What happens after city workers accidentally pave over historic marble cobblestones?

Story by Lisa Selin Davis / Mar. 26, 2004

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Provost Street, Jersey City, N.J. (Lisa Selin Davis)

Last November in Jersey City, N.J., a paving truck parked on Provost Street, a three-block marbled cobblestone strip in the city's warehouse district. In the early winter night, a work crew paved the first block, covering cracks and filling potholes with asphalt.

In the morning, though, the city didn't receive thanks for the job; instead, outraged preservationists contacted the mayor's office to condemn the paving of one of the city's five remaining 19th-century cobblestone streets.

One of the first to call was John Gomez, president of the Jersey City Landmarks Conservancy, a nonprofit committed to protecting local endangered historic sites. "By the time I got down there, it was done already," he says.

His group has asked the city to restore the street's original cobblestones and to protect, through historic designation, Provost and the four other cobblestone streets. Despite assurances from the city that both requests would be fulfilled, Gomez fears that what happened on Provost may set an unhappy precedent for the fate of cobblestone streets.

But Stan Eason, spokesperson for Jersey City Mayor Glenn Cunningham, says Gomez's fears are unfounded. "What happened on Provost Street was an accident. It was an oversight," Eason says. "It will not happen again."

Betty Outlaw, the director of the city's department of public works, which was responsible for the Nov. 24 job, says the incident served as a wake-up call. "It is our mission to preserve all the remaining historic streets in Jersey City now that it has come to our attention," she says.

The mistake was not necessarily a result of the city's insensitivity to preservation, as Gomez has asserted. More likely, it was the result of poor communication between Mayor Cunningham—who is in the process of writing a book on Jersey City history and who Eason calls "the preservation mayor"—and the rest of the city government. The city had received numerous complaints about the condition of the street, and the department of public works, unaware that the mayor had met with preservation groups and promised to protect the cobblestones, dispatched workers to the site.

No one argues that Provost Street was in need of attention. Craters of stagnant water pocket the street, which is heavy with truck traffic due to construction and renovation in the area. Part of the warehouse district of Jersey City, Provost is one of many streets here undergoing the slow transition from abandoned industrial use to revitalized arts district.

The Powerhouse building (Leon Yost, Jersey City Landmarks Conservancy)

Developed in the mid-19th century, the area along the Hudson River was formerly home to factories and warehouses that suffered from the decline in American manufacturing in the 1970s and '80s. The city has made several attempts to improve the neighborhood, most recently in the form of a proposal by the Urban Land Institute to rename the area the Powerhouse Arts District. Named for the National Register-listed 1902 Powerhouse building, the steam-generating engine of the Hudson & Manhattan Railroad Company (now the PATH train), the district could draw artists from nearby Brooklyn and Manhattan to the wealth of loft spaces and post-industrial charm on par with SoHo or Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Cobblestone streets are an integral part of that charm, Gomez says, and Provost Street is particularly unusual because its stones are marble rather than basalt. "They're extremely beautiful. When it rains, they glisten."

But even with more attention from politicians and preservationists alike, Provost Street's potential has largely gone ignored. Though the deputy state historic preservation officer declared in 1991 that the area was eligible for historic districting, it still remains unprotected. "[The streets] don't need to be protected," says Stan Eason. "They're not going to be attacked again." He says the city had retained an artist to design signs for all of the streets, indicating that they are historic, and the Powerhouse area was a major focus of economic development.

For preservationists, though, renovating a few buildings and painting signs are not enough. "If the area been designated a historic district, the street never would have been paved," Gomez says.

But Andrew Berman, executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, says even cobblestone streets in landmarked districts are subject to destruction. "We regularly have battles with the city over the issue of cobblestones being paved over, or potholes being filled with asphalt, or allowing developers to tear up and remove cobblestones without adequately replacing them in-kind," he says.

Provost Street today (Lisa Selin Davis)

Now that one block of marble sleeps under a heavy coat of tar, what can the city do? "It'll be $500,000 to pull up asphalt from the whole street," Gomez says, who claims city officials told him there was no longer money in the budget for the project. "More than likely, the cobblestones will not be restored."

The city maintains its commitment to restoring the street, no matter the cost. "We're trying to find some money to get this done," says Outlaw, who added that the department of public works is waiting for the inclement weather to break before getting an estimate for un-paving the street. In the future, they hope to repair wayward cobblestones before dumping tar atop them. But the city has yet to develop a policy for protecting and repairing cobblestone streets or to nominate them for historic status. Eason plans to retain a historical architect to assist with preservation efforts, but he says budget restraints made it impossible to hire one full-time. He didn't say when or how the streets will be protected, only that the city wanted it just as much as the preservationists.

"There's so much development going on in Jersey City that we fear streets can be paved over and buildings can be torn down," Gomez says. "We're looking for reassurance that that won't happen, and this is not reassuring."

Does what's under our feet tug at our heartstrings as much as what's in front of our eyes? Streetbeds are just as important as the buildings above them, Gomez says, and that the paving of Provost Street represents a real loss to the preservation movement. "It's not a Penn Station coming down," he says, "but it still hurts."

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