Sayreville's
LANDSCAPE
Situated within the New York metropolitan area, Sayreville looks much like any suburb in Middlesex County, or in New Jersey for that matter. Most of Sayreville’s homes were built after World War II on flattened tracts of land, and their architectural styles are repeated throughout surrounding communities. But buried within this seemingly ubiquitous landscape, mixed among a sea of curvilinear streets, cape cods, and split-levels, are remnants of a community which, for nearly a century, functioned in ways quite unlike the suburbs that have since engulfed it. Here, three village-like neighborhoods and a handful of very small, outlying neighborhoods thrived as a result of their interplay with two highly contingent and interdependent factors, one of which being industry, the other open space.