Monday, August 30, 2004
BY STEVE CHAMBERS

Gold Coast hits pay dirt

Three decades ago, the Jersey City waterfront was a wasteland of abandoned rail yards and decaying brownstones, the worst of which were heroin shooting galleries. 

Four waves of development later, the downtown historic districts boast some of the nicest brownstone blocks in the Garden State, wholly restored beauties that once couldn't be given away for $7,500 but now sell for up to $1 million. The waterfront has seen so much growth that Jersey City now has more office space than Denver, Cleveland or Kansas City, and young families are starting to rethink flight to the suburbs.   

Things aren't perfect. Exchange Place, a cluster of riverside high-rises dubbed Wall Street West, gets eerie after 5 p.m.; some apartment buildings still lack tenants and a restaurant row planned during the dot.com boom sports mostly dollar stores. Gentrification has pushed many old-timers out of downtown, and the public schools -- whose academic woes led to a state takeover 15 years ago -- still scare most of the upscale new homeowners.   

Still, few places in New Jersey have changed as dramatically as Hudson County's Gold Coast in the past two decades, and Jersey City is at the heart of it, building bigger buildings and changing more startlingly than any of its neighbors.  

With state and local government stressing protection of New Jersey's remaining farmland and forest, the stock of cities is on the rise. Urban pockets across the state are beginning to see dramatic redevelopment proposals, and some cities already have begun radical transformations. 

Jersey City was one of the first gritty urban settings in New Jersey to see large developers make risky, high-stakes investments.

Like Hoboken to the north, Jersey City benefits from convenient PATH trains -- which run from Newark to Manhattan and have four stops in Jersey City -- historic architecture and great views of Manhattan.

Stephanie Valchar, 37, an art director at a Manhattan ad agency and the mother of two young children, said she and her husband, Marc Debartolomeis, plan on staying.

With the birth of their second child two years ago, they expanded their share of the brownstone they own to three floors. And while Manhattan seems unmanageable, being able to hop the train to visit museums feels like a good way to raise children, she said.

"Where else are we going to go to have this?" Valchar said one sunny morning, as she pushed Ava, 4, and Ren, 2, on the swings in Van Vorst Park. "We do not want to move out to the suburbs."

In Newport -- practically a city unto itself, with 4,000 residential units and nearly 6 million square feet of commercial space -- the third generation of the LeFrak family is planning several more residential towers. In a bid to keep young families in place, the developer negotiated the opening of a private elementary school, which will begin its second year in September by adding additional kindergarten and first grade classes to meet high demand.

Jamie LeFrak, grandson of founder Sam, said he has begun to notice families sticking around a few extra years before taking flight for bedroom communities. Half a dozen new restaurants help.

"A project of this size has a lot of corners to turn," LeFrak said one recent afternoon, as school - aged children streamed Back from summer camp. "But establishing ourselves as a dining destination and opening a school means more of the social fabric that keeps a city vibrant is in place."

The thousands of Manhattan commuters moving into the brownstone neighborhoods and new glass residential towers have driven median household incomes skyward and helped contribute to a dramatic drop in crime. The population jumped by 11,500 in the past decade to 240,000, nearly overtaking Newark as the state's largest city.

Massive state subsidies have kept taxes stable, with the average homeowner paying around $4,100 a year, in the bottom third statewide.

"The market is so strong that it just adapts and continues to grow," said Mark Munley, the city's former economic development director. "Jersey City is a great story because it's the private sector initiating development. That's going to continue well into the future."

"GROWING AND GROWING"

Newport is not the only place gearing up for more change in the downtown, the low-lying area that spreads from the foot of the Palisades to the waterfront and includes four historic districts, three PATH stops and light rail that snakes across the city and into neighboring Hoboken and Bayonne.

The distinctive 40-story tower of Goldman Sachs & Co. -- the tallest in the state -- has begun moving in 3,000 employees, increasing the bustle of the already busy waterfront.

John Ciesla, an executive at J.P. Morgan Chase, who was catching a Manhattan-bound ferry at the new Paulus Hook Terminal near the Goldman Sachs building, marveled at the changes he's witnessed.

"The first time I came up here in 1994, there was nothing," he said one recent morning. "But it just kept growing and growing and growing."

To the west of Goldman Sachs, following the light rail line just beyond the historic neighborhood of Paulus Hook, developer Peter Mocco has big plans for an 80-acre lot strewn with garbage and weeds. Liberty Harbor North, which broke ground on roads and sewer lines in June, will mimic the street grid and low brownstones of the historic districts and will include 6,000 residential units and a few 20-story commercial buildings.

Andres Duany, founder of the pedestrian-friendly New Urbanism movement, helped design the project. It has already won national praise, but some critics consider the waterfront expansion of cold office towers to be banal.

"They squandered a tremendous opportunity," said Ron Hine of the Fund for a Better Waterfront, a nonprofit group that has battled for public access to the waterfront across Hudson County. "It was a blank slate. They could have done a marvelous job there, and it became developer driven. You end up with a lot of high rises and an appalling lack of planning."

But John Gomez, president of the Jersey City Landmarks Conservancy, said there is no question the protection of the brownstones and the booming waterfront have translated into progress.

He has concerns that some historic buildings -- such as a First Street building in the warehouse district that has become an artist colony -- will be destroyed. But having "twisted many an ankle" playing in the rail yards as a boy in the early 1970s, he has respect for the changes.

"The rail yards were the ruins of a century we never knew," he said. "Of course, things are much better. You want to preserve some remnants, but you can't keep ruins."