North Arlington was ranked eighth by Money magazine on its list of "Best Places to Live 2017", which cited the borough's healthy economy, affordable homes and a high quality of life. North Arlington was originally part of an area called "New Barbadoes Neck".
Copper was mined at the Schuyler Copper Mine in present-day North Arlington during the 18th and 19th centuries. It was one of the first true copper mines in North America.

In 1755, the first steam engine in North America was assembled in North Arlington. The Newcomen steam engine was imported from England by John Schuyler to pump water out of his copper mine. He hired engineer Josiah Hornblower to assemble the machinery. ​North Arlington, together with Lyndhurst and Rutherford, was the site of the EnCap project, an effort to remediate landfills on the 785-acre (3.18 km2) site and construct homes and golf courses on top of the cleaned up site. On May 27, 2008, the New Jersey Meadowlands Commission terminated its agreement with EnCap Golf Holdings, the company that had the contract to redevelop the site, after the company had missed targets to clean up the landfills as part of the project

Education​
Students in pre-kindergarten through twelfth grade are educated by the North Arlington School District. As of the 2018–19 school year, the district, comprised of five schools, had an enrollment of 1,869 students and 135.1 classroom teachers (on an FTE basis), for a student–teacher ratio of 13.8:1. Schools in the district (with 2018–19 school enrollment data from the National Center for Education Statistics[109]) are Thomas Jefferson Elementary School with 298 students in grades K-5, Franklin Roosevelt Elementary School with 226 students in grades K-5, George Washington Elementary School with 357 students in grades K-5, North Arlington Middle School with 422 students in grades 6-8 and North Arlington High School with 532 students in grades 9-12. In 2010, Roosevelt Elementary School was recognized with the National Blue Ribbon Schools Award of Excellence by the United States Department of Education.

In the 1970s and 1980s, declining enrollment led North Arlington to be one of the few school districts in the state that featured involuntary "combined classes" whereby classes at their Roosevelt School for grades 4 and 5 and for grades 6 and 7 were combined into a single classroom with a single teacher for each pair of grades.

Public school students from the borough, and all of Bergen County, are eligible to attend the secondary education programs offered by the Bergen County Technical Schools, which include the Bergen County Academies in Hackensack, Applied Technology High School on Bergen Community College Campus, and the Bergen Tech campus in Teterboro or Paramus. The district offers programs on a shared-time or full-time basis, with admission based on a selective application process and tuition covered by the student's home school district.

Queen of Peace, a Roman Catholic parish, operates two parochial schools, Queen of Peace Elementary School (founded in 1923 and serving PreK to 8th Grade) and Queen of Peace High School (9th-12th grade, founded in 1930) which closed after the 2016–17 school year. Despite a fundraising campaign that raised $1 million, in May 2017, the Archdiocese of Newark announced the closing of the high school as of June 30, 2017, in the wake of sharply dropping enrollment and financial challenges, though the affiliated K-8 grammar school will remain open

Lassoni Restaurant is certainly a local favorite restaurant in North Arlington, the restaurant offers traditional Italian cuisine ; meals that are expertly prepared and serve in a generous portions by professional wait staff, which prides itself on service that is attentive. The restaurant offers daily lunch and dinner specials, a beautiful party room that holds up to one hundred guests for different occasions; having the reputation of serving locals, regulars and new comers like family.​