An initiative to replace an aging police facility in the city’s northernmost neighborhood has officially entered the next development stage and the initial proposal has been revamped significantly following community input.
Plans have long been underway to supplant the Jersey City Police Department’s North District building at 282 Central Avenue. A consensus has been reached that the property, built in 1901, has outlived its usefulness due in part to decades of neglect.
Working with Totowa-based Coppa Montalbano, a new station has been pitched for several parcels along 269-273 Central Avenue that currently host a surface parking lot. The city released a preliminary design in 2019 and requested input from residents, hosting many meetings and launching several online surveys.
Jersey City has now released a new vision of what the project will look like and it addresses several community concerns. Mayor Steve Fulop said in a Facebook post that residents requested that the building design “be changed to be more consistent with the aesthetics in the area” and the released image appears to align more closely with the character of The Heights.
The facility, set to rise five stories, will additionally create a meeting space for community groups on the ground floor. The city says the design of the station includes a parking area for police vehicles behind the building that will alleviate the need to park them on neighboring streets.
The next step in the process of building the new station consists of preparing formal documents so that the project can be bid out for construction. Officials have not announced a timeline for when ground could break on the project, which is one of several updates to government facilities Jersey City has spearheaded in recent years.
A new public safety headquarters that will consolidate all the city’s police and fire operations under one roof is under construction in Jackson Square, with a recent redesign adding an additional floor to the project. The city is also planning a new fire station in the Bergen-Lafayette neighborhood and an ongoing renovation to City Hall is creating some new usable space while sprucing up the property’s exterior.
Hudson County has also gotten in on the action, breaking ground on a new $345 million courthouse facility along the western half of Newark Avenue late last year.
