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is a hamlet (and census-designated place), in the Town of Clarkstown Rockland County, New York, United States located north of Pearl River; south of New City; east of Spring Valley and west of West Nyack.
Nanuet is 19 miles north of Manhattan, and 2 miles north of the New Jersey border. It has one of three Rockland County stations on New Jersey Transit's Pascack Valley Line.
Maxwell Anderson drew attention to the hamlet in "High Tor," a play based on the robbery that took place at the Nanuet Bank in 1936. The advent of the Tappan Zee Bridge in 1955 brought changes to the area that are still continuing.
The community is located in the Town of Clarkstown. Nanuet has popular shops and its main shopping center, the Nanuet Mall, lies on Route 59, the main thoroughfare. Popular recreational activities include gold panning along the Naurashaun Brook south of Townline Road, exploring the Paleolithic ruins west of the Hackensack River, and fossil and Indian arrowhead collecting west of Sickletown Road. Lake Nanuet is a popular pool in Nanuet.
The population was 16,707 at the 2000 census, and was estimated at 18,200 in 2006. In 2007, CNN Money ranked Nanuet 24th on its annual 100 Best Places to Live list.
According to the United States Census Bureau, the CDP has a total area of 5.4 square miles (14.1 km²), all land.
The topography is result of the massive glaciation of the last Ice Age, and as such the soil is extremely rocky and the surface shows glacial erratic boulders. The glacial ice scraped off and carried with it rocks and minerals from as far north as Canada, depositing them in Nanuet in particular and southern New York in general. This is the hypothesized source of the manganese-rich parvo-mangano-edenite minerals, as well as the placier gold within Naurashaun Brook and the fossil impressions of huge Precambrian Era jellyfish in the wooded, undeveloped regions.