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Collection Description

Collection provenance by J. Owen Grundy, City Historian, written September 1981:

Miss Margaret Jeffers, Director, Division of Assessments, City of Jersey City, said she took a photographer on a tug boat and photographed the entire Jersey City waterfront from [the] Bayonne line to [the] Hoboken line on November 15, 23, and 30, 1954, in afternoons, from land side and November 16 from water side.*

(*2020 note: not photographed - or at least not included in the donated collection - was the military rail facilities at Caven Point, which was a vital shipment point for men and munitions during and after World War Two.)

Collection description (probably) by Joan Dougherty Lovero, NJ Room librarian, circa 1986:

Since the 1630s the Hudson River Waterfront has been the focal point for the area's development.

By the mid-1830s, when the Morris Canal reached its Jersey City basin and the New Jersey Railroad and Transportation Company, working with the Paterson and Hudson River Railroad, was laying tracks through the Bergen Hill, the fate of Jersey City was sealed. From that time on, for over 125 years, the city's waterfront would be devoted to the movement of people and freight.

Jersey City's role as the region's prime railroad center was vital to the operation of the Port of New York and New Jersey. Goods shipped east by train were transferred to New York and New Jersey piers by lighters and by car floats, introduced in 1866, or else loaded onto some of the few freighters which docked on the New Jersey side of the port. The pictures shown here were taken in 1954, in the waning years of the city's railroad industry. They illustrate the movement of freight from the Jersey Central facility, where liberty State Park is now located, and from Harsimus Cove and the Greenville Yards of the Pennsylvania Railroad.

The Harsimus Cove Yards were built by the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1871, just after it gained control of the Exchange Place passenger terminal of the New Jersey Railroad. The Greenville Yards, the world's most complete freight transfer facility, were constructed by the Pennsylvania on landfill between 1900 and 1912. Most operations were phased out in the 1970s, but the Cross Harbor Railroad Terminal Corporation, in business since 1984, anticipates floating a total of 15,000 carloads in 1986 between Brooklyn and Greenville Yards, which are now owned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

Update, 2020

By the end of the 20th century, all traces of the railyards that defined the downtown Jersey City waterfront for a century had vanished, save for a couple of piers and the semi-submerged footings of several more. In their place are the modern developments that have redefined the city's "Gold Coast," beginning with Newport and spreading south and inland towards the historic districts of the interior of downtown.

Greenville Yards has remained an integral part of the Port of New York and New Jersey as the port was restructured to accommodate container shipping. In 2014, Superstorm Sandy delivered the final blow to much of the aging infrastructure depicted in this series.

Redevelopment of the site expanded operations into new piers on the Bayonne side of the border, while the interior of the old Greenville Yards is now a complex of warehouses. In 2019 work was completed on the expanded site, now known as Global Container Terminal's Bayonne ExpressRail Port Jersey.