In the last decade, longtime residents of Jersey City’s Journal Square have witnessed a transformation that has rendered the neighborhood unrecognizable. More changes — and skyscrapers — are on the way. One of the next major developments was unveiled this month at a community meeting at Hudson Community College.
Kushner Companies is gearing up for the next phase of its Journal Square redevelopment with a 71-story tower. The developer has already completed two 64-story glass towers called the Journal that opened in 2024 and 2025.
The tower, the tallest building that architectural firm Marchetto Higgins Stieve has ever designed, will be set back behind the current historic Jersey Journal building at 30 Journal Square. The current plan includes preserving the facade of the Jersey Journal building at 30 Journal Square along with the newspaper’s iconic red neon sign.
“The Jersey Journal is the namesake of Journal Square, it’s how the square got its name,” said Chris Lamb, chair of the construction and planning committee at the Journal Square Community Association, which organized the meeting. “So it’s a place of great historical significance to the neighborhood.”
The proposal is an updated plan approved in 2014 and 2019, but it still needs approval from the Planning Board due to amendments, including the redesign of the tower. Vince Marchetto, who led the presentation, said the project “preserved the legacy of the Jersey Journal.”
“As architects, we’re thinking about how we can preserve and reimagine the things that we already have instead of just tearing it all down, starting from new,” Marchetto said.
Community members in attendance raised several concerns about the project and audibly gasped when Marchetto said the building would be 71 stories. However, Marchetto said the proposal complies with the Journal Square 2060 Redevelopment Plan, drafted after a series of charrettes in 2007.
“They mapped out a future for Journal Square and the result of that process was the Journal Square 2060 Redevelopment Plan,” Marchetto said. “The plan calls for a tall tower. The plan calls for the historic preservation of the Jersey Journal building, and the plan calls for a 14,000-square-foot public plaza that’s open to a whole community.”
“I would say that we did listen to the community and we’ve delivered a project that follows almost to a T the plan that the community created,” Marchetto continued.
Another concern among attendees was that new Journal Square residents appear increasingly transient — largely college students who leave after graduation — and they are wondering why there were so many studio and one-bedroom apartments in the new tower and why the building lacked affordable housing.
Eugene Paolino, attorney at Genova Burns, legal consultant for the project, said the redevelopment plan doesn’t require affordable housing in this zone.
“Every city deals with affordable housing in different ways,” Paolino said. “I can’t tell you why the lines were drawn in a certain way. I didn’t draw them, I can tell you that.”
Mike Sommer, chief development officer, said the current land is “underutilized” and the current apartment layouts were based on current market demand. “We’re trying to be thoughtful about bringing the right product to the community, and at the same time, ensuring that the project will be financeable,” Sommer said. “Without this investment, it just lingers in its current condition, which doesn’t do anyone any good.”
Renee Tirella Cassidy, a longtime Journal Square resident, said that development has had the opposite effect of causing small businesses to close or leave. “How do you keep people here? That’s what we should be focusing on,” she said. “The small businesses are getting removed because of development.”
But Marchetto believes his plan will help revive a “dying commercial area.”
“I lived in Journal Square in 2015. It was a much different place. It was in a lot worse shape than it is today. If you walk on the street, there’s energy on the street, there’s people.”
