America's most crowded place: Hudson County's town of Guttenberg

Dave Sheingold | NorthJersey

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Consider a place where every person, big and small, is confined to the space of a studio apartment. And a little one at that.

Welcome to the town of Guttenberg, N.J., the most crowded municipality in the United States.

Guttenberg — a tiny rectangle in Hudson County where roughly 11,700 residents cram inside two-tenths of a square mile — is so densely populated that if the people were arranged evenly within the municipal borders, each one would get a mere 466 square feet. That's about equal to a room of 23 feet by 20 feet.

The numbers translate into 58,800 people per square mile (if Guttenberg were that big) which is more packed than New York City. And San Francisco. And Boston. Not to mention Chicago, Philadelphia or Washington, D.C., which are relative cow pastures by comparison.

Guttenberg's status as America's sardine can is revealed in an analysis by The Record of 2017 population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. The analysis found that the top four most crowded communities in the nation are all in Hudson County.

Following Guttenberg, is nearby Union City and neighboring West New York, with 54,900 and 53,800 residents per square mile, respectively. Hoboken has 43,200 for every square mile.

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To put that in perspective, New Jersey as a whole is the most densely populated state, but with only 1,225 residents per square mile. Across the entire country, the figure is 93. New York City has 28,500 people in the average mile-square chunk.

What's at the low end of the spectrum? In New Jersey, that'd be Sussex County's Walpack Township, with 16 people inside 24.1 square miles taken up mostly by the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area. Among states, the emptiest is Alaska, a moose-heavy expanse with only one person for every two square miles.