New proposal for Sixth Street Embankment: No park, no light rail, but the walls stay
by Amy Sara Clark / The Jersey Journal
Wednesday April 15, 2009, 9:06 AM
A rendering of developer Steve Hyman's plan to put two multi-million dollar houses on each block of the Sixth Street Embankment in Jersey City.
Facing a failing economy and stymied by a lack of progress on his proposal to put 600 units of housing, a park and a light rail line on top of the Sixth Street Embankment, developer Steve Hyman has come up with a new plan.
The plan scraps the park and light rail and instead proposes putting 12 multi-million dollar houses on top of the historic six-block embankment stretching along Sixth Street, from Marin Boulevard to Brunswick Street.
"The theory behind these houses is that even though the economy is in tough shape, there are still a lot of wealthy people out there, and you only need a few people to make this work," he said.
He also said the new plan is more likely to be approved by the Historic Preservation Commission, since 96 percent of the wall would remain intact.
"I got back to the basics and said, 'I'm in front of the HPC and (historic preservation) should be their only charge. If they can't deal with the fact that I need to remove (from the wall) 60 feet out of 1000 feet on each block to get an economic return, there's nothing that will satisfy them," he said.
A rendering of what the patio of one of the houses proposed for the top of the Sixth Street Embankment in Jersey City could look like.
The openings in the walls would allow for garage and pedestrian entrances for the homes, Hyman said.
He said he hopes to sell the homes for $5 million each.
The fate of the embankment has been under debate since Hyman's wife, Victoria, bought the land for $3 million from Conrail in 2005 to build housing. The Embankment Preservation Coalition wants to preserve the land as open space. Mayor Jerramiah T. Healy wants a combination of open space and a light rail link.
But Hyman said he has included those amenities in his previous proposals and has made no progress.
"I tried to accommodate them in every plan and every scenario, but the basic request is to save the wall," he said.
A view of what the garage opening in the wall of Jersey City's Sixth Street Embankment would look like in developer Steve Hyman's new plan.
Even if the HPC were to approve Hyman's proposal, he wouldn't be able to begin building anytime soon due to a ruling in August 2007 by the obscure federal Surface Transportation Board, which determined that Conrail never properly "abandoned" the site.
Attorneys hired by the city believe the ruling could mean that Hyman no longer owns the land and the city has to be given the opportunity to buy the land for the $3 million it sold for in 2005. But Hyman has appealed the ruling.
Hyman said if the city really wants the park and the light rail, it should condemn the land and give him fair market value for it, which he puts at around $20 million.
City officials could not immediately be reached for comment.
An Embankment Preservation Coalition official said the coalition needed time to consider Hyman's proposal before responding.
Stay tuned.