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201 is the area code for the following North New Jersey communities: Bayonne, Caldwell, Cliffside, Closter, Cragmere, Dumont, Englewood, Fair Lawn, Hackensack, Hasbouck Heights, Jersey City, Kearny, Leonia, Morristown, Newark, Newton, Oakland, Oradell, Orange, Park Ridge, Passaic, Ramsey, Ridgewood, Rutherford, Succasunna, Teaneck, Union City, Westwood, and Wyckoff. It is one of two which currently exist in the city, the other one being 551.
The 201 area code was the first area code to ever be used, in 1951.
Up until the late 1980s, New Jersey was served by only two area codes: 201, which served the northern-most, most populous counties in the state: Essex, Bergen, Hudson, Union, Morris, Passaic, Middlesex, Warren, and Sussex counties. New Jersey's southern counties, including the Philadelphia metro area and the shore area were served by 609.
As the shore region of New Jersey grew during the 1980s, while the northeastern section of the state lost sizeable chunks of its population due to increasing ghettoization of Jersey's once prominent cities, such as Newark, Paterson, Clifton, and Elizabeth, area code 908 was added, and began to be used for the shore region middle region of the state, including Trenton and Elizabeth. The northern-most counties continued to use 201, while the southern Pine Barrens area stuck with 609.
During the mid 1990s, as businesses began to flourish once again in the northern region of New Jersey, as well as the ever-growing popularity and commercialization of cell phones and internet dial-up connections, New Jersey expanded its number of area codes again, from three to six. Essex and Passaic counties, home to urban areas Newark-Orange and Passaic/Paterson/Clifton respectively, as well as the more rural northwestern counties of New Jersey, Warren and Sussex, were broken away from area code 201 and moved to a new area code, 973 (see Area Code 973). Hudson County (Jersey City) and Bergen County, the state's two most notheastern counties, two of the state's most densely populated counties, and the closest two counties to New York City (together, they border the Bronx, the length of Manhattan, Staten Island, and Brooklyn), which have a combined population of 1.5 million and several businesses thanks to their proximity to New York, became the last remaining counties in the state to be served by the 201 (along with 551) area code.
At present, there are nine area codes in New Jersey, up from only two just fifteen years ago; if the present growth trend continues, New Jersey will have more area codes than counties (21) within the next decade, becoming the first state to have this happen.
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