No Charge To Visit These NJ Attractions On MLK Day

NEW JERSEY — Entrance fees will be waived at national parks, museums and other facilities run by the National Park Service in New Jersey on Monday for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a federal holiday honoring the life and legacy of the slain civil rights leader.

Admission will be waived at more than 400 National Park Service-managed facilities across the country. Among the places in New Jersey with free admission Monday are:

• the Appalachian Trail
• Delaware Water Gap, along the Delaware River
• Ellis Island
• Gateway National Recreational Area, spanning from Sandy Hook to Breezy Point in New York City
• Great Egg Harbor River
• Lower Delaware National Wild and Scenic River
• Morristown National Historical Park
• New Jersey Pinelands National Reserve, in southeastern New Jersey
• Paterson Great Falls National Historical Park
• Thomas Edison National Historical Park, in West Orange
• Washington-Rochambeau Revolutionary Route

MLK Day is the only federal holiday designated as a day of service. Many of the national parks and places where King and the civil rights movement he influenced made history are among sites managed by the National Park Service.

Those include the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park in Atlanta; the Selma to Montgomery Historic Trail, which traces the footsteps of King and other civil rights activists in the 1965 Voting Rights March in Alabama; and the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., where King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.

Thousands of volunteer projects are taking place in National Park Service-managed facilities on MLK Day of Service. The parks service said the holiday is a call for volunteerism to help bring about systemic changes that make the just, equitable and inclusive communities King dreamed of possible.

The National Park Service has free entrance day at the facilities it oversees five times a year. Other days this year when admission is free are:

• April 22: First day of National Park Week
• Aug. 4: Anniversary of the Great American Outdoors Act
• Sept. 23: National Public Lands Day
• Nov. 11: Veterans Day