The Jersey City Planning Board finally gave the green light last week for construction at a major waterfront redevelopment site, which will be turned into a neighborhood called Liberty Harbor North.
At a special meeting Tuesday night, Liberty Harbor North, Inc. – comprised of Jersey City-based developers Peter Mocco and Jeffrey Zak – brought their team of planners, engineers and architects to present the project’s intricate design schematics to six commissioners. After almost four hours of presentations and expert testimony, the applications for a final subdivision and preliminary site plan were approved unanimously.
The site is bounded by Grand Street, Luis Munoz Marin Boulevard, Jersey Avenue and the tidewater basin.
The Planning Board approval allows the developers to begin street and utilities construction in the spring of 2004. This will mark the beginning of construction for the city’s long-heralded and award-winning Liberty Harbor North Redevelopment Plan, which will create 28 blocks of high-density residential, retail and commercial space. The visionary project, which will create more than 16 million square feet of space across 80 acres of land, will possibly take decades to complete.
“This is the finest example of architecture and planning Jersey City has ever seen,” city planning director Bob Cotter said Tuesday. “This is going to be one hell of a development project.”
Example of ‘new urbanism’
Liberty Harbor North was designed to meet planning ideals illustrated in successful Manhattan neighborhoods like Greenwich Village and the Upper West Side, said Jeff Speck of Miami, Fla.-based urban planning firm Duany, Plater-Zyberk and Company, the firm retained by Mocco to manage the project. With a keen eye on avoiding the mistakes made by American planners in the past 50 years, Liberty Harbor North’s architects explicitly shied away from spread-out suburban models and instead crafted a high-density neighborhood that is fed more by a pedestrian mode of access than an automotive one.
With that in mind, planners capitalized on the two Hudson-Bergen Light Rail stations in the area and laid out the space so that the majority of the neighborhood is accessible through a five-minute walk. The Grove Street PATH station, Speck said, will be within a 10-minute stroll to the neighborhood.
And while the breadth of the plan would initially lead residents to believe that Liberty Harbor North would be a self-sustaining neighborhood separate from the rest of the city like Newport or Port Liberté, the development’s designers said that complete integration into the existing Downtown neighborhoods was a goal of critical importance.
“We wanted to tie into the existing fabric of the Van Vorst Park historic district and become an expansion of that district and have a logical expansion from the Grove Street PATH station,” Liberty Harbor North developer Zak said Thursday.
“We didn’t want to have to cross a hinterland to get to our new housing by the water,” he added. “We wanted to make the attachment and grow out of that. The light rail became a logical barrier that separates one portion of the project from the other. The outgrowth of Van Vorst Park was what we first wanted to attain in our first phase.”
Benefit to Downtown
To achieve that, project designers are creating 667 dwelling units on the six northernmost blocks of the property facing Grand Street. A series of four-story rowhouses, designed traditionally to merge with the neighborhood’s existing buildings, will be constructed first.
When the entire project is completed, approximately 6,000 units of market-rate housing will be created.
Of the architects who presented designs for the rowhouse buildings, one included Jersey City resident Ronald J. Russell of Jersey City-based firm Lindemon, Winckermann, Deupree Martin and Associates. Russell, who recently constructed a traditional rowhouse at 212 Grand St. between Marin Boulevard and Grove Street, presented a design for Liberty Harbor North’s buildings that would similarly pick up on stylistic elements found in nearby Van Vorst Park and Paulus Hook.
Another building facing Grand Street, designed by Carmi Bee of New York-based architecture firm Rothzeid, Kaiserman, Thomson and Bee, would be a larger apartment building that takes basic elements of traditional Jersey City architecture presented through a more contemporary interpretation.
New York-based architectural firm Gruzen Samton is serving as the project’s master architect.
Parking, often a thorn in many planners’ sides, will be spread among four-story parking garages totally obscured by surrounding buildings. In the blocks that will feature them, the parking structures will be located in the center of the block and accessible through a small archway in the side.
In their comments, board commissioners Leon Yost, Larry Eccleston and Jeni Branum expressed approval of all of the plan’s aspects, ranging from its sheer thoroughness to its diversity in design. Councilwoman Mary Donnelly agreed with her colleagues but said she wished there was more of a commitment to create housing that would be accessible to city residents who earn more moderate levels of income.
Branum added that she was delighted to hear how the developers’ utilities construction will impact the sewer systems throughout Downtown. The new sewers underneath Liberty Harbor North, part of a $5 million utilities construction package, would alleviate an already strained sewer system on Grand Street.
“It will take 1.5 million gallons of water per storm occurrence from the Grand Street system,” developer Zak said. “People downstream will benefit greatly.”
Hammering out the details
Now that the developers have the legal right to build the structures, they will soon begin the construction design, which will take about a year, Zak said. This will include formulating the heating, ventilation and cooling systems, structural details like foundations and pile systems, and environmental testing. Construction of the actual buildings is expected to begin in the autumn of 2004.
There is also a bit of property acquisition left in the process, and Zak estimated the remaining purchasable property to be about 15 percent of the entire site. The Jersey City Redevelopment Agency owns several parcels on the Liberty Harbor North site and has designated other companies to develop them.
The price tag for the entire project, using a standard construction cost measure of $300 per square foot, would total to about $4.8 billion, Zak said. Financing for the first phase is already in place, he added.
Asked whether he feels the current economic downturn will negatively impact the demand for the residential space, Zak said that while movement on the project will depend on how favorable the economic climate, he and Mocco remain hopeful that everything will go smoothly.
“If there’s no demand, it won’t get built,” he said. “Absorption is the ultimate controller of quantities. Where we have offices zoned, the market is nil. That market, however, will pick up when the economy gets better. The housing market is solid and the demand for sales housing is there. With that low interest rate, there’s a solid demand for the sales housing.”