Clifton: The Boomtown Years

The dawn of the 1950s signaled a boom time for many American cities, flush with new families in the years after World War II. In Clifton, founded in 1917, far-flung western farms were transformed into a new suburbia. The pace of growth was so fast that, decades later, one official would bluntly say, "Clifton wasn't planned. It just happened." Decades earlier, there had been a false start. In Clifton's Allwood, a development of a promised 4,500 Tudor-style homes, construction was interrupted, as elsewhere, by the onslaught of the Great Depression. But the boomtown years would come. People who called this 12-square-mile town home were a reflection of the times and swelled with pride as they cheered the high-energy, high-stepping Clifton Mustang Band and as they watched the 1967 jubilee parade.