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Local News Blog Downtown Jersey City | Downtown Jersey City |
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| Written by Robin Laverne Wilson | |
| Friday, 03 August 2007 | |
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The armpit of metropolitan New York is cleaning itself up, applying some deodorant and rapidly becoming attractive to post-9/11 evacuees and transplant pseudo-New Yorkers. A walk through downtown Jersey City reveals a unique hybrid of Brooklyn-style brownstones and historic districts, embattled, old warehouses becoming lofts and artists’ studios, the remains of ethnic enclaves, impending new condo towers and a waterside mini-mirror of Battery Park City known as Pavonia-Newport. On the waterfront, a 10-minute walk away, you can see the New York City skyline and feel as though you can touch where the Twin Towers once stood. Formerly known as “Jersey Shitty,” and a once-embittered urban center in the shadow of New York City, Jersey City is ironically the true home of the Statue of Liberty. But the freedom to walk safely through its downtown was once a dream. Crime here may be substantially lower than in recent decades, but it is not gone. Still, the denseness of businesses and residences in commuter-laden downtown Jersey City pushes people out onto the sidewalks. And the infusion of new people, with grassroots community-building initiatives alongside surging property values, has shaken up the crime-ridden status quo. The new blood has taken a consistent stand against knuckleheads roving the streets. The Port Authority Trans-Hudson commuter train, better known as the PATH, is the artery that gives downtown Jersey City its ultimate appeal. Transplants like me, who are true New Yorkers at heart, acknowledge that it is significantly cheaper on this side of the Hudson. We rely on this 24-hour lifeline that runs from Newark to Jersey City to midtown Manhattan, for only $1.50 each way. The trains are mostly on time, the stations are clean, and the anchor is the Grove Street stop, where blight and boom, apathy and ambition meet and respectfully greet at the pedestrian intersections of Grove Street with Jersey and Newark avenues. Weekday mornings until about 9:30, the Grove Street station bustles with commuters departing in both directions. The yuppies insert their full-fare MetroCards in the turnstiles for the World Trade Center train, which reopened in 2004. They seem to reluctantly clutch their Dunkin Donuts coffee, resenting it for not being Starbucks or another fancy brand and for reminding the upwardly mobile corporate types that they have not fully overtaken the blue-collar ways of this town, where many commute to their midtown Manhattan jobs via the 33rd Street train. The artists, intellectuals and bohemians drink Spanish bodega coffee with milk or herbal tea while listening to their iPods. Hopeful students, jaded urban youth and hardened laborers insert their PATH Quick Cards and also wait on the other side of the station for the Newark train. Almost all have a paper in tow: the free commuter papers, amNewYork and Metro, or the New York Post, which is double the price for being 10 minutes away from New York. With that exception, the station is almost as New York City as it is New Jersey. Above ground, locals raise the gates and prepare for business. Construction resumes on the Grove Pointe Towers that loom over the station entrance; the residential high-rise will be the newest and most inland of local developments. Homeless men and women emerge from sleeping in front of the Employment Commission to resume their duty as dirty but benign neighbors. They sit across from the liquor store with the pigeons in the plaza all day, waiting for scraps of food or change. Women haul shopping carts. There’s the old Latino man who voluntarily directs traffic on behalf of pedestrians outside the station’s busy intersection and tells everyone, “I love you, man!” John, the old vet with a bum leg whom the Veterans’ Administration has abandoned, drinks to euthanize the pain. He always has a kind word and rarely asks for spare change. City Hall is two blocks away. Its classic marble architecture and courtyard are neither inviting nor foreboding. It just stands calmly, a landmark with little bustle, as a witness to the quiet revolution of commerce and dining on the south side of Grove Street. The newest establishments invite the mid- to moderate income sets. At Marco & Pepe, you could convince yourself that you are in Chelsea, brunching at a sidewalk café complete with white tablecloth, napkins, unpronounceable menu items and little dogs parked by the table. The Merchant, right across from City Hall, fills in for a typical bland Wall Street pub—dark wood interior, sports on the televisions and ’80s rock playing on the jukebox. Pedestrian traffic feels imminently foreboding south of The Merchant, as it is not as well lit and the blocks are patchy. But the pub’s late hours help stave off trouble for the sparse sidewalk traffic to the end of the block. Starving artists and thrifty types shun the idea of Jersey food at New York prices and instead opt for the local ethnic fare. Shadman has some of the best Pakistani food outside of Jersey City’s Little India district. Ibby’s Falafel is addictive, and related to the proprietor of the renowned Mamoun’s in Greenwich Village. Across the station on the corner, Hard Grove Café remains steadfast and popular despite health code violations that temporarily shut it down in 2004. North of Newark Avenue, Grove turns into Manila Street in honor of the local Filipino community down the block. La Conguita restaurant on one corner and its grocery store directly across serve the neighborhood with inexpensive and savory Latino food from across the Americas. This corner remains busy, as the bright street lights, restaurants and residences provide comfort for the late-night commuters returning home. By 5 p.m., Mexican families with flower carts wait outside the train station. Whoever has something to say or sell hawks his flyers to the steady stream of returning people. Newark and Jersey avenues are now at their busiest. It is mostly businesses, with about half of the buildings with residents upstairs. Despite the boom, many buildings a block or two from the train station inexplicably still hold the same “Lofts for Sale or Rent” signs since I arrived three years ago. What is potentially the most prime real estate in the metropolitan area is often overlooked for the flashy new condos by the water, away from the locals. Between 7 and 9 p.m., the gates start coming down. Most of the pedestrians briskly walk home, while the extra careful or distant take a $5 cab ride from the station. Newark Avenue remains brightly lit and populated enough to be relatively safe until past midnight, now that a city ordinance has been passed to allow restaurants and bars to remain open until 2 a.m. Afterward, a few 24-hour bodegas, the late-night halal chicken shack and intermittent vehicular traffic keep you from feeling abandoned. I park my bike in front of the bohemian bar, LITM, knowing that it will be there when I return and offer me a speedy ride home. Yuppies determined to keep their property values up refuse to succumb to the occasional spate of crime, and respond with signs to inform the community of incidents and effectively keep watch. As a result, police patrols by car and on foot have increased, and the levels of yahooing and loitering have significantly decreased. The rest of Jersey City is miles away from the influx of real estate, commerce and finance in the downtown district. Even one stop down from Grove Street, at Journal Square, the blight still trumps any attempts at a boom. Downtown Jersey City is the great compromise: one foot in New Jersey, one foot in New York City, and the best of both.
Robin Laverne Wilson is an Honors College interdisciplinary major senior Source: The Newark Metro             |
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