Plumber in Hillside, NJ

Hillside took its modern shape early — it was substantially built by the mid-twentieth century, which means its housing skews older than the post-war suburbs around it: pre-war colonials and tudors near the Elizabeth side, early-post-war neighborhoods filling the rest, and a housing stock whose plumbing has been in its maintenance years longer than most of the corridor.

The Elizabeth River draws the township's southern line, and the neighborhoods above it — Westminster among them — live with the river's standing arrangement: ordinary weeks of green banks, and storm weeks when the river rises into the region's shared memory of 2021. Hillside's southern basements keep the river discipline without the river drama: tested pumps, holding valves, clear drains.

Evergreen Cemetery, one of the region's great burial grounds, covers a green swath of the township's center, and Kean's East Campus anchors its north — two institutions that give Hillside an unusual share of open land for its density. Around them, the residential grid runs its ordinary, honest plumbing story: systems from the 1930s through the 1960s, renewing one street at a time.