New Jersey Travel Guide

Grounds for Sculpture is a 42-acre sculpture park founded by artist Seward Johnson in 1992, placing contemporary sculpture among woods, lakes and winding paths to blur the line between art and nature. It features life-size tableaux echoing Impressionist paintings alongside monumental figures and abstractions that stop you in your tracks. Wandering feels like an outdoor contemporary-art adventure with surprises around every corner. With dining and seasonal shows, it is a distinctive retreat for families, couples and art lovers just beyond the New York metro.

Thomas Edison National Historical Park preserves the core of the inventor's later work — the ~20-acre laboratory complex he called his 'invention factory,' plus his Victorian Glenmont estate. Here his teams improved the phonograph, developed early motion-picture equipment and the alkaline battery; more than half his patents were born on this ground. Visitors today walk the lamp-lit labs, watch restored film projections and stroll the estate gardens, sensing how the 'Wizard of Menlo Park' fused imagination with industrial discipline to shape modern life.