This week, 71 years after Orson Welles' located his notorious radio version of "The War of the Worlds" here, this little town southeast of Princeton again was at the center of an historic conflict, this one featuring helmeted earthlings instead of ray-gun-wielding Martians.
"Everyone around here is excited about the game," resident Tom Carmichael said of today's NFC divisional playoff contest between the Eagles and Giants. "But if you're trying to figure out whether more people will root for the Giants or Eagles, don't even bother. I can almost guarantee you it will split almost exactly down the middle."
Ben Franklin once noted that New Jersey was a state "tapped at both ends" by the powerful metropolises. The gravitational pulls of Philadelphia and New York weaken somewhere near here, producing a vortex of mixed allegiances.
As Philadelphians travel north on I-95 or the New Jersey Turnpike en route to today's game at the Meadowlands, they'll be passing through the heart of where the cultural, economic and sports spheres of New York and Philadelphia converge.
No one is exactly sure where North and South Jersey, or Giants country and Eagles country, begin and end. Some say it's the Garden State Parkway's Driscoll Bridge in Middlesex County. Other suggest it's the Raritan River, or the place where the 201 and 609 area codes used to converge.
Most will agree, however, that this land of the Giants Eagles runs diagonally across the belly of the state, from Phillipsburg in the west to Toms River in the east, and from Princeton in the north to Trenton in the south.
Here, it's not just fans of the two NFC East rivals who coexist in the same neighborhoods, often on the same streets, but Wawa and 7-Eleven customers, Inquirer and New York Times subscribers, hoagie and hero devotees.
