Tenafly

In the mid-19th century, Tenafly was a small Dutch-settled farming community located along the Hudson River, west of the Palisades. Once the railroad started running through the village around 1860, Tenafly developed into an attractive growing neighborhood as well as a summer retreat for wealthy professionals. In 1894, the village broke away from Palisades Township and received borough status. The completion of the George Washington Bridge in 1931 made the journey to Manhattan more convenient, attracting more city dwellers as residents and cementing Tenafly's place in New York suburbia. Since the days of unpaved roads, handfuls of wood-framed stores, and country estates, Tenafly has boasted intimate parks and historic landmarks that give this picturesque Bergen County town its community feel. The photographs in Tenafly show the community's social and physical development throughout its more than 110-year history as a borough.

Paul J. Stefanowicz, coauthor of Images of America: Tenafly with Alice Rigney, is a councilman and local historian. A lifelong resident of Tenafly, he uses his roots to provide a perspective of how the borough of Tenafly has moved through the second part of the 20th century and into the 21st.