River mouth

Mid-river

Upper river

Baseline maps (Charts 12337 & its extension) created by and courtesy of the Office of Coast Survey. They are taken from the excellent Mapfinder site built and maintained by the Special Projects Office. Both offices are in the National Ocean Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Silver Spring, Maryland. Thank you

The Passaic and Hackensack Rivers empty into the northern end of Newark Bay, a deep, long, inside bay west of New York harbor's Upper Bay. Of the two rivers the Passaic drains a far larger area, with many branches and feeder streams. The Passaic also has a far more illustrious history. The falls at Patterson gave rise to colonial industry and, later, to the foundries making the country's first steam locomotives. The Passaic is navigable well above its mouth though it seldom is in recent times.

The Hackensack feeds large grassland swamps, the Meadowlands, behind the escarpment that forms the western edge of Upper New York Bay and the Hudson River. Its drainage area is a small fan between the Passaic's watershed and the point in far lower New York State where the streams start running east into the Hudson. It has no major branches. Because of its easy navigability it has, however, long been home to power, chemical, and industrial plants.