If you stand on Eleventh Avenue in the upper Thirties and look south, the new forty-story Goldman Sachs building in Jersey City, on the other side of the Hudson, appears to be at the end of the street. The intimate connection created by the optical illusion (Manhattan starts angling eastward at about Twenty-third Street) works both ways. If you stand at the corner of Grand and Washington Streets in Jersey City, a couple of blocks from the waterfront, the river has pretty much disappeared, and the Woolworth Building looks as if it were just a short walk away. The Goldman Sachs tower, which was designed by Cesar Pelli, is the tallest skyscraper in New Jersey, and, with its graceful profile and elegant glass façade, the most beautiful. You could also say that it is one of the most important new pieces of architecture in lower Manhattan. To just about everyone except the tax authorities, the Jersey City waterfront is a part of New York. Pelli’s tower is the anchor of a new city, a kind of Shanghai on the Hudson, that has sprung up over the past decade on what was once industrial land. It is an enormous complex—by far the largest cluster of skyscrapers in the region outside Manhattan.
Pelli has come closer than most architects to figuring out a way to design a skyscraper that expresses both height and dignity and doesn’t seem to be an imitation of the romantic towers of the nineteen-thirties. He started out making buildings, such as the tower above the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, that were attempts to reinvent the skyscraper as a pattern of glass, and he moved on to buildings, such as the World Financial Center and Carnegie Hall Tower, that leaned too heavily on older skyscraper forms. Now he has transcended both his first modern period and his retro period. Like the tower Pelli just finished for Bloomberg on the upper East Side, the Goldman Sachs building mixes a classic modern look with soft, flowing lines. The building’s profile is telescoped, and its corners are cut into a series of small steps, which both reduces the visual impact of the tower’s bulk and provides a plethora of corner offices. The façade consists of a pattern of metal lines set over glass, making for a rich, warm texture. The building is the only grace note on the Jersey City skyline.
It took a long time for Jersey City to reach the point where someone would want to put up a building as good as this one. The first developer to realize that you could exploit Jersey City as an extension of Manhattan was Sam LeFrak. In the late nineteen-seventies, LeFrak built Gateway Plaza, a set of concrete towers in Battery Park City that have none of the architectural gentility of the rest of the complex, which was constructed later by other developers under a different master plan. After dropping out of the Battery Park City project, LeFrak joined forces with Melvin Simon, a shopping-center developer who was seeking a partner to build a mall in Jersey City. LeFrak shifted his attention across the river, and in the mid-eighties, on a portion of the Jersey City waterfront he named Newport, he built not only the giant shopping mall that Simon had envisioned but also a cluster of high-rise residential towers and some glass office buildings. It is a dreary assemblage, but it was a big hit. Compared with real estate in Manhattan, the towers were inexpensive to build and inexpensive to rent, and LeFrak could promise tenants all the shopping they wanted, along with spectacular river views, one transit stop away from Wall Street—or just a few steps away from their desks, if they happened to work for the financial firms that had moved their back offices into Newport’s commercial buildings.
The Newport towers—among which are two named the Southampton and the East Hampton—were placed behind gated guardhouses around a small central plaza in front of a huge parking garage. Newport is less a city than a suburbanite’s idea of what a city might be if all the unpleasant people went away. The buildings float in space, disconnected from one another, and the streets seem designed to ease the movement of traffic rather than the movement of pedestrians. (Not that the traffic moves so well. The routes through the place are confusing, and traffic is often backed up.)
More ambitious developers followed LeFrak, as well as corporations like Goldman Sachs, which looked to Jersey City during the peak of the nineteen-nineties boom, when projections indicated that its workforce would grow to thirty thousand people by the end of the decade, and there seemed to be no place in lower Manhattan to put all of them. The company’s headquarters, at 85 Broad Street, had filled up, and employees were spread out in several other buildings downtown. The Jersey City site had room for expansion and spectacular views, and it was handy. It is easier to get to Jersey City from Wall Street than to much of the rest of New York, even though you have to cross a state line, not to mention a vast psychological barrier. Ferries connect it to several different points in Manhattan, and the trip takes about as long as it does to go under the river on a path train, and a lot less time than to drive through the Holland Tunnel. The Jersey City waterfront is one of the few parts of the New York City region that are nicer to reach by mass transit than by limousine.
