For such a small house, the Victorian home at 32 Sherman Place has taken up a lot of space in the minds of Jersey City’s preservationists. The owner, Joseph Berardo, has been pursuing every available avenue, including the court system, to demolish the home in a proposed historic district for the past six years.
But his fight may have reached its conclusion this month when the Zoning Board voted 6-1 to deny his appeal of the Historic Preservation Commission’s decision to prohibit him from tearing it down.
The reason the situation was interesting is that the home is neither landmarked nor located in a historic district. However, Jersey City is one of a handful of local governments in New Jersey that grants the HPC demolition review for properties featured in architectural surveys.
The purpose of such an ordinance is to act as a placeholder for potential local landmarks while the city decides whether to move forward with landmarking efforts. In fact, residents who attended the hearing said there has been movement of late toward creating a Sherman Place Historic District.
“The Sherman Place Historic District has been in the works for several years now,” said Cynthia Scott. “It’s a process, and we had a pandemic in the meantime.”
“We’re so close to the finish line to having a historic district,” said Laura Ford, who lived on Sherman Place. “Every other ward in the city has one, and we’ve worked so hard on having it.”
Berardo hired architectural historian Peter Primavera, who was tasked with convincing the Zoning Board that, despite a 2024 survey recommending the home as a contributing property in the proposed historic district, the home is “not remotely historically significant.”
“It’s no longer the original building,” he said. “That’s not the Queen Anne building that was built.”
Primavera brought to the Zoning Board hearing tax photos of the property from 1935 and 1974 to show how much the home has been stripped of its Victorian-era embellishments. The home used to have a front porch that was “characteristic of the Queen Anne period,” and photos also shed light on the origins of the turret that juts out, which used to have decorative columns beneath them.
Primavera also disagreed with an argument made at the HPC’s hearing last May — when it denied the application — that the building, though altered, was restorable and therefore should be saved.
“Restorable has nothing to do with an evaluation of significance — it’s not in any ordinance I’ve ever seen,” Primavera said. “The discussion of whether it is restorable or not was out of the purview of the Historic Preservation Commission under any ordinance.”
Michael Arimov, an officer in the Historic Preservation, defended the commission’s vote to deny Berardo a demolition permit.
“This property maintains a number of characteristics that do evoke that historic sense, that Queen Anne style that was popular at the time in 1896 when that was built,” he said.
The residents of Sherman Place came to the hearing to defend the HPC’s ruling last year and speak in favor of designating a historic district.
“I would hate to see the Historic Preservation Commission be so totally undermined by a little bit of nitpicking,” Ford said.
“If someone came back who knew that building when it was built, they would still recognize it,” said Colin Egan, who founded Friends of Loew’s.
Though his demolition was denied, Berardo’s fight has left a lasting mark on Jersey City and has led to major changes in how the city handles historic properties, Jersey Digs reported. Before 2023, the Historic Preservation Office had a policy of making preliminary determinations, called “determinations of significance,” that let a property owner know whether a property could be landmarked. But Berardo’s court battle led to sweeping changes, leaving the determinations to the HPC rather than to the Jersey City officers. Despite the impact, the courts still denied what Berardo was really seeking — permission to demolish the house.
