SOUTH HACKENSACK — Head south on Moonachie Road and you'll enter South Hackensack. A few seconds later, you'll leave for Little Ferry. But keep going—past Route 46 until the road changes to Liberty Street and then back to Moonachie Road again and make a a left on Empire Boulevard—this too, is South Hackensack, two miles away from the South Hackensack you just passed. And if at this point you get out of your car and take a helicopter about five miles northwest, you'll pass over Moonachie, Teterboro, Hasbrouck Heights and still end up in South Hackensack again.

In a state with 565 municipalities, some wholly surrounded by others, South Hackensack Township is one of the strangest. The town is split into three sections that don't touch.

The main section of town is, naturally, south of Hackensack. It contains town hall, South Hackensack Memorial School and most of the homes.

The Moonachie section of town is sandwiched between Moonachie, Little Ferry, Carlstadt and the Hackensack River. No one lives there; it's fully occupied by businesses.

The Garfield Park section has a mix of homes and businesses and is bordered by the Lodi campus of Felician College, the Bergen rail line and the Saddle River.

"The biggest thing with being a mayor or public servant or councilman of the town, we treat it as being one community," Mayor Bill Regan said.

While the Township Council is made up entirely of residents of the main section of town, Garfield Park residents are active in the recreation program and the planning and zoning boards, Regan said. All the residents vote at South Hackensack Memorial School in the main section of town; most of their kids go to school there.

The police department covers all three sections of town, but South Hackensack has mutual aid agreements with Wallington, which borders remote Garfield Park, for fire and ambulance services. Wallington also plows the sections of Saddle River Avenue and Main Street that lie in Garfield Park.

The town shares a Little League and soccer team with Little Ferry and borrows a pothole filler and sewer equipment from the Meadowlands Commission.

"The cooperation with other towns as far as how this town is broken up is absolutely phenomenal," Regan said.

But how did the town get like this? Like most of Bergen County's 70 municipalities, it was formed in the throes of Boroughitis, when clumps of residents voted repeatedly to form smaller communities to gain control over funding for schools and services.

South Hackensack Township was formerly Lodi Township, which included parts of present-day Little Ferry, Lodi, Hackensack, Hasbrouck Heights and Moonachie. Starting in 1894, sections of Lodi Township were set off to form smaller communities.

The remainder of Lodi Township would eventually become South Hackensack.

"That was the last unattractive portion that others didn't want," Kevin Wright, a local historian who has written extensively on Boroughitis, said. "It was either rural areas or areas that the others did not want to include in their boundaries because they didn't want to pave the roads there or school the children."

Lodi Township was renamed South Hackensack in 1935.

The town's history as a leftover of Boroughitis hasn't kept away people like municipal clerk Donna Gambutti, who recently moved to South Hackensack.

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"It's pretty awesome actually," she said.

And while there is regular talk of consolidation in Trenton, there hasn't been serious talk of merging with other towns in years, Regan said. For the forseeable future, South Hackensack will remain an oddity.

"It's unique when you look at it on paper," Mayor Regan said. "It probably scares you right? But it's a great community."