As Jersey City grows, you can sense a yearning to make a real city, even though it looks as if it were being put together by someone who has never been anywhere other than a mall, or perhaps an airport. The Goldman Sachs building, which is on the site of an old Colgate factory at Paulus Hook, at the south end of the Jersey City waterfront, is more than a mile from Newport, at the north end. In between there is a set of office buildings called the Harborside Financial Center; a long, low Hyatt hotel on a pier stretching out into the Hudson; and a few more condominiums. The office buildings encompass all of the architectural clichés of the moment—a bit of neo-traditional cast stone here, a bit of neo-modern steel and glass there. Most of them are mediocre, but no more so than office towers elsewhere. The problem is how little, in the end, they add up to.
In a great or even a good city, the whole is usually more than the sum of its parts. In Jersey City, the parts and the whole are essentially the same thing, an incoherent splatter of buildings. It is not easy to traverse the place on foot, even if you don’t mind walking the equivalent of thirty Manhattan blocks, because the streets don’t always connect—a lot of the time there aren’t any streets. There are parking lots and open spaces and vacant lots and garages, many of which are set on wide streets that aspire to be boulevards but which look more like highways. The intersection of Hudson Street, the first street in from the waterfront, and Exchange Place comes the closest to feeling as though it might be a real city corner, but it lacks energy. The Newport mall sucks up much of the retail activity. There is a riverfront promenade of sorts, but it isn’t nearly as well designed or as well landscaped as the one at Battery Park City. Its chief asset, besides the water itself, is the New York skyline.
As the Goldman Sachs building was rising, the company’s executives learned that many of their highest-ranking employees thought of Jersey City as Siberia, and a plan to send some of the firm’s powerful trading departments to the new building collapsed. This spring, lower-level support departments such as technology and real estate began moving into it, and a lot of the space originally intended for financial executives remained empty. The most significant long-term effect of the building may be that it changed the view Goldman Sachs has of New York. It was thought that the company still needed a new main headquarters building in lower Manhattan, but the old Financial District, which is centered around the Stock Exchange, was abandoned, and plans were made for a new tower in Battery Park City, on the New York side of the Hudson. Goldman’s new New York building, which is being designed by the firm of Pei Cobb Freed, is opposite the Jersey City skyscraper. Workers will presumably shuttle back and forth across the river between the two towers. “We call this our Venice strategy,” Lloyd Blankfein, the president of Goldman Sachs, said to me.
The pleasantest way to move along the Jersey City waterfront is by climbing onto what is officially called the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail System, which is to say a trolley. “Light rail” is an appealing form of mass transit for cities today, since it requires relatively little infrastructure—no subway tunnels or elevated tracks—and it brings in federal subsidies. This one connects the mall, the path stations, and Liberty State Park, just to the south. The trolley is uncrowded most of the time, and one suspects that many of the passengers are using it not as a form of mass transit but to reach their cars, which have been parked an inconvenient distance from the pseudo urban center.
Just to the west of the waterfront district, blocks of renovated brownstones have created a small but solidly gentrified quarter not unlike many parts of Brooklyn. But this pleasing, small-scale urbanity has not made its way into the new waterfront area any more successfully than the energy of Manhattan has. The new waterfront has the ambitions of Manhattan, but its real nature seems to lie somewhere much deeper in New Jersey, in its suburban heart.
The waterfront literally has no depth—it extends only a few blocks in from the Hudson—and it has no conceptual depth, either. Since it is also a place where some of the office workers live and shop, it ought to feel more like a real city, but instead we have a place with no center other than a suburban mall and, at least until Goldman Sachs came around, not a single building that could be considered a notable piece of architecture.
Why isn’t this place better? 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’t measure up in any way to the big-time expansions of great financial districts, places like Canary Wharf in London and La Défense 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. ♦
