George Washington, George III, some Austrian guy with a weird mustache, etc.), would have massive effects on the city's urban development.

In the situation of the 17c - or for that matter the early 19c - there was no real reason for a split to put what is now Jersey City on the New York side. It was separated from the city by a wide river, and only started developing as a suburb of New York around the same time as Brooklyn, in the middle of the 19c. Maybe New York and New Jersey could have exchanged some territory in the mid-19c, the way Rhode Island and Massachusetts did as Providence's urban development sprawled into Massachusetts... but at the time New York had no land of comparable value to give to Jersey.

I think what we need is to get that land into the same state as New York City. NYC only became one city in 1898; I suspect that if those regions had not been in a different state they could also have been included.

The question then becomes: why did the British split New York from East Jersey in that fashion, instead of keeping the Dutch all in one colony, or maybe splitting the lower Hudson from the Hudson valley? I've actually looked into this a little and was never able to come up with a satisfactory explanation.

Of course, different borders could butterfly NYC as we know it, or consolidation, or...
 
Serious question - why haven't they added more boroughs over the years? Is it just because the suburbs don't want to pay taxes to NYC?
 
I think what we need is to get that land into the same state as New York City. NYC only became one city in 1898; I suspect that if those regions had not been in a different state they could also have been included.

The question then becomes: why did the British split New York from East Jersey in that fashion, instead of keeping the Dutch all in one colony, or maybe splitting the lower Hudson from the Hudson valley? I've actually looked into this a little and was never able to come up with a satisfactory explanation.

Of course, different borders could butterfly NYC as we know it, or consolidation, or...

I don't think it would butterfly the city (the harbor and the Mohawk wind gap are still there), nor would it butterfly consolidation, which happened nearly universally in large cities to some extent.

However, it would reroll the dice on everything from the 18c onward. Issues that hinge on specific people, such as US independence or the Napoleonic Wars, could go the other way very easily.

Serious question - why haven't they added more boroughs over the years? Is it just because the suburbs don't want to pay taxes to NYC?

Pretty much. It took New York until the 1930s to grow to the North Bronx and Eastern Queens, and those areas kept getting more new development in the postwar era. Before WW2, the only bunch of suburbs in the same state was in Westchester, which was super-rich (that's why it suburbanized early) and didn't want to pay taxes to the city.
 
Top