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But the twentieth century brought a profound change. The Aladdins of industry noticed Bayonne's position on the shore line of the Port of New York, remarked the main line of the Central Railroad of New Jersey running along its water-front, and they saw the big "Hook," a huge tract of low waste land which juts into the harbor opposite Staten Island, along the ship channel into Newark Bay. This combination of transportation routes and undeveloped land meant opportunity. The Aladdins rubbed their magic lamps and behold!—a new Bayonne arose. A collection of huge industrial plants, built by corporations of national and international scope was placed on the Bayonne peninsula, with wharves, avenues, business buildings, schools, churches, institutions and recreational facilities, together with the transportation lines required to serve all this complicated machinery. And lastly, the army of workers arrived, who were to make the machinery go.

In the quick transformation, the Hook section went to the oil companies—the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, and the Gulf Oil, the Vacuum Oil and the Tidewater Oil Companies, whose tankers could come and go from the wharves at their refineries to all the ports of the world. Manufacturing plants like the International Nickel Company, the American Radiator ​Company and the Pacific Borax Company, occupied locations near the railroad tracks. Somewhere near these refineries and factories the workers found housing of the sort offered by the local real estate market.

Bayonne was changed by the genii of industry from one end to the other in its physical aspect, and in its social structure it was changed from top to bottom. Formerly a quiet, residential suburb, it suddenly became busy, heterogeneous, industrial. A familiar story, this coming of industry into an old-fashioned city—so familiar, indeed, that its consequences are not heeded. But it is a process of revolution, and cannot avoid leaving scars.