Jersey City wants to open a High Line-style park
Sketch by Richard La Rovere courtesy of the Journal Square Community Association
A Jersey City community association wants to turn an abandoned rail cut into a 17-acre High Line-style park. The Journal Square Community Association is proposing turning what used to be the Erie Railroad’s four-track cut through the Palisades into a public park. Better known as the Bergen Arches, the historic rail-cut borders Journal Square and opened in 1910, but has not been in use since the late 1950s. Since then, the Bergen Arches has become an overgrown wooded area in the expanding Journal Square neighborhood.
Bergen Arches; photo via Studio B9 Photography
The cut ran one mile through the Palisades in Jersey City, connecting passengers to the Hudson River waterfront and Manhattan. During the nearly five decades it ran, between 1910 and 1959, the line carried about 30,000 daily passengers.
As Jersey Digs reported, the association and Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop are hosting a fundraiser called “Open The Arches,” to raise money for the project. The event will take place at the historic Loew’s Jersey Theatre, with musical guests Eldad Tamu and the Flying South Latin Jazz Ensemble, and a food festival “Taste of Journal Square.”
The idea to turn the Bergen Arches into public green space isn’t a new one. In 2016, architecture firm So+So Studio proposed creating an elevated park for the currently forgotten space, calling it “The Cut.” The plan called for a lofted system of ramps and walkways, with canopies, sculpture gardens, and underground tunnels of graffiti.
[Via Jersey Digs]
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