Kearny Point has a new lease on life — literally. A former shipping and recycling complex that sits on a 130-acre peninsula between the Hackensack and Passaic rivers, which experienced terrible flooding during Hurricane Sandy, is back on track to becoming a hip revitalized incubator for big and small manufacturing businesses.
“Hurricane Sandy was a very defining moment,” says Wendy Neu, chairman and CEO of developer Hugo Neu. “Tenants had inventory losses, and we started to rethink the site.”
As Kearny Point started to rebuild its tenant base and consider how to attract new companies, Neu targeted manufacturing businesses with growth potential rather than warehouses, which don’t employ a lot of people.
The idea is to be green. “I’m an environmentalist and wanted to restore the waterfront and make more open space,” Neu says. “I wanted to make it impermeable and build new buildings.”
She also aimed to conserve former shipping facilities on the site, which has lovely views of the New York City skyline.
Studios Architecture and WXY Architecture + Urban Design planned and designed the Kearny Point project, which will ultimately take up 3 million square feet interspersed with parks and waterfront space.
Already, one 200,000-squarefoot building dubbed “78,” which was long unoccupied, now houses more than 175 tenants and has its own communal café and roof deck. “It’s become its own ecosystem,” says Neu.
Building 78’s tenant companies create, among other things, 3D-printed items, cotton candy, cookies, yogurt, photographs, vitamins and even piñatas.
The dog-friendly office space at Kearny Point includes co-working facilities, creative office space, communal areas, high-speed Internet, unlimited free parking and seven-minute shuttle service to the Newark PATH station.
A second phase, the 197,000-square-foot Building 100, will primarily be used for creative office space.
“We are breaking up the interior towards food-oriented tenants,” says Steve Nislick, chief financial officer of Hugo Neu.
A Cushman & Wakefield team led by Mitchell Arkin is handling leasing for Building 100. New tenants pay rents of around $30 per foot.
A hotel is also planned for the site, located near Routes 1 and 9, just west of Jersey City.
“We are really sensitive to using all the new technologies,” adds Neu, about the developer’s adaptive reuse of the old manufacturing buildings. The company is working on a variety of solar, wind, geothermal, stormwater and other initiatives for Kearny Point.