Tax court. The Tax Court of New Jersey, a court of limited jurisdiction within the New Jersey judiciary, was established in 1979. Its predecessor, the Division of Tax Appeals, was an administrative agency within the Department of the Treasury. The court hears appeals from local property tax assessments, assessments by the director of the New Jersey Division of Taxation, appeals of other taxes imposed by a state or local government or authority, and other tax-related matters. Appeals from determinations of the tax court are heard by the appellate division of the superior court and then the supreme court of New Jersey. The court is authorized to have twelve judges who sit, without a jury, in Trenton, Newark, and other locations. Judges are appointed by the governor with the advice and consent of the State Senate for initial terms of seven years and, on reappointment, until age seventy. Judges of the tax court are statutorily required to have special qualifications, knowledge, and experience in matters of taxation. Almost one thousand opinions of the court are published in New Jersey Tax Court Reports, which as of the year 2001 comprised almost nineteen volumes. The court is one of only three judicial tax courts in the United States and is considered one of the best forums for resolving complex state tax questions.
Taxes. The principal taxes in New Jersey are the property, income, corporate income, sales, and inheritance taxes. While property taxes have existed since the seventeenth century, income and sales taxes are a late twentieth-century invention, instituted to pay for the expanded services provided by state and local governments.
Property taxes are assessed at the municipal level at a rate fixed by the county boards of taxation. They include the local tax for services (such as police and fire protection), the school tax, and the municipality’s share of the cost of county government. There are exemptions for property devoted to religious, educational, hospital, or charitable uses, the state of New Jersey, the Garden State Parkway, the New Jersey Turnpike, and county and local governments or their agencies. Limited exemptions are also granted to buildings constructed or renovated as part of urban renewal projects authorized by the municipal governing body. Partial exemptions, known as farmland assessments, are available for at least five acres devoted to agricultural or horticultural use.
Income is taxable in New Jersey at a top rate of 6.37 percent. Each taxpayer is allowed a personal exemption and an additional exemption for a spouse who does not file separately. Exemptions are also provided for those over sixty-five, the blind or disabled, and dependents, including those under age of twenty-two attending an accredited institution of higher learning on a full-time basis. Deductions are allowed for medical expenses and for property taxes on the taxpayer’s residence. In addition, a taxpayer may exclude retirement benefits, property acquired by gift or inheritance, workers’ compensation payments, and damages for personal injuries or sickness.
Corporations, both domestic and foreign, are subject to New Jersey corporation business tax. For a corporation that maintains a regular place of business outside New Jersey the portion of its income taxable is determined by an allocation factor, which considers its property, sales, and payroll both within and outside New Jersey. The tax rate on corporate net income is 9 percent.
There is a 6 percent sales tax on the retail sales of tangible personal property and services. While prepared food and drink sold in restaurants and taverns are taxable, unprepared food and meals especially prepared for homebound elderly and disabled persons, airlines, and school cafeterias are not taxed. Although the sales tax is imposed upon the purchaser, the law requires the seller to collect the tax at the time of the sale. There are numerous exemptions including sales of prescriptions, clothing and footwear, newspapers and magazines, certain utilities, and school textbooks.
A transfer inheritance tax is imposed upon all property, both real and personal, of a New Jersey decedent, but property owned by husband and wife as tenants by the entirety is not subject to the inheritance tax upon the death of one of the owners. Transfers to a spouse, children, or parents are not subject to the inheritance tax. Transfers to other relatives are taxable at rates from 11 percent to 16 percent depending on amount. The law allows deductions for the decedent’s debts, funeral expense and the expense of last illness, administration expenses, and real property taxes. Finally, in addition to the transfer inheritance tax, New Jersey imposes an estate tax.
Teaneck. 6.22-square-mile township, incorporated 1895, lying between the Hacken-sack River and the Overpeck Creek in south-central Bergen County. The name Teaneck is believed to be from the Lenape word meaning "place of villages.” Later, the name identified a high ridge of land that roughly divides the township from north to south. European settlement began in 1676 along an American Indian trail paralleling the Hackensack River, called New Hackensack or East Hackensack. Settlements also grew along another American Indian trail (now Teaneck Road) on the eastern side of the so-called Teaneck Ridge.
