With its lush hills, winding roads, and glistening lakes and reservoirs, Ringwood, New Jersey feels more like the Catskill Mountains than a New Jersey suburb. When Linda and James Pentifaro decided to leave their longtime home in River Edge, Bergen County, they were drawn to its rural charm.
“My wife really wanted to go to the lake, but I thought, ‘We can’t afford that,'” said Pentifaro, 64, owner of Ridgefield Hobby Store in Ridgefield, New Jersey.
But earlier this year, they bought a three-bedroom log cabin on Cupsaw Lake, one of Ringwood’s several lakes, for $599,000. For Pentifaro, 65, a retired office manager, their new home reminds her of the lakeside cabin her family owned in the Adirondacks.
“We go out on the deck and have cocktails and enjoy the view,” Pentifaro said. “The great thing about Ringwood is its location. It’s in the countryside but not too far from the city.”
Many buyers start their search in expensive northern New Jersey towns, but in Ringwood, “you can afford a nice home,” said Orlie Steinberg, an agent with Keller Williams Village Square Realty in Ridgewood. They realize that they can get a higher return on their money. She said some people discover the area during weekend outdoor adventures.
“During the pandemic, 30 percent of our customers came from out of town,” said Steinberg, a longtime Ringwood resident. “Everyone was hiking the trails. It grew people, and a lot of people bought permanent homes and weekend homes.”
He added that since many people are working remotely, “you can work in a beautiful environment while looking out at the lake and trees.”
Amanda Nabojoski, 35, and her fiancé James Curran, 33, paid $660,000 for a four-bedroom house on 3.3 acres in Ringwood last summer. Nabojoski is a biomedical engineer who visits hospitals to manage clinical trials, and Curran is a data analyst who commutes to Westchester County twice a week.
The couple previously lived in a condominium in Bergen County’s Rochelle Park, but “we wanted more space and a slower pace of life,” Nabojoski said. Their new home is near the Monksville Reservoir, where they plan to kayak during the warmer months.
One of Ringwood’s greatest assets is Ringwood State Park, which includes Shepard Lake. New Jersey Botanical Garden at Skylands. Ringwood’s manor was the country home of Abram’s Stevens, who once made his fortune in iron mining and later entered politics, serving as a member of Congress and mayor of New York in the late 19th century.
Although many of Ringwood’s natural resources are protected as parks and reservoir watersheds, the borough has also responded to environmental hazards. Cleanup is underway at a 500-acre Superfund site contaminated by paint sludge and other toxic waste dumped in the 1960s. Photographed in the 1970s at the former Ford Motor Company manufacturing plant in nearby Mahwah.
what will you find
Spread over 26 square miles in northern Passaic County, approximately 40 miles northwest of midtown Manhattan, Ringwood is bordered by West Milford to the west, the Ramapo Valley County Reservation in Mahwah to the east, Wanaque and Oakland to the south, and Sterling Forest State Park. are doing. To the north is Tuxedo, New York.
The borough is less diverse than New Jersey as a whole, with its approximately 11,500 residents being 84% white, 9.2% Hispanic, 2.2% Asian, 1.6% black, and 1.3% Native American. (By comparison, New Jersey’s population is 52.9 percent white, 21.9 percent Hispanic, 15.4 percent black, 10.5 percent Asian, and 0.7 percent Native American.) Ringwood has a long-established community of indigenous Ramapaw Lenape people. there is.
Housing styles include cottages and cabins that are built as summer homes and later winterized. 1960s and 1970s Cape Cods, two-story, colonial. McMansions were built in the late 20th century. There are very few apartments or housing complexes.
What you pay for
As of early December, there were 12 homes for sale in Ringwood, including a two-bedroom duplex for $112,321 and a five-bedroom, 6,320-square-foot home for $3.7 million.
According to data provided by the Garden State Multiple Listing Service, 104 homes were sold in the year ending November 1, 2023, with a median price of $483,500. During the previous 12 months, 140 homes were sold at a median price of $462,000.
The decline in sales reflected the national recession, and Steinberg and other observers blamed high mortgage rates.
vibrator
Ringwood does not have a downtown shopping district. Instead, most commercial activity is concentrated in two strip shopping centers on Skyline Drive.
Residents of the three lake communities of Erskine, Cupsaw, and Skyline often develop neighborhood connections around lake associations that offer summer camps, beach clubs, dinners, holiday parties, and other activities.
For outdoor enthusiasts, there are plenty of natural spaces to explore. In addition to Ringwood State Park, there are several parks and preserves nearby, including Ramapo Mountain State Forest, Norvin Green State Forest, Wawayanda State Park, Long Pond Ironworks State Park, and Tranquility Ridge Park. there is.
school
Ringwood has four schools, serving approximately 1,100 early-year students. Students from kindergarten through third grade attend either Robert Erskine Elementary School or Peter Cooper Elementary School, which also has a kindergarten program. The fourth grader and her fifth grader attend Eleanor G. Hewitt Middle School. Students in grades 6 through 8 attend Martin J. Ryerson Middle School.
Older students attend Lakeland Regional High School in nearby Wanake, which has 900 students in grades 9-12. The average SAT scores for the 2021-22 school year were 547 in reading and writing and 524 in math, compared to the state averages of 538 and 532.
commute
New Jersey Transit operates buses from the park-and-ride parking lot near Skyline Drive to the Port Authority Bus Terminal in midtown Manhattan. The journey takes between 1 hour and 1 hour 20 minutes and costs $10.75 one way or $267 per month. (However, Skyline Drive is a steep thoroughfare and may be closed during the winter.)
If you want to drive to Midtown, you can take Route 208 or Interstate 287 in neighboring Oakland. Depending on traffic conditions, it can take as little as an hour or more than an hour and a half. Interstate 287 connects commuters to corporate centers and other suburban areas in Morris, Bergen, and Westchester counties.
history
European immigrants began mining iron ore in the Ramapo Mountains around Ringwood in the 18th century. One of the early iron masters, Robert Erskine, served as George Washington’s cartographer during the Revolutionary War. The iron mines of Ringwood and nearby areas provided iron for the war effort, including the chains across the Hudson River that stopped British sailing ships.
From the mid-19th century, Peter Cooper and his son-in-law Abram Stevens Hewitt operated the ironworks. The family, also founders of Cooper Union College and Cooper Hewitt’s Smithsonian Design Museum, donated their Ringwood vacation home to New Jersey in the 1930s. It is now a museum and part of Ringwood State Park.
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