Walking the New Jersey Waterfront
Exchange Place, Jersey City to Hoboken


by Theodore W. Scull



Travel Directions to Starting Point – Exchange Place, Jersey City

PATH: From the World Trade Center Site Station, take any PATH train under the river to the first stop, Exchange Place, Jersey City and rise to the street. www.panynj.gov. FERRIES: NY Waterway ferries leave from Battery Park City to Colgate, Jersey City, just two blocks south of the PATH Station. Ferries are not currently operating on weekends. 1-800-GO-FERRY. www.nywaterway.com..



Exchange Place, Jersey City across the Hudson River from Lower Manhattan.

This outing ties together waterfront communities that have been around for two hundred years with others that are brand new burgeoning neighborhoods still in the developing stage. Because the riverside locations had Manhattan as the raison d’être, none was well connected to one another until now. A new street grid has been laid out where virtually no one had walked before, and the Hudson-Bergen Line Rail Line runs between Exchange Place and Bayonne to the south and between Exchange Place and Pavonia/Newport, Hoboken, Lincoln Harbor, Weehawken, Union City and North Bergen to the north. . It is worth taking the ride in both directions. Tickets are good for 90 minutes. Hudson-Bergen Line Rail - NJ Transit: (973) 762-5100; (800) 626-7433. www.njtransit.com.


Hudson Bergen Light Rail turns onto Essex Street, Exchange Place.


Decorative ocean liner wind indicator -
Hudson Bergen Light Rail Station, Exchange Place.

Taken as a whole, the outing presents a kaleidoscope of the old and new and an intriguing look into the future. There are numerous fun places to eat or take a picnic lunch or buy one locally as there are delightful places to have one by the river.


Foot of Montgomery Street, Exchange Place,
site of former Pennsylvania Railroad Terminal.


Pennsylvania Railroad Terminal, Exchange Place.

The New Jersey waterfront immediately across from Manhattan first developed because of its proximity to the city, and because a river separated the two, there was need for transfer facilities. Exchange Place and Pavonia in Jersey City, Hoboken and Weehawken all had railroad terminals and railroad navies for freight and passengers in amongst an almost continuous line of steamship piers. Industrial sites sprouted because of nearby transportation and the huge population as a ready market across the Hudson. Working class housing got built to supply labor, and the industrial managers and owners lived in fine style in a few isolated pockets.


NY Water Taxi enters Morris Canal Basin
and passes the former Jersey Central Terminal.

Beginning at the south end, just north of Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty and across the Morris Canal Basin, stands the 1880s Jersey Central Terminal, a splendidly restored former combination railroad and ferry terminal that connected the Central of New Jersey, Baltimore and Ohio, and Lehigh Valley Railroads to Manhattan via the Liberty Street Ferry until April 1967. The building serves as the ticket booth for the Statue of Liberty/Ellis Island Ferry and for special functions and railroad fairs. The intervening waterway once formed the entrance to the Morris Canal, now a marina, but the waterway once extended across the Garden State to the Delaware River, and via other canals, to the Pennsylvania coal mines.


Lower Manhattan from Morris Canal Basin.

Exchange Place itself, where the walk begins, had a large Pennsylvania Railroad terminal that remained a secondary access to Lower Manhattan long after Penn Station, Manhattan was completed in 1910. Nothing remains to be seen. But the same is not true for the site of the Colgate Palmolive factory, as its large lighted outdoor clock that sat atop the original headquarters, sits on the ground just north of the Morris Canal Basin. This area has been variously called Paulus Hook or Exchange Place, a part of greater Jersey City that extends for several miles inland and north to Hoboken.


Polish Memorial, Exchange Place.

At the waterfront plaza just in from the recreation pier, the statue of a bayoneted soldier marked Katyn 1940 commemorates the massacre of two million Poles and thousands of soldiers by the Soviets, a crime once blamed on the Germans. A Hyatt Hotel occupies the pier to the north and take the escalator up one level to have a look at the lobby, bar and restaurant at the river end with big window views north, south and across to Lower Manhattan. Washroom facilities are available next to the bar. At water level, the end of the pier is an ideal ship watching and photo spot.


Queen Mary 2 sailing as viewed from Exchange Place.


Hudson Bergen trolley passes along Hudson Street
with Lower Manhattan as a backdrop.

To the left or south of the bayoneted soldier and two streets inland after crossing the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail Line, several square blocks of 19th century row houses now qualify as an historic district. Gentrification is setting in because of its proximity to the new office complexes and to Lower Manhattan. High rise apartments look south over the Morris Canal to Liberty State Park. Walking north to Montgomery Street, you pass buildings that exhibit an earlier period of greater importance, such as the one-block long post office and the large Catholic church and school.


High-rise apartments and Goldman Sachs skyscraper,
the tallest building in the State of New Jersey.


Historic District of row houses, Communipaw, Exchange Place.

Returning towards the river along Montgomery to the intersection with Greene, the Flamingo Bar and Grill, is a Greek-owned throwback to the 1940s. It’s a lively combination bar, diner counter and booth restaurant, packed at lunch time with construction and office workers. You can’t beat the atmosphere or the price of the meals. To leave Exchange Place follow the trolley tracks north past the Harborside Center and its ferry landing. The various warehouses and industrial buildings that served the waterfront have either been pulled down, or such as Harborside, recycled into new office space. For a few years yet, there remain some hulking vestiges of the past - a handsome power plant, factory building and P. Lollilard warehouse - sited a few blocks inland that have not yet succumbed to the wrecking ball and may see reuse.


Former power station in Pavonia-Newport, Jersey City.

When the tracks turn sharply left, walk straight through the gate marked Avalon Cove, a new high- and low-rise apartment cluster facing the water. A boardwalk skirts what used to be a cargo slip and leads into Washington Boulevard and Newport Center. Pavonia, now also called Newport, to give it more caché, has completely reinvented itself. What were once vast railroad yards and cargo piers are now sites for a high-rise community of offices, chain hotels and residences, with even a hint of a resort atmosphere where marinas and restaurants occupy the waterfront.


Avalon Cove and high-rise office building in Pavonia-Newport, Jersey City.

A long pier to the right serves the Newport Marina, restaurant and café and is worth a diversion, though you must say you are going to the restaurant to gain access. Ahead you are hemmed in by an indoor shopping mall with multiplex cinema, office buildings, and chain hotels, an entirely new city built over an industrial landscape. At the north end, it’s a work in progress and a few bits of railroad heritage such as warehouses, transfer bridges and tracks survive at the north end of old Pavonia, now Newport. To leave the area by transit, take either the PATH from Pavonia/Newport to stops back to the World Trade Center Site or in the other direction to Hoboken and the line under the river to Christopher Street and stops north along 6th Avenue to 33rd Street; or the Hudson Bergen Light Rail Line from the Newport Mall to Exchange Place and PATH or NY Waterway Ferry to Lower Manhattan.


(All photographs were taken by Theodore W. Scull 2003/2004.)


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