The Revolutionary War site known as New Bridge Landing lies in the northwestern part of the township. In 1865, William Walter Phelps moved from Manhattan to Teaneck. He later became a U.S. congressman, ambassador, and judge. His Teaneck property, called Englewood Farm, encompassed more than five thousand acres. Residential development began in earnest after the breakup of the Phelps estate in 1927. The U.S. Army used Teaneck as an example of the model American town government in its post-World War II reconstruction efforts in Japan and elsewhere. Today, it is the most populous municipality in the county.
In 2000, the population of 39,260 was 56 percent white, 29 percent black, 7 percent Asian, and 10 percent Hispanic (Hispanics may be of any race). The median household income was $74,903.
Teedyuscung (b. c. 1709; d. Apr. 17, 1763). Lenape translator and intermediary. Tee-dyuscung, also known as "Gideon” and "Honest John,” was born into the Toms River band of Lenape. Around 1735 Teedyuscung’s entire band moved to the Forks of Delaware in Pennsylvania, the only Lenape band to emigrate west from New Jersey. These Lenape colonizers provided the Pennsylvania colonial government with an opportunity to "buy” the Forks region, although the participating "vendors” held no native claim to the land. As he grew up, Teedyuscung mastered the art of diplomacy and became a culture broker, or intermediary, for the English colonial government during the difficult years of the French and Indian War. He often claimed to represent several of the groups of native peoples whom the Six Nations Iroquois had settled in the buffer region along the New York-Pennsylvania border. Teedyuscung sometimes even claimed to represent the Six Nations as well. He died in 1763, in a cabin that had been built for him by the Pennsylvania colonial government, near the end of the war that provided him with unusual opportunities.
Telcordia Technologies. Telcordia, a telecommunications technology company and a wholly owned subsidiary of Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), is a world leader in telecommunications research, engineering, consulting, and training. Telcordia’s heritage can be traced directly to the divestiture of AT&T in 1984. In that year, AT&T’s nationwide Bell telephone network was divided into seven independent regional Bell operating companies, commonly known as the "Baby Bells.” At the same time, AT&T’s original central services organization was transformed into a separate company under the name Bell Communications Research, or Bellcore. Bellcore’s mission was to provide research, engineering, and administrative services for the newly created Baby Bells. Bellcore opened a new corporate headquarters in suburban Livingston in 1985. The company was acquired in 1997 by San Diego-based Science Applications International Corporation. Two years later, Bellcore was renamed Telcordia Technologies.
Telcordia is one of the world’s largest providers of telecommunications engineering and consulting services. It is a major participant in the ongoing development of advanced next-generation networks and is also the world’s largest provider of telecommunications training services. Telcordia’s headquarters is located in Morristown. The company has offices throughout the United States and in Canada, Central and South America, and Europe.
Telegraph. Painter Samuel F. B. Morse conceived the electric telegraph in 1832 and worked on the invention at his studio at the University of the City of New York (now New York University) until 1837, when he became associated with his former student Alfred Vail. The son of Stephen Vail, founder of the Speedwell Iron Works near Morristown, Alfred, who worked on the telegraph at his father’s ironworks, provided the mechanical skill necessary to improve Morse’s crude instruments and turn them into devices suitable for commercial use. It was at the ironworks that the first public demonstration of the new system took place on January 11, 1838, before a crowd of several hundred people.
Subsequent experimentation and development of the system then took place in New York, where Morse’s university colleague, Leonard Gale, a chemistry professor, helped to design batteries and electromagnets. Demonstrations of the system in New York and at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia attracted the attention of Congress, which had begun considering the adoption of semaphore telegraphs in 1837. However, only after extensive lobbying by Morse and his associates did Congress vote in 1843 to fund an experimental line between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, Maryland. The line was completed and put into operation on May 24,1844.
Morse and his associates formed the Magnetic Telegraph Company after Congress decided not to adopt the telegraph, and they began extending this line to New York. The section from Philadelphia to Newark opened in January 1846, with messages being sent from Newark to Jersey City by rail and then to New York by ferry. The line was soon extended to Fort Lee in the hope that a cable could be laid under the Hudson River, but this attempt failed. For a time a boat took the messages across the river where they were telegraphed south to New York City from the home of naturalist John James Audubon. A short time later, the company ran a line from Newark to Jersey City and again sent messages to New York by ferry. Although several efforts were made to lay telegraph lines across the Hudson, none permanently succeeded until 1856, when a cable was laid from the Stevens estate in Hoboken. The New Jersey Magnetic Telegraph Company, using the printing telegraph devised by Royal E. House, established a competing north-south line in 1847, which initially crossed the Hudson River over large masts extended from both shores. While New Jersey was essential for north-south lines between Philadelphia and New York City, lines going west from New York branched off from those extending north of the city and either missed New Jersey entirely or only crossed a small corner of the state.
Although primarily important as a crossing for north-south telegraph lines, New Jersey briefly played a significant role in the telegraph industry during the 1870s through the efforts of inventor Thomas Edison. At a series of shops in Newark he devised important improvements in telegraphy, most notably his Universal stock ticker and the quadruplex telegraph, which enabled four messages to be sent simultaneously over one wire. It was his success as a telegraph inventor that enabled Edison to build his famous laboratory at Menlo Park.
Television stations. In traditional, over-the-air broadcasting, the American television industry has depended heavily on national networking, that is, centralized distribution of programming by such networks as ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox to affiliated stations. New Jersey, however, is almost entirely devoid of national network affiliates. The state’s geographical position between New York and Philadelphia has much to do with this; New Jersey television viewers are served by network-affiliated stations in those cities, whose coverage areas are essentially contiguous.
Exceptions include NBC affiliate WMGM (Atlantic City) and WWOR/UPN-9 (Secaucus). The latter is the flagship station of the recently created UPN network. However—and indicative of New Jersey’s marginal status in the world of network television—UPN’s own database of affiliates lists the Secaucus station under New York, and lists no affiliated or owned stations in New Jersey.
American television is not strictly limited to the national network model, and New Jersey has seen much more activity in other areas of television production and distribution. These areas include cable television and various forms of noncommercial television, including educational, public, and public access television.
New Jersey is served by approximately forty cable systems, each providing cable service to one or more contiguous municipalities. The majority of these cable systems are owned by the multisystem operators (MSOs) Cable-vision and Comcast. Like other cable systems around the country, many of New Jersey’s cable systems include public access channels, which provide an outlet for programming produced by members of the public, as well as civic and educational organizations. (Public access channels owe their existence to an FCC mandate that the cable industry give something back to the municipalities whose property it crosses with wires.) For example, TV30, Princeton Community Television, transmits live town council meetings, high school plays, religious programming, a film review panel, discussions with Princeton University faculty, chess programs, locally produced comedy shows, and many other programs not available on commercial and/or national television.
Public television, another form of noncommercial television, is also well represented in New Jersey, by the NJN (New Jersey Network). (Public television stations, unless they are public access stations, are generally not cable-only, and are owned and operated on a more traditional basis, though under noncommercial broadcasting licenses.) NJN is a member of the Public Broadcasting System (PBS), a national distribution agency—sometimes called a "quasi-network”—for public television programming. NJN broadcasts on four over-the-air channels and is carried on all New Jersey cable systems.
Temperature. Due to New Jersey’s middle-latitude location along the East Coast of North America, temperatures vary markedly on a number of timescales. The midday sun ranges from approximately 26 degrees to 74 degrees above the horizon between the winter and summer equinoxes, in part explaining the seasonal temperature changes. Intraseasonal to hourly swings in the thermal regime result from wind shifts. Northerly winds bring in cold (or cool, depending on the season) air from polar regions, southerly breezes push warm air up from the south, and easterlies bring in cool, but not cold, air regardless of the season. Depending on the origin of the air mass, westerlies can introduce air that is hot to cold into the state.
Despite New Jersey’s relatively small geographic extent, a spring heat wave can result in midaftemoon temperatures ranging from the mid-gos inland to the mid-6os on the seabreeze-cooled barrier islands. Conversely, a winter coastal storm can raise the coastal temperature to 5O0F, while Sussex County shivers in the 20s.
Statewide, January is the coldest month, with an average temperature of 3O.60F, and July the warmest at 74.5°F (averages are calculated using 1971-2000 data from approximately thirty-five National Weather Service observing stations). The coldest month on record was February 1934, at I7.9°F, and the hottest was July 1955, at 79.o°F (records extend back to 1895). The coldest daily minimum temperature on record is -340F, observed in River Vale (Bergen County) on January 5,1934, and the hottest daily maximum temperature is iio°F at Runyon (Middlesex County) on July IO, 1936.
New Jersey in 1859. Service ended in the 1960s, but the town won a preservation award for work on the stone railroad station’s exterior. The house occupied from 1865 to 1880 by suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton is a national landmark. In 1894, Tenafly became a borough apart from Palisades Township (which in turn had been formed from Hackensack Township in I872). During World War I, a section of Tenafly was part of Camp Merritt. Bandleader Glenn Miller lived in the borough from I938 until his death in I944. Roosevelt Common and a horticultural park are the gifts of philanthropic citizens, and near Tenafly’s portion of the Palisades cliffs are a nature center and preserved forests. Today the town is a residential suburb.
The 2000 population of 13,806 was 77 percent white and I9 percent Asian. The median household income was $90,931.
Gilbert graduated from Yale College in 1725, was ordained by the Philadelphia Presbytery, and appointed to the New Brunswick Presbyterian Church. It was here that he met Dutch Reformed minister Theodore Frelinghuysen, who influenced Tennent’s commitment to the personal piety and active evangelical faith associated with the colony-wide revival known as the First Great Awakening. Tennent became a leader of the pro-revival "New Side” faction of the Presbyterian Church and traveled throughout the colonies propagating the Awakening.
Tennis. Tennis started in New Jersey when private clubs began opening in the late 1800s. Early clubs included the Orange Lawn Tennis Club, the Oritani Tennis Club in Hackensack, the Englewood Field Club, and Saint George’s Cricket Club in Hoboken. Others were in Newark, Jersey City, Montclair, Plainfield, Short Hills, and Seabright. By I900 Branch Brook Park offered public tennis courts and George Jay Gould had built a private court in Lakewood.
At the turn of the century, many New Jersey players became United States champions. Juliette Atkinson of Rahway won the singles title in 1895, 1897, and 1898 and the doubles title seven times. In I896 she lost to Ridgewood’s Elisabeth (Bessie) Moore, who was the first to win four national singles titles. Bessie lost in I906 to Helen Homans, who, along with the women’s doubles champions, Annie Coe and Ethel Platt, came from the Englewood Field Club. Englewood, according to the New York Times in 1893, had more "expert players than any other club in America.”
William Larned, from Summit, tied for the most U.S. men’s singles titles (seven) starting in I90I. Fred Alexander of Seabright excelled in doubles, beginning at Princeton in 1900 and winning his last nationals in I9I7. Later champions included Bayonne’s Dick Savitt, who won major titles in 1951. Today, New Jersey still has many private tennis clubs, as well as an extensive network of public courts.
Tenafly. 4.6-square-mile borough in Bergen County, five miles north of Manhattan. Jacobus Van Cortlandt obtained lands here in 1688. He was followed by Dutch and French Huguenot settlers. Part of the Roelof West-ervelt House is dated from 1745. A 1764 will mentioned "Tienefly” (Dutch dialect, possibly meaning "ten marshes”).
Tennent, Gilbert (b. Feb. 5, 1703; d. July 23, 1764). Clergyman and revivalist preacher. Gilbert Tennent was born in Armagh, Ireland, and immigrated to America in 1718. He was the son of William Tennent, the patriarch of a famous family of colonial Presbyterians.
Terhune, Albert Payson (b. Dec. 21, 1872; d. Feb. 18, 1942). Writer. Albert Payson Terhune’s famous collie-dog stories are set on the Terhune family estate, Sunnybank, along Lake Pompton in Wayne Township, New Jersey. "Bert”was the youngest child of Edward Payson Terhune, a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church, and Virginia Hawes Terhune (Marion Harland), a successful author of cookbooks and popular novels.
Bert Terhune graduated from Columbia University in 1893. He traveled to the Mideast with his mother and published his first book, Syria from the Saddle, at the age of twenty-three. For the next twenty-one years, he worked as a journalist on the New York World and as a freelance fiction writer. He first married Lorraine Bryson, who died four days after the birth of their only child, Lorraine Virginia Terhune (1898). In 1901 Terhune married Anice Stockton, and their forty-year marriage was the model for the Master and Mistress of Sunnybank. "Lad" first appeared in Redbook magazine in 1915 as the collie hero of Terhune’s short story "His Mate”; its success prompted twenty-eight sequels, allowing the Terhunes to live at Sunnybank with the collies Terhune fictionalized in Lad, A Dog; Bruce; Buff; A Collie; Wolf; Treve; The Ways of a Dog;and The Book of Sunnybank. Anice Terhune died in 1964; Sunnybank-Terhune Memorial Park and the collie graves remain on nine acres along Lad’s "fire-blue” lake, administered by Wayne County Department of Parks and open from dawn to dusk year round. Terhune memorabilia are at the Van Riper-Hopper Historic House in Wayne, New Jersey.
Terhune, Mary Virginia Hawes (b. Dec. 21, 1830; d. June 3,1922). Writer. Known to her readers as "Marion Harland,” Mary Virginia Hawes won her first prize from the Southern Era for the best serial novel on a temperance theme when she was twenty-three. It was republished to great success in 1856, the same year she married a Presbyterian minister who was called to the First Reformed Dutch Church in Newark, New Jersey. Their three children would become writers, most notably Albert Payson, who made famous the family’s beloved summer home in Pompton, Sunnybank.
Terhune was an extraordinarily prolific writer. Her many novels and three volumes of short stories (most set in the antebellum South) gratified the taste in her day for romance, sentiment, and piety. It is for her practical nonfiction, however, that she is remembered today. Common Sense in the Household (1871) was an immediate best-seller and was translated into French, Spanish, German, and Arabic, despite the fact that, by her own account, the housekeeping side of her marriage was a disaster when she was a bride. Many more books on homemaking followed, plus numerous articles, syndicated columns, and lectures.
In Eve’s Daughters, Terhune set forth her opinions about the role of women in society, clearly predicated upon her own. Women should find their highest fulfillment as wives and mothers, although these roles should not preclude practical command of a profession and experience in money management. She also wrote on travel, biography, and history. The Story of Mary Washington (1892) created interest in a monument to the first president’s mother. Elected the first woman member of the Virginia Historical Society, she wrote the "Story of Virginia” for a book of state histories and was active in the Daughters of the American Revolution and several other historical associations.
Terra cotta. Used as a building material, terra cotta (also known as architectural terra cotta) was a ceramic product commonly made in the form of hollow blocks and used in place of stone in architecture. It could be glazed in a full spectrum of colors and sculpted or molded into a variety of shapes. The material is fireproof. Together with steel-frame architecture, terra cotta cladding facilitated the construction of the first true skyscrapers. The phrase terra cotta derives from the Italian for "baked or cooked earth.”
Clays useful for manufacturing terra cotta are concentrated in a wide band running across the central portion of New Jersey. Some of the best deposits are located in Wood-bridge, Perth Amboy, and South Amboy. In 1854, Diedrich Winnter of Newark tried unsuccessfully to make terra cotta. Later, manufacturers in Mercer, Burlington, and Camden counties succeeded in producing small quantities of the material. The industry, however, remained quite small until the 1870s when Alfred Hall, owner of a brickworks and pottery in Perth Amboy, hired skilled English terra cotta manufacturer James Taylor to help establish a factory. Hall’s Perth Amboy Terra Cotta Company contributed terra cotta to such notable structures as the first Madison Square Garden and Philadelphia’s Reading Terminal— now the Reading Terminal Market.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Perth Amboy Terra Cotta Company spawned a half-dozen other terra cotta-producing firms and Middlesex County became the national center of the architectural terra cotta industry. Other noteworthy firms included the Standard Terra Cotta Company (1891-1907) and New Jersey Terra Cotta Company (1893-1928), both of Perth Amboy; the Excelsior Terra Cotta Company in Rocky Hill (1894-1907); and the South Amboy Terra Cotta Company (1903-1928).
The industry thrived in the early twentieth century and two Perth Amboy-based companies, Atlantic Terra Cotta (1907-1949) and Federal/Federal Seaboard Terra Cotta (19281968), came to dominate the market. Many workers in the industry were new immigrants. English, Danes, Italians, Hungarians, and, in later years, Puerto Rican immigrants all contributed to the industry’s growth.
The industry’s primary product was ceramic block for architecture; however, statuary, grave markers, hitching posts, and even curbing was also produced. Some of the more famous buildings ornamented with New Jersey terra cotta are the Woolworth (19101913) and McGraw-Hill (1930-1931) buildings in New York City, the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1932), and Asbury Park’s Convention Hall (1929).
During the Great Depression, the market for lavish terra cotta ornamentation, once so popular on skyscrapers and cinemas, dried up. There was little call for terra cotta during the Second World War. After the war, architects and engineers began to demand more modern building materials, including cinder block, concrete, and stainless steel. In 1968, Federal Seaboard Terra Cotta of Perth Amboy, New Jersey’s last producer, closed.
Although the industry is no more, colorful architectural terra cotta still enlivens the skylines of New Jersey’s cities. Perth Amboy contains a particularly rich collection of terra cotta building facades and grave markers, unique reminders of a once-proud industry.
