Denville's garage doors vary with its geography more than its age. Around the lakes, cottages that became year-round homes often have small or detached garages and humid air that rusts hardware, while the hill neighborhoods have standard attached garages with pitched driveways. Townhomes like Estling Village add yet another setup, and the pages below cover each one.
Denville
Denville mixes a walkable downtown with lake communities and hillside neighborhoods, so garage setups vary a lot from street to street. Some homes near the lakes started as seasonal cottages and have small or detached garages, while other neighborhoods have standard attached two-car garages. Opener repairs, off-track doors, and replacing worn springs are typical calls, along with replacing older doors that have taken years of moisture.
What sets Denville apart is how much water and how much variety fit inside roughly twelve square miles. The township has eleven named bodies of water, and homes around them deal with humid summers and freeze and thaw cycles that are hard on steel hardware. Low lying streets near the Rockaway River and Den Brook have flooded more than once, so lower panels, opener wiring near the floor, and photo eyes deserve a check after any high water. Up the hills, steep driveways and settled slabs leave bottom seals gapping. And the 1920s lake roads, like Franklin Road and North Shore Road at Indian Lake, are narrow, which matters when a new door has to be delivered and carried close to the garage.
Sections of Denville
- Downtown Denville
- Indian Lake
- Cedar Lake
- Rock Ridge
- Lake Arrowhead
- Estling Lake
- Openaki Lake
- Cooper Lake
- Cooks Pond
- Union Hill
- Mount Tabor
- Franklin
- Ninkey
- Beacon Hill
- Snake Hill
- Bald Hill
Main roads
- Route 10. Passes the Ayres/Knuth Farm Historic Site and The Shoppes at Union Hill
- U.S. Route 46. Floods along with downtown when the Rockaway River rises
- Interstate 80. Crosses the township
- Route 53. State route through Denville
- Broadway. Downtown street, route of the Fire Department Halloween parade
- East Main Street. Downtown; home of the Main Street Firehouse
- Mount Pleasant Turnpike. Roughly follows part of the historic Minisink Trail in southern Denville
- Bloomfield Avenue. Parking lots between it and Route 46 are a known flood-prone area
- Riverside Drive. Runs along the Rockaway River and takes water when it overflows
- Diamond Spring Road. Crosses the Rockaway River; dredging done near its bridge
Landmarks
- The Tourne. Morris County park with an 897 ft summit and NYC skyline views
- Ayres/Knuth Farm Historic Site. Historic farmstead on Route 10 near the old Minisink Trail
- Cooks Pond. Township recreational lake open by membership
- Park Meadow. Riverside open space created from flood buyout lots; a sign marks Irene's 6 ft flood
- Gardner Field. Savage Road field that hosts the Fourth of July fireworks
- Morris Canal remnants. Piers of the old Denville Aqueduct over the Rockaway River
- Denville station. NJ Transit stop on the Morristown and Montclair-Boonton lines
- Job Allen Iron Works site. Iron works around which Denville village grew
Neighborhood guides
- Union Hill. Union Hill is one of Denville's three big residential areas away from the lakes, along with Beacon Hill and Bald Hill. The Route 10 shopping center that carries its name, The Shoppes at Union Hill, opened in 2003, but most of Union Hill is houses with garages that see daily use.
- Estling Lake. Estling Lake is a small private lake in Denville, fed by Den Brook and spilling over a dam into Indian Lake, with NJ Transit's Montclair-Boonton Line running along its north shore. The Estling Village townhomes, which share the Estling name, add a very different kind of garage.
- Lake Arrowhead. Lake Arrowhead is one of Denville's four major residential lake communities, and it includes the waters known as Great Bay and Bay of Deep Waters. Like its neighbors, it began about a century ago as a summer colony and has since become a year-round neighborhood.
Nearby towns
- Parsippany
- Mountain Lakes
- Boonton Township
- Rockaway
- Rockaway Township
- Randolph