Anyone who’s been on the Hudson waterfront of Manhattan over the last thirty or so years has noticed that Jersey City has been growing a serious skyline. The buildings are generally unremarkable, and the highest are nowhere near as tall as dozens of skyscrapers in Manhattan, but, still, several are more than 200 meters in height. Only a few U.S. cities have more buildings of this size. Jersey City’s skyscrapers include both office and residential towers. Most are clustered in the corner of Jersey City east of roughly Jersey Avenue, south of the roads that carry traffic to and from Holland Tunnel, and north of the Morris Canal Basin.
Jersey City skyline looking north across the Morris Canal Basin from Liberty State Park.
Jersey City’s urban bona fides have been enhanced by its acquisition of a substantial light-rail system.1
I’ve been in Jersey City several times over the years. I had last been there at some point early in the current century. At that time, despite the nascent skyscrapers and the light-rail tracks, the area around Exchange Place—the center of Jersey City’s skyscraper complex—was somewhat disappointing. There were only a few pedestrians. The newish corporate buildings seemed designed to be approached chiefly by automobile. Surface parking lots occupied a great deal of space, and there was still a considerable amount of gritty industry in the area.
I was in the same parts of Jersey City again in both early and late September, and I was a little bowled over by the changes.
A light-rail train at Exchange Place. Jersey City’s financial industry is mostly located nearby.
The industrial buildings have mostly been torn down or converted into apartment or office buildings. There is a huge amount of new, mostly high-rise housing, and older row houses have mostly been upgraded.
Grove Street, inland from Exchange Place. Grove Street is arguably the center of traditional gentrification, in which there was a slow replacement of some of the old population as buildings were renovated.
There are also what look to be thriving retail centers around the Exchange Place, Grove Street, and Newport PATH stations, especially the latter.
Crowds near Newport Centre, a large mall, which is surrounded by tall office and apartment buildings.
The most astonishing feature of this area is that it’s teeming with pedestrians. This part of Jersey City is one of the few places in the United States where a substantial dense, walkable, and transit-oriented neighborhood has been created in the last few decades.2
The changes in Jersey City, however, are ongoing and incomplete. There are still surface parking lots near Exchange Place, and the swath of northern Jersey City through which massive amounts of Holland Tunnel traffic pass constantly is still a ragged carscape, filled with gas stations, big box stores, and huge parking facilities.
Surface parking lot between the Exchange Place and Newport stations.
The transformation of Jersey City has involved a great deal of gentrification. Note these maps, which show per capita income by census tract in Jersey City and surrounding areas in 1979 and in the 2018/2022 period.
On this map, the heavy black lines represent municipal boundaries, and the thin black lines represent tract boundaries. The dark blue lines show PATH and New York subway routes, while the light blue lines on the later map show light-rail routes. The park boundaries are recent and may not be accurate for the earlier map (but Liberty State Park was opened in 1976). GIS data are from several different sources that don’t fit together perfectly. White areas can be either tracts with no income data or places where the different GIS files don’t quite jibe. The census boundaries were downloaded from NHGIS. The basic geographic data are mostly from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap. The municipal boundaries come from the NJ Geographic Information Network. The nominal scale of the maps is 1:60,000. That’s the scale the two maps would have if they were printed together on an 11-x-17-inch sheet of paper. See text below for information on the census data. Click the maps to enlarge them.
The map can only be understood if one understands the peculiarities of the data. The data from 1979 come from the long form of the 1980 census; the data for 2018/2022 are from the 2019/2023 American Community Survey (ACS) and are expressed in 2023 dollars, which were worth about 24 cents in 1979 dollars. In both cases, per capita income is shown in quartiles from national tract-level data. Figures for the two periods are not quite comparable. While the whole country had long since been “tracted” by the time of the 2019/2023 ACS, only part of the country had been “tracted” in 1980; rural areas were generally excluded. There are lots of exceptions, but rural areas in the United States are generally poorer than urban and suburban ones, so, if the whole country had been “tracted” in 1980, the tracts in Jersey City that end up in the lowest quartile might have been moved to a different quartile, most likely the next quartile up. There would still have been a dramatic difference between the two periods. In 1979, most of Jersey City was quite poor. In 2018/2022, it was quite well-off. There are still a few poorer areas in southwest Jersey City and around Journal Square on the west side of town, but, on the whole, Jersey City and some neighboring municipalities (especially to the north) have to some degree earned their description by real-estate brokers as a “gold coast.”
I acknowledge the arguments against gentrification, but, since most of the prosperous areas of Jersey City along the Hudson waterfront were largely filled with railroad lines, factories, and warehouses in 1979, it’s likely that there was only a modest amount of displacement—and that it occurred over several decades.
In the United States, numerous cities sit on rivers. In many cases, smaller cities (or neighborhoods) across the river from the CBDs of major cities have ended up being places to which poorer people have been pushed. Camden, N.J., and East Saint Louis, Ill., are classic examples. Oakland and perhaps Brooklyn have sometimes been considered “poor cousins” too, and so have Jersey City, Newark, and (less clearly) Hoboken.
Much of Jersey City and all of Hoboken have broken out of this pattern over the last two or three decades. They’ve become prosperous, dense, and extremely urban places.
- I can’t resist adding a brief description of this system.
It runs from Bayonne and southwestern Jersey City to a northern terminus in North Bergen. It passes through Hoboken, Weehawken, and several other municipalities on the Hudson.
Most of the line follows old railroad alignments, so, even in central Jersey City, it often has its own right-of-way. Some of it is elevated, and the line passes under the Palisades in a subway.
Marin Boulevard station on the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail line. The station sits in the middle of a neighborhood of new high-rise housing.
The line does run in traffic for a few blocks in Jersey City.
The Hudson-Bergen light-rail line as it runs along Essex Street a little south of Exchange Place in Jersey City.
There are quite a few level crossings, and signal preemption does not prevent trains from having to stop at some red lights on every trip. Still, the line’s a little speedier than the majority of new U.S. light-rail systems.
The central portion of the line, from West Side Avenue in Jersey City and 34th Street in Bayonne north to Newport, opened in 2000, the rest between 2002 and 2011. The light-rail line complements the long-existing PATH system, which connects Manhattan with Hoboken, Jersey City, and Newark via tunnels under the Hudson and through Jersey City and Hoboken.
- See my earlier post, on Waikiki and Brickell, for some other examples.
