Dear Editor:
Weehawken is planning to build the largest waterfront park between Liberty State Park and the George Washington Bridge. School, recreation and municipal officials have dominated design input to date. As a result, the current proposal looks like the back of a high school – though with a million-dollar view. While this is clearly much better than the vacant lots and abandoned rail yards that have been there in the past, the proposal is just half as good as it should be.
There are some highlights of various concerns:
1. PRIVATE CONDOS IN THE MIDDLE. The very center of the public park has been cut out and handed to developers for a massive luxury residential building, which would block views, especially of King’s Bluff, one of the Palisades’ most magnificent geological features, and making public parking for the rest of us impossible. I say get rid of it; make the whole thing a public park.
2. GATES EVERYWHERE. The bulk of the area will be fenced-off, Town-controlled recreational facilities. Some facilities of this kind would be great, but the Town has squeezed every inch of open space into such limited, scheduled or for-rent uses, instead of emphasizing the freedom normally associated with a public park. So, for example, there are no provisions for picnicking, or large, unobstructed, year-round open areas. They say such typical park areas make up nearly half of the space, but the plan shows that percentage is really just scattered fragments between the fenced-off, single-use facilities. The seemingly permanently-locked pocket-park near Pathmark is their model for this lack of public access. I say allocate more contiguous multi-use open space and get rid of the gates.
3. CAN’T GET THERE. Waterfront developers have made every effort to prevent “riff-raff” like us from getting to the public facilities in these exclusive communities, which include the Hudson Waterfront Walkway and major public transit infrastructures, in addition to the park. There will be no elevator to the new Weehawken light rail and ferry terminals, for example, and who knows how people will navigate the dangerous traffic bottleneck at Baldwin Ave. near the park. Tens of millions of our tax dollars are paying for these facilities, yet unless you can afford a million-dollar waterfront home, you won’t be able to get to them easily, certainly not by foot or bike or with on-street public parking. I say make safe, easy access the number one priority, including a complete pedestrian and bicycle access plan with routes from every section of Weehawken, big sidewalks, an elevator to the HBLRT, and more on-street parking as in the Community Plan.
4. INADEQUATE CLEAN-UP. The park site is on top of tons of chromium waste, which is the subject of a major regulatory overhaul, because the Whitman Administration has allowed the standards to be weakened by industry (see the April 20 Star Ledger article “New alarm over chromium ‘hot spots'”). These poisonous heavy metals will be “capped” but will still be left in the ground, where they will remain highly toxic for thousands of years during which time they could leach into underground waters, the river and possibly, up to the surface or into built facilities, posing risks to generations for years to come. Jersey City Mayor Cunningham possibly just slowed development on top of similar contamination in response to citizen demands. Weehawken Mayor Turner should do the same. I say remove the wastes and comply with the recommendations in my expert testimony to the Planning Board in July 2000.
5. PRIVATIZED ART. There are no provisions or spaces designated for public art, as might be expected since no artists were involved in the design. Instead, there is a proposal to build an in-door Hudson River Performing Arts Center on a restored pier at the southern end of the site. Not only will this non-profit contribute zero tax dollars to local needs, but it will also require many millions of public dollars as well as public land for a private facility charging entry fees to survive. This new venture will siphon off scarce public and foundation art funding for the foreseeable future that would otherwise be available for already struggling existing local arts establishments. Maybe Hudson County can accommodate another arts center, but should it be in tiny Weehawken, using up precious public open space, without adequate plans for parking, and blocking southern views from the park?
6. WALKWAY VIOLATIONS. I believe according to the plans that I’ve seen that the Hudson River Waterfront Walkway will not be continuous through the park, and instead seems to be diverted over an inadequately narrow bridge that spans an inlet. The walkway should be the first part of the waterfront completed, but it is unclear when this will occur. Weehawken is the last Town on the waterfront to have a passable walkway as required by law.
I could go on. There are issues associated with the size of the pool, the number of ball fields, the inclusion of existing open space and elimination of others, lack of fences to prevent small children from falling into the river, lack of entry and exit points, and so on.
Let’s demand a better design with more input from a greater diversity of constituents.
Ben Goldman
Friends of the Weehawken Waterfront