The building is a fixture in Jersey City. Indeed, it has been there so long and has become so rooted in downtown’s landscape that it often goes unnoticed. It has the look and feel of a grange or VFW hall, and in fact, it started life as an Elks Club that hosted dances, weddings, and a theater.
By 2001, Victory Hall had become a center for a mixed bag of activities, including art exhibits, poetry readings, dance performances, film screenings, fencing, mixed martial arts, arts-education programs, and an entertainment venue for Art House Productions, and it collaborated with the Jersey City Museum on annual themed exhibits.
But in 2007, it closed. “It was getting too big, and the OLC [Our Lady of Czestochowa] School, which owned the building, needed the space for pre-school programs,” says Victory Hall Inc. Executive Director Jim Pusterino. “We needed to find another way to survive.”
It 2004, the organization got funding from Hudson County and was presenting events in various venues in Jersey City, Hoboken, and New York City. It staged an art fair at the Beacon in Jersey City, sponsored large-scale sculpture exhibitions at Mac-Cali, established a summer gallery at South Street Seaport, taught art at the Jersey City Museum, worked with MLK HUB to produce murals and street art, and established the Victory Hall Press.
“But ultimately, we realized we needed a permanent space,” Pusterino says. “We needed a public space to promote artists and give them a foundation and the permanence they needed.”
Conveniently, the convent that OLC owned adjacent to Victory Hall had become vacant. The owners, Pusterino says, “were receptive to the idea of us getting into the building. They needed rent to keep the building going.”
Inconveniently, the group took over the space in October 2012, just two weeks before Hurricane Sandy hit. The storm dumped eight feet of water in the basement. It took eight months of repairing the furnace, the wiring, and electrical panels before they were back in business.
Home for Artists
By May 2013, a true artists’ community was beginning to form, made up of well-known local artists and curators, including folks with studios at Neumann Leather in Hoboken. “We needed to run it like a mini version of the Jersey City Museum, with salaries, utilities, rent, and promotion,” Pusterino says, “though we had only 10 rooms and a hundredth of the budget.”
Right away, the group became what is now known as Victory Hall Drawing Rooms. Though they lost Victory Hall in 2007, it was important to maintain the Victory Hall brand.
“The name carries a positive message to the community,” Pusterino says. “We’ve been able to create an art space that not only exhibits Jersey City-area artists but also attracts and involves artists and the public from across New Jersey, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Connecticut.”
To keep the organization afloat, Pusterino was visiting the Foundation Center in New York City and successfully pursuing the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, which approved funding in 2014.
Reaching out to the community was key in maintaining this funding. The organization works with churches and nonprofits in Bayonne, Hoboken, and Jersey City, collaborating on art, music, and special-ed programs.
Currently it works with developmentally disabled adults in partnership with Bayonne’s Windmill Center. (See a story on that collaboration in the summer issue of Bayonne: Life on the Peninsula, which is available at 170 Broadway, Bayonne; 1400 Washington St., Hoboken; or online at hudsonreporter.com.)
These combined programs have a ripple effect beyond 180 Grand St. One of the biggest benefits, Pusterino says, is that “many people new to us are discovering Jersey City.”—Kate Rounds
Victory Hall Inc.
180 Grand St.
info@drawingrooms.org
drawingrooms.org