United States · New Jersey
Where to Stay in West New York, New Jersey
West New York is a town on the New Jersey Palisades in Hudson County, New Jersey, facing Manhattan across the Hudson River.
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Where to stay in West New York
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West New York covers a little over three square kilometres, so the choice is a street rather than a district. Two streets, really. Bergenline Avenue is the commercial spine, lined with bakeries, delis, and bus stops, and a room near it puts the shops and the jitneys to the Port Authority Bus Terminal at the door.
Boulevard East is the other option, running along the top of the New Jersey Palisades where the high-rise towers face Manhattan across the Hudson River, and the overlooks along it are the reason people pay to be on that side of town. Everything else sits in between, a few blocks either way. Book ahead in the town.
A municipality of this size holds a limited stock of beds, and anyone arriving without a reservation will most likely end up looking outward into Hudson County rather than along the ridge. Union City lies to the south, North Bergen to the west, and Guttenberg to the north, each a short drive away on the same bus routes. A stay in West New York suits travellers who want a compact town on the New Jersey Palisades, with the whole of it walkable, and who do not need a district to choose between.
About West New York
What is West New York known for?
Bergenline Avenue is the reason most people know West New York. The commercial street runs the full length of the town before carrying on into Guttenberg and North Bergen, and it holds the largest concentration of shops anywhere in North Hudson. Jitney buses work it minute by minute.
Cuban families who settled here from the 1960s made the avenue their own, and the strip took the name Havana on the Hudson. Boulevard East does the opposite work, edging the cliff top with the Manhattan skyline laid out across the Hudson River.
What are the main landmarks in West New York?
The Excelsior Engine Co. No. 2 Firehouse at 6106 Polk Street is the one building in West New York on the National Register of Historic Places, added in 2022. Robert C. Dixon Jr. designed it in 1897 for a volunteer fire company, in Romanesque Revival brick with terra cotta Corinthian capitals, and the town retired it once paid companies took over in 1915.
The other draw is the view. Boulevard East runs along the New Jersey Palisades with the Manhattan skyline opposite, and the trap rock walls lining its overlooks came from the quarries that once cut into the cliff.
What is the history of West New York?
West New York was incorporated as a town on July 8, 1898, by an act of the New Jersey Legislature, replacing Union Township after a referendum three days earlier. The waterfront below the New Jersey Palisades is far older. It has been called Bulls Ferry since before the American Revolutionary War, after the Bull family who rowed and sailed passengers across the Hudson River to New York, and the British blockhouse there was the object of a failed raid by Anthony Wayne on July 20, 1780.
Textile mills made the town. Embroidery works spread across the ridge at the start of the twentieth century and turned North Hudson into what the trade called the Embroidery Capital of the United States, drawing Italian and German families onto the ridge. Cuban arrivals followed in the 1960s and reset the town again, filling Bergenline Avenue with their own shops.
Albio Sires, who came from Bejucal as a boy, became the first Hispanic mayor of West New York in 1995, went on to Congress, and had the Public School No. 4 he attended renamed for him in 2013. A ferry operator was born here too. Arthur Imperatore Sr. arrived in 1925, and in 1981 he bought a derelict stretch of Penn Central rail yards on the Weehawken and West New York waterfront and started the service that became NY Waterway, putting boats back on the crossing the Bull family had worked.
Hudson County holds the town, New Jersey holds the county, and the whole of it sits inside the United States.
Where is West New York?
West New York stands on the New Jersey Palisades, with the Hudson River along its eastern edge and Manhattan directly opposite. Guttenberg adjoins it to the north and North Bergen to the west, while Union City and Weehawken close it off to the south. The cliff is the organising fact.
A little over three square kilometres of ridge top carries the whole municipality, and the highest ground in Hudson County sits inside these boundaries, which makes elevation rather than any harbour or river bend the thing that set the street grid of this piece of New Jersey.
What is the climate of West New York?
The Hudson River sets the terms here. A position on the New Jersey Palisades puts West New York above the water, so wind off the river reaches the cliff top with less shelter than a low-lying part of Hudson County gets. Seasons are marked, in the temperate band that this part of New Jersey falls within, with a clear separation between summer and winter.
Nothing about the pattern is unusual for the New Jersey side of the river.
How do you get to West New York?
The Bergenline Avenue station of the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail sits at the Union City line, its platform 160 feet down in a former West Shore Railroad tunnel and reached by lift. That is the rail link. NJ Transit buses run down Bergenline Avenue and through the Lincoln Tunnel to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, and NY Waterway ferries cross the Hudson River from the Weehawken waterfront just south of town.
Newark Liberty International Airport is the nearest airport with scheduled passenger service, and Kennedy Boulevard carries the county route in along the town's western border.
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Updated September 2026