A Slice of Life Where the Price Is Right

Verona, like West Orange, is relatively affordable, with a wide variety of condominiums, three-bedroom houses, Victorians and newer, bigger colonials. “The great thing about Verona is that it has a price point for everyone,” said Katie Severance, an agent for Re/Max Village Square in Upper Montclair.

One couple who found the right price point, Claudine and Al Pascale, paid $384,000 for a three-bedroom one-and-a-half-bath Dutch colonial in Verona two years ago. The Pascales, who were married last month and plan to start a family, see their house as a wise purchase for various reasons — not least because they work nearby, he as a software manager in Parsippany, she as a librarian in Cliffside Park. There is also their love of Verona Park, a sweeping and picturesque 54-acre site with a lake.

They see children regularly playing in the neighbors’ yards in the Forest Avenue section — in this era of sitting inside playing video games, Mrs. Pascale said with a laugh. And not too long ago came a block party, another old-fashioned surprise. “I’d never been invited to a block party before,” she said.

The Pascales, who moved to this corner of Essex from Bergen County, have company in their fondness for it. Mary Myers Koelhofer and her husband, David, moved here from the Detroit suburbs with their two children six years ago, paying $575,000 for a four-bedroom two-bath colonial dating to the 1920s.

“It’s so cute,” Mrs. Koelhofer said. “The kids all walk to school. They know who the crossing guard is. It’s a very Norman Rockwell setting. The one thing we really like is that it has a real small-town feel.”

That quality is apparent in the strength of local volunteerism, said Frank Sapienza, Verona’s part-time mayor. During the economic downturn, he said, no services were cut. Taxes are considered reasonable, especially when compared with those of neighboring communities. “There’s a great community spirit,” Mr. Sapienza said. “When someone’s in need, this community comes together like no other.”

After an October snowstorm left 80 percent of Verona residents without power, the township needed to get rid of thousands of leafy tree branches snapped off by the heavy snow. At the site of the town pool, a kind of unofficial community meeting space, debris was gathered and machines were used to mulch it.

The mulch was then trucked to the Hilltop Conservancy, the former site of the Essex County Sanatorium, where a three-acre meadow is being created by conservancy volunteers. “Saved us tens of thousands of dollars,” Mr. Sapienza said. “We didn’t have to get rid of all that wood.”

Lisa and Sean Remler moved to town in August with their daughters, Caitlin, 10, and Sara, 7. The school the girls attend, Forest Avenue, one of four primary schools in the Verona district, has about 250 students enrolled through Grade 4. As Mrs. Remler put it, “I feel like the teachers really know my kids.”

Caitlin and Sara will probably soon be spending time at the town pool, which has two water slides and which, even before its recent renovation, was “one of our jewels,” Mr. Sapienza said. A family membership is $440 a year.

Anticipating the first full summer in town, Mrs. Remler said: “Everybody says they go to that pool. People say, ‘We have neighbors who have kids who are grown now, and the kids have told us, we grew up at that pool.’ ”

WHAT YOU’LL FIND

Verona sits almost smack-dab in the middle of a triangle formed by Interstates 80 and 280 and the Garden State Parkway — though it is not as if any of the three highways were right down the street. Ms. Severance (an author of “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Selling Your Home”) said, “You’ve got access to highways, but the highways aren’t running through Verona.”

It is not on the New Jersey Transit Midtown Direct line — for which the closest station is in Montclair — but the township has easy highway access to New York City, about 20 miles to the east. And although Verona is hardly as trendy as Montclair, its neighbor to the east, Mrs. Koelhofer said, “we’re as close to Montclair as some of the people who live in Montclair.”

Busy Bloomfield Avenue traverses the township from Montclair to Caldwell, and residents like the accessibility to both towns, but they also like Verona’s homespun shopping district, up the street from Verona Park. On weekends, customers visit DiPaolo Bakery on Bloomfield Avenue in a steady stream.

Verona is also a good place to slow down. When asked what he liked to do on weekends, Mr. Sapienza said, “I just like to sit in the backyard and relax.”