In the early years of the 19th century Hoboken was a popular resort.   Visitors came by ferry from New York to frequent the beer gardens, taverns, and boarding houses to enjoy the river walks.  Sybil's Cave near the river was a popular meeting place for lovers until a New York salesclerk was murdered there; newspaper accounts of her death are said to have inspired Edgar Allen Poe's "The Mystery of Marie Roget.") Washington Irving and martin Van Buren were among those who visited John Jacob Astor and his villa at 2nd and Washington streets.

By the mid-19th century Hoboken was an active manufacturing center, but of the many industrial firms once in Hoboken, none remains.  The last - the Maxwell House coffee plant, whose aroma often permeated the town - closed in 1992.  The old Keuffel and Esser complex (3rdSt., Jefferson and Grand), part of which dates to the 1880s, has been converted to apartments.  Keuffel and Esser, which produced a variety of precision instruments, was the first company in the country to manufacture slide rules, and during World War II it raised spiders in Hoboken to supply webs for telescope crosshairs.