When I was in Jersey City last month, I naturally noticed the recreational trail along the Hudson. A little research revealed that it’s part of an entity called the Hudson River Waterfront Walkway that’s planned to run between Bayonne and the George Washington Bridge, a distance of something like 18.5 miles (30 km) (although perhaps more given the fact that the waterfront has a pretty irregular edge).
Map of the Hudson River Waterfront Walkway and vicinity. The Walkway is shown by a thick dark green line. The thin, medium green lines show other pedestrian and bicycle facilities. The thin grey lines indicate ordinary roads. Data are mostly from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap and have been edited in many places. Nominal scale of the map is 1:70,000. That’s the scale it would have if printed on a 6-x-14-inch sheet of paper. The map is clickable and downloadable.
I’ll confess that, despite a long-standing interest in urban recreational paths, I’d never heard of the Hudson River Waterfront Walkway, although planning for it began in the 1980s and construction started in the 1990s. Chalk this up, if you will, to New York chauvinism. There have been only half a dozen casual references to the Walkway in the New York Times, and there’s never been a feature story on one of the longest and most attractive pedestrian features of the whole New York area. Streetsblog NY doesn’t appear ever to have mentioned it at all.
The great attraction of the Walkway is the view of the Manhattan skyline across the river.
Users on the Hudson River Waterfront Walkway in Edgewater, New Jersey.
If, like me, you have an image of Manhattan’s skyline that was more or less imprinted in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, you will be startled by the changes that views from the Walkway make clear. More than some U.S. cities, New York has in certain ways remade itself over the last several decades. It’s added more than a dozen supertall skyscrapers—plus hundreds of smaller but still tall buildings. I can’t think of an urban recreational path with more striking views of a city.
For much of its history, the Hudson River Waterfront Walkway has been under the aegis of a more or less private entity called the Hudson River Waterfront Conservancy. The Walkway’s existence, however, is chiefly owing to an official state Coastal Zone Management plan from 1988 requiring developers who construct new housing near the Hudson River waterfront to include open space and a walkway along the river. As it happens, the river’s waterfront was ripe for redevelopment in the 1990s. It was lined with obsolete factories, warehouses, railroads, and port facilities, and, then as now, there was a huge demand for new housing in the New York area. The law requiring developers to construct a walkway was contested by the real-estate industry but was declared legal in a 1999 court decision.1 It seems, however, that developers and local housing associations have continued to try to block access to the Walkway; there have been numerous court cases as a result.2 In fact, there isn’t much doubt that the Walkway enhances the value of new housing developments on the Hudson. Even if some potential residents were a little nervous about living right over a public recreational path, it’s likely that most of them still valued this amenity.
Requiring that private developers do most of the building had an obvious downside. Since housing development was at first quite scattered, so were segments of the path. Only five miles had been opened by the end of the 1990s,3 and the path is far from complete today. But, as I’ve pointed out in another post, it’s quite common for urban pedestrian facilities to take decades to build. Governments never view them as high-priority projects.
Jersey City and Hoboken, the largest cities on the shoreline, apparently did develop some segments more or less on their own. Jersey City’s new financial center acquired a wide walking path early in the 21st century.
The Hudson River Waterfront Walkway near the Exchange Place PATH station.
Hoboken has a well-used locally built section of Walkway too, just north of the train station.
Crowds on the Hudson River Waterfront Walkway just north of Hoboken Terminal.
Hoboken is continuing to develop its portion of the Walkway. The part of the Walkway below the hill where the Stevens Institute of Technology sits, for example, once consisted of a narrow sidewalk along the Hudson. A high-quality path is now being added there.4
Sign with a picture of the planned new Walkway segment in Hoboken. Hoboken is almost alone in having a separate bicycle lane along its parts of the Walkway.
Further north, most Walkway construction has indeed been done by housing developers, who have put up a massive number of mostly midrise apartment buildings and row houses along the Hudson shore. They’ve all added a recreational path too (although it’s often narrower than the thirty feet the law called for).
New housing along the Hudson River Waterfront Walkway in Edgewater. This is a fairly typical Walkway scene.
There are still substantial gaps, however. Most of the Bayonne waterfront, for example, is an active port. There is no prospect that it’s going to be converted into housing with a recreational path any time soon. Much further north, the path is interrupted several times, once, for example, by a huge Superfund site. For the moment, pedestrians have to take a narrow sidewalk along a very busy roadway to get around this area. Still further north, there is a similar detour around a site that once contained a refinery.
Diversion along River Road in Edgewater around what was once a refinery.
So far as I can see, detours are never clearly marked with signage. When I was first walking north along the Walkway without an adequate map and came to the north end of the Superfund site, it was so unclear where I was supposed to go in the car-oriented district that I’d arrived at that I gave up and turned around. It was only later that I discovered instructions on the Conservancy’s website for how to cross the gaps. (But these instructions led me, near the George Washington Bridge, onto the winding, hilly, nearly sidewalkless, and quite dangerous east side of River Road.)
The problem may be that it’s not clear who should be making and maintaining signs. The developers of the paths? The municipalities? The Conservancy? (The Conservancy says it’s the municipalities.)
There’s a similar problem when it comes to repairs. Thanks to Hurricane Sandy and other storms and normal wear-and-tear along a tidal waterfront, parts of the Walkway are in poor shape.
Cracks in the Hudson River Waterfront Walkway in Edgewater.
While developers or condo associations seem to be the entities responsible for Walkway maintenance, they haven’t always been very enthusiastic about doing this necessary work.
Despite these obvious problems, the Hudson River Waterfront Walkway seemed to me a pretty impressive facility that deserves to be better known.
- See, for example: “Judge upholds law on waterfront access,” New York Times (19 August 1999).
- See, for example, “Court orders condo association to open its Hudson River waterfront to the public,” NJ.com (24 January 2023).
- See, for example: Andrea Kannapell, “If you’re thinking of walking or biking … ,” New York Times (15 August 1999).
- In the meantime, Walkway users have to detour along Hudson Street, one of America’s most handsome collections of late 19th-/early 20th-century urban buildings.
Brownstones on Hudson Street, Hoboken.
