The character of the city has changed from an artsy industrial vibe from the days when Maxwell House coffee, Lipton tea, Hostess Cupcakes, and Wonder Bread called Hoboken home, to one of trendy shops and expensive condominiums.

Hoebuck, old Dutch for high bluff, and likely referring to Castle Point, the district of the city highest above sea level, was used during the colonial era, and was later spelled as Hobuck,[34] Hobock,[35] Hobuk[36] and Hoboocken.

[31] The first recorded European to lay claim to the area was Henry Hudson, an Englishman sailing for the Dutch East India Company, who anchored his ship the Halve Maen (Half Moon) at Weehawken Cove on October 2, 1609.

In series of Indian and Dutch raids and reprisals, Van Putten was killed and his buildings destroyed, and all residents of Pavonia, as the colony was then known, were ordered back to New Amsterdam.

[citation needed] Eventually, the land came into the possession of William Bayard, who originally supported the revolutionary cause, but became a Loyalist Tory after the fall of New York in 1776 when the city and surrounding areas, including the west bank of the renamed Hudson River, were occupied by the British.

[49] Before his death in 1838, Stevens founded the Hoboken Land and Improvement Company, which laid out a regular system of streets, blocks and lots, constructed housing, and developed manufacturing sites.

[56] In 1845, the Knickerbocker Club, which had been founded by Alexander Cartwright, began using Elysian Fields to play baseball due to the lack of suitable grounds on Manhattan.

[citation needed] By the 1850s, several Manhattan-based members of the National Association of Base Ball Players were using the grounds as their home field while St. George's continued to organize international matches between Canada, England and the United States at the same venue.

In 1859, George Parr's All England Eleven of professional cricketers played the United States XXII at Hoboken, easily defeating the local competition.

[58] With the construction of two significant baseball parks enclosed by fences in Brooklyn, enabling promoters there to charge admission to games, the prominence of Elysian Fields diminished.

During the 1950s, the economy was still driven by Todd Shipyards, Maxwell House,[65] Lipton Tea, Hostess and Bethlehem Steel and companies with big plants were still not inclined to invest in major infrastructure elsewhere.

[citation needed] In the 1960s, working pay and conditions began to deteriorate: turn-of-the century housing started to look shabby and feel crowded, shipbuilding was cheaper overseas, and single-story plants surrounded by parking lots made manufacturing and distribution more economical than old brick buildings on congested urban streets.

The city appeared to be in the throes of inexorable decline as industries sought (what had been) greener pastures, port operations shifted to larger facilities on Newark Bay, and the car, truck and plane displaced the railroad and ship as the transportation modes of choice in the United States.

Attempts were made to stabilize the population by demolishing the so-called slums along River Street and build subsidized middle-income housing at Marineview Plaza, and in midtown, at Church Towers.

[68] The Hudson Waterfront defined Hoboken as an archetypal port town and powered its economy from the mid-19th to mid-20th century, by which time it had become essentially industrial (and mostly inaccessible to the general public).

[69][70] The southern portion (which had been a U.S. base of the Hamburg-American Line) was seized by the federal government under eminent domain at the outbreak of World War I, after which it became (with the rest of the Hudson County) a major East Coast cargo-shipping port.

[citation needed] With the development of the Interstate Highway System and containerization shipping facilities (particularly at Port Newark-Elizabeth Marine Terminal), the docks became obsolete, and by the 1970s were more or less abandoned.

[41] A large swath of River Street, known as the Barbary Coast for its taverns and boarding houses (which had been home for many dockworkers, sailors, merchant mariners, and other seamen) was leveled as part of an urban renewal project.

At the foot of the cliff is Sybil's Cave (where 19th century day-trippers once came to "take the waters" from a natural spring), long sealed shut, though plans for its restoration are in place.

These trends in development resembled similar growth and change patterns in Brooklyn and downtown Jersey City and Manhattan's East Village—and to a lesser degree, SoHo and TriBeCa—which previously had not been residential.

Re-zoning encouraged new construction on former industrial sites on the waterfront and the traditionally more impoverished low-lying west side of the city where, in concert with Hudson-Bergen Light Rail and New Jersey State land-use policy, transit villages are now being promoted.

[84] Hurricane Sandy caused seawater to flood half the city, crippling the PATH station at Hoboken Terminal when more than 10 million gallons of water dumped into the system.

[92] The project included expanding the city's sewer capacity, incorporating cisterns and basins into parks and playgrounds, redesigning streets to minimize traffic accidents, and collect and redirect waster.

It includes a playground, an acre of open lawn space, a new indoor gymnasium, play sculptures, and infrastructure to capture over 450,000 gallons of rainwater to reduce flooding.

Amenities in the $90 million park's design include a great lawn, a stage, a central fountain that can be converted into a seasonal ice skating rink, a pavilion, playgrounds, and athletic fields.

Also incorporated into the park are a number of environmentally friendly provisions, including both underground and above ground stormwater detention system that can store up to 2 million US gallons (7,600,000 litres) of water to help mitigate flooding.

[177][178] Zimmer had been the city council president and first took office as mayor on July 31, 2009, after her predecessor, Peter Cammarano,[179] was arrested on allegations of corruption stemming from a decade-long FBI operation.

[253] In December 2018, the city of Hoboken installed eight parking meters in high foot-traffic areas, painted orange, to collect donations to benefit homelessness initiatives.

[255] Hoboken Terminal, located at the city's southeastern corner, is a national historic landmark originally built in 1907 by the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad.

[300][301][302] Other weeklies, the River View Observer and the Spanish-language El Especialito,[303] also cover local news, as does The Stute, the campus newspaper at Stevens Institute of Technology.