The Planning Board ruled this past Tuesday that the city’s Redevelopment Plan for the Hoboken rail yards is sufficiently consistent with the city’s Master Plan to clear the way for its approval by the City Council. However, it added 13 recommendations for the council concerning the contours of development near the city’s southern border.
The proposed plan for the Hoboken Yards was developed by a four-member City Council committee, incorporating extensive feedback from city stakeholders and the public. It would allow NJ Transit, which owns the land, to build up to 2.3 million square feet of new development, as well as three buildings potentially as tall or taller than the W Hotel. The W is the tallest building in Hoboken.
The proposed total area of NJ Transit’s development could be 68 percent office space, 25 percent residential, and 7 percent retail.
Endorsed by Mayor Dawn Zimmer, the latest Hoboken Yards plan is smaller, shorter, and less apartment-heavy than the initial concept for the area produced by NJ Transit and an earlier city administration in 2008, which called most notably for a 70-story tower.
However, the new plan includes larger office buildings and more total floor area than a draft plan released by the city in 2012. That draft underwent significant revisions after Superstorm Sandy highlighted flooding problems in south Hoboken.
“You’re going to get what some people refer to as the yuppie ghetto.” – Daniel Weaver
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The council will hold a special meeting at City Hall this coming Wednesday, Dec. 10 from 7 to 10 p.m. to further discuss the plan and hear comments from the public. However, the earliest the council will vote on the plan is at its Dec. 17 regular meeting, or possibly later.
A question of scale
Dave Roberts, the board’s professional planner (no relation to the former mayor of the same name), said that the Hoboken Yards plan is consistent with the city’s 2004 Master Plan and 2010 Master Plan Re-Examination.
Roberts said the plan fulfills the master plan’s emphasis on limited development by “scaling down the development as you go farther away from the transit terminal to make it consistent with the context of the blocks across the street.”
While the maximum allowed heights are in line with adjacent buildings in the eastern residential corridor of the Hoboken Yards zone, they rise notably higher in the three blocks closest to the terminal on Observer Highway. The tallest building in this commercial sector could be 330 feet tall, more than double the tallest current adjacent structure at 146 feet.
Planning Board Commissioner Ravi Bhalla, who is also a councilman, questioned whether it was even possible to create an economically viable redevelopment plan that can comport with the city’s master plan, which emphasizes limited scale.
“In order to make this plan economically viable, we’re substantially increasing height,” said Bhalla.
Roberts explained that the Hoboken Master Plan did not explicitly define limited scale, but did make clear that Hoboken was a “historic urban village” incompatible with the kind of density and size displayed in Jersey City’s Newport or midtown New York City.
Still, some commissioners said the plan doesn’t go far enough to conform to Hoboken’s historic milieu.
“The character of Hoboken is already in deep trouble because you can’t get in and out of this city,” said Commissioner Ann Graham, the only Planning Board member who voted that the Hoboken Yards plan did not comply with the Master Plan.
Several members of the public commented on the potential increase in traffic on Observer Highway that would come with over 500 new residential units.
Extending the grid
Roberts applauded the plan to extend Hoboken’s street grid into the new developments—Bloomfield, Garden, Willow, and Grand streets and Park Avenue are all projected to continue through the zone and connect with a service road on its southern edge. This would create block lengths in keeping with the rest of Hoboken.
Still, board members and residents questioned why all of the north-south streets do not extend through the zone.
Ron Hine, the director of the Fund for a Better Waterfront, an activist group, particularly disapproved of the possibility of building over the roadway of Bloomfield Street as it passes through the rail yard development, saying “we don’t build over roads in Hoboken.”
“I understand a project like this is not going to look like old Hoboken,” said Hine, “but what you want to do is try to capture as much of that ambiance, as much of that character as you can,” which he said begins with the street grid.
Similarly, one of the Planning Board’s recommendations advised against placing a building just south of the intersection of Observer Highway and Washington Street, Hoboken’s main commercial drag.
“Right now, as you leave, you have a view of the horizon,” said Commissioner David Weaver, who cautioned that to close off the view corridor would change the entire feel of Washington Street.
Cutting the ‘wedding cake’
The Hoboken Yards plan includes a special provision to allow two extra stories on the three tallest commercial buildings in the zone if their design secures LEED Gold certification and displays “significant architectural creativity.” Another of the Planning Board’s recommendations to the City Council was that a panel of design professionals selected by the New Jersey Chapter of the American Institute of Architects judge that creativity.
But Commissioner Weaver, an architect who has worked on a similar project for the Hudson Yards in New York City, warned that the current bonus may not go far enough to prevent bland, uniform buildings along Observer Highway.
The problem, said Weaver, is that the plan’s requirements for floor area ratio, height, property line frontage, and upper story setbacks are so prescriptive that the city will get exactly what was shown in their prospective drawings.
“We have determined [that] this is the wedding cake” said Weaver, and “every developer will build that, they will not build one floor less. That’s the buildings you’re going to get. You can wrap it with brick, you can wrap it with glass, you can wrap it with steel.”
“You’re going to get what some people refer to as the ‘yuppie ghetto,’ ” he added.
As a spot lesson, Weaver pointed to the Waterfront Corporate Centers blocks away from the Hoboken rail yards on Sinatra Drive, which he said “have almost no architectural value.”
“They don’t do anything for Hoboken,” he added. “They’re just the biggest building a developer could build on the site as efficiently and cheaply as possible and fill out with bulk use.”
Landowners remain mum
While a large diversity of voices have spoken out on the new plan, perhaps the two most crucial individual stakeholders, NJ Transit and LCOR, the firm it has designated as its future developer for the site, have kept conspicuously quiet. Asked for a comment on the plan, a NJ Transit spokesperson said Tuesday that the agency is “reviewing the plan and continuing dialogue with the city.”
LCOR’s official statement was similarly non-committal.
“We are encouraged to see the administration and City Council advancing a redevelopment plan for the Hoboken Terminal and Rail Yard,” said a spokesman for the company, “and we look forward to future productive conversations as plans are finalized and implemented.”
However, it is clear that NJ Transit continues assert its influence over the project behind the scenes. On Tuesday, Planning Board Chairman Gary Holtzman mentioned that he had just received a 30-page document from NJ Transit reminding the board that the Hoboken Yards Plan must harmonize with their bus and infrastructure demands.
Carlo Davis may be reached at cdavis@hudsonreporter.com.