In 2006, Bill Benzon was out exploring Jersey City with his camera and discovered a hidden world near his Hamilton Park home. It was the old Erie Cut, now called the Bergen Arches, a former rail line that blasted into the mountains. Abandoned in 1957 and tucked away below street level, it became a haven for graffiti artists.
“When you’re down there, you lose all sense of being in a densely populated urban environment,” Benzon said. “It’s a different world down there.”
It was then that Benzon envisioned what the Bergen Arches could someday be — a greenway with bike paths connecting to the 6th Street Embankment. Two decades later, he hasn’t given up on that dream. After forming the nonprofit Bergen Arches Preservation Coalition, he and his colleagues have made remarkable headway, and NJ Transit, which owns the right-of-way, has been cooperative.
Last month, however, NJ Transit published a press release that has caused some confusion about their commitment to creating a greenway. Their plan is to use the Bergen Arches as part of a $22 million transitway for buses between Secaucus Junction and Jersey City. It isn’t clear if the plan will include green space, light rail, bike lanes, or pedestrian walkways, or if they will simply asphalt the entire stretch for vehicular traffic. NJ Transit still didn’t respond to our questions in time.
“It’s confusing for us because they know the community wants a greenway,” said Rahid Cornejo, project director for BAPC, who first got involved with the coalition as a student at NJIT in 2016. “It really brought up more questions than answers.”
The Bergen Arches Preservation Coalition said NJ Transit has been communicative with them in the past. In fact, their cooperation led to a two-volume feasibility study published in 2024.
Another point of confusion is the transitway’s exclusion of rail travel, according to the press release. Cornejo is not clear whether that exclusion also includes light rail. He said NJ Transit always wanted to include some form of transportation in the plans for the Bergen Arches — but the coalition is hoping for light rail, and that’s what the feasibility study recommends.
“We’ve never been opposed to transit through the arches; we’re just advocating for the greenway component, ” he said. “The light rail made the most sense because there is potential to connect to the Second Street light rail to downtown Jersey City and Newport. I don’t know why they decided to go with vehicular traffic.”
The coalition’s plans for the Bergen Arches are not happening in isolation — they could eventually connect the Essex-Hudson Greenway and serve as an important link between the Greenway and the 6th Street Embankment, which seems to be moving forward after a legal settlement was reached.
“NJ Transit has been at meetings and said they would do some sort of transitway, but there haven’t been a lot of details,” said Sofia Barandiaran, manager for the East Coast Greenway Alliance. “I was surprised that the Greenway wasn’t mentioned in this press release, and I would like there to be more opportunities for NJ Transit to hear from the community.”
The hope, Barandiaran said, is to someday provide safe passage for bike riders in Jersey City to other nearby cities, and the Bergen Arches is the only means of connecting that network. “There are currently people who make that commute over Route 1&9 who put themselves at great personal risk,” Barandiaran said. “People are not against having a transitway, but the greenway is also important.
“My hope is that the transitway and the greenway will coexist side by side,” Barandiaran said. “That would require some engineering creativity, but in order to achieve that, we need everyone working together.”
Cornejo said the news of the 6th Street Embankment settlement has given his coalition a renewed sense of momentum because the Bergen Arches would be the most “logical connection” between the embankment and the Essex-Hudson Greenway.
“That is a major component of the entire network,” he said. “The whole thing is part of the larger scheme to bring the East Coast Greenway into Jersey City that’s part of larger national greenway network.”
