Good article on Jersey City in this week's New Yorker.
Pretty sharp analysis, if you ask me. But I don't live there. What do you think?
What makes Jersey City attractive to tenants—the fact that it is shiny and new and free of the messiness of New York or, for that matter, Newark—is the very thing that condemns it to a kind of terminal banality. Cities are heterogeneous by their very nature. They are built around public places, the most important of which are streets, and they are resistant to too much order. Great cities are eccentric and surprising. The only quirky thing on the whole Jersey City waterfront is the immense octagonal Colgate clock next door to the Goldman Sachs tower. The clock is left over from the days when the site was a factory complex.
Jersey City doesn‚Äôt measure up in any way to the big-time expansions of great financial districts, places like Canary Wharf in London and La D?©fense in Paris, which have a kind of bombastic power. The tall buildings of Jersey City emanate an aura of prosperity and vigor when you look at them from the other side of the Hudson, but, when you cross the river and get close, these new skyscrapers seem to offer little but a stark, prim cleanliness. For a lot of people, it seems, that is enough.
Comments (1)
That's the most offensive, one-sided piece of trash that I've EVER seen!
Just kidding. =) He's pretty much right on the mark. The Jersey City waterfront is basically separate bunches of financial building with clusters of afterthought luxury condos and apartments around each bunch. Actually I'm kinda surprised they haven't torn down the Colgate clock yet. It doesn't work anymore and you can't even tell what it is from the Jersey City side.
The new-ness of the living complexes obviously attracts a greater than normal percentage of yuppies, new families, and freshly graduated folk. While in Manhattan the city is pretty much delineated into the single and just joining the workforce young people crammed into the Upper East side and the more well-to-do singles and young families on the Upper West side, we've got them all here. And I don't see how much different it could be when compared to the new developments going up in Brooklyn.
Paulus Hook, the neighborhood we're in now is actually not that bad. You've got your newer apartment complexes like the one we're in and then you've got your old brownstones right across the street. And it's quite self-contained for families. You've got your long-established church and elementary school one block over. A decent private school 2 blocks over. A Korean corner bodega of sorts across the street. A new deli/fancy food store a block away. And six restaurants in a one block radius. Of course 4 of them are freakin' Italian/thin pizza places but you can't have everything eh?
Besides, I don't mind it being banal. That's why we have NYC 5 minutes away. ;-p
Posted by Ben | August 3, 2004 2:56 PM
Posted on August 3, 2004 14:56