“It was planned to be a cute place where overflow soccer people could come in and play. And what it became was kind of a nightmare for the neighborhood.”
North Bergen Mayor Nicholas Sacco made those comments last week about the dirt field at the north end of James J. Braddock North Hudson County Park, commonly known as the “dustbowl” for its barren and unattractive surface. That area is about to get a complete makeover, it was announced at a groundbreaking ceremony on Friday, Jan. 23. The dustbowl is being reinvented as a veterans’ memorial with individual walkways honoring each of the armed services, and there will be new soccer fields nearby.
“We’re going to put in chessboards,” said County Executive Tom DeGise. “Guys are going to be playing dominos and just hanging around reading a book, sunning themselves. If you have little children, they can run around here a little bit.”
Regarding the proposed new athletic fields nearby, “We didn’t want to take a field away without putting new ones in,” said DeGise. “So there are going to be a bunch of new fields. They’re going to be regulation size, artificial turf, lights, bathrooms. It’ll be first-class all the way.”
Two new soccer fields are being built next to the existing ball fields alongside where Kennedy Boulevard cuts through the park. Construction has already begun on the athletic fields, with the dustbowl fenced off and work set to begin there as soon as the warmer weather begins.
Total construction time is estimated at 320 days, with completion projected for September 2015.
Reclaiming the dustbowl
“The building of the dustbowl, allowing it to be put out as a sandlot type of soccer thing, started about 10 years ago,” said DeGise. “It was a bad idea.”
For one thing, the space became a magnet for players from outside the area.
“These vans came in from New York bringing teams,” said Sacco. “Seven in the morning until well into the night, that’s what people around here were tolerating. Games all the time. It wasn’t even being utilized by the people that live here. And there were a lot of things like beer bottles. We were spending a lot of time just coming to clean this area up. It became very much what it wasn’t planned to be.”
On top of which, the space wasn’t appropriate for sports to begin with.
After several false starts over the years, ground was broken on a new veterans’ memorial and athletic fields expected to open in September.
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The new, regulation-sized fields will be surfaced appropriately with synthetic turf to increase longevity and playability. A large new comfort station is planned to serve the entire north end of the park. Existing lighting on the fields will be replaced by modern LED lighting.
“We worked with the community,” said DeGise. “We’re well aware that those houses over there are pretty close to our ball fields. They don’t want a light shining in their window at 9:30 at night.”
The cost for the entire project is estimated at just over $6 million, with funding coming from a variety of sources, including grants and the New Jersey Green Acres and Open Space programs.
Starting over… again
“I used to play some high school baseball up here when I was a kid and they were all baseball fields,” remembered DeGise. “Now soccer is the more popular sport.”
Braddock Park, one of 12 county parks, serves the communities of North Hudson, including North Bergen, Union City, West New York, and Guttenberg.
“Hudson County is the most densely [populated] county in the United States of America,” said DeGise, “and we need our places like this, places where our kids can play ball and all of us can recreate and enjoy a limited amount of open space that is in Hudson County.”
Plans for the redesign of the park space stretch back many years, with several false starts. Initial proposals called for a stadium to be built at the north end of the park, but locals strongly objected, calling for more open space.
A new design was drafted, with athletic fields scheduled instead of a stadium. “We had meetings with the community and there’s a slope as you can see, so engineering-wise it wasn’t easy,” said DeGise. “But we finally got to the point [of beginning construction], and when we went in there and dug, we find all this stuff under there. Mostly, from what I understand, it was old telephone poles. They dipped them in creosote, that black stuff. That’s a hazardous material. So we decided we can’t build it there.”
The county initiated a remediation project on the area with the buried poles, while starting over yet again in planning for new athletic fields.
Ultimately it was decided to build the two new soccer fields near the extant ball fields. “It’s right across the street from our recreation soccer field so we can actually do a tournament here with three soccer fields,” pointed out Freeholder Anthony Vainieri.
“Soccer up there will be done by permit,” said Sacco. “So if those teams want to come they have to have insurance and play by permit. This will make it much better controlled.”
“This will be a nice location for a farmer’s market or something,” said DeGise of the veterans’ memorial. “We’re doing that in some of the other parks. Those kind of things that are good for the community, that’s what we’re trying to do.”
Among the other attendees at the groundbreaking ceremony were Freeholder Board Chairman E. Junior Maldonado, North Bergen Commissioners Hugo Cabrera and Allen Pascual, Township Administrator Christopher Pianese, and Police Chief Robert Dowd.
Art Schwartz may be reached at arts@hudsonreporter.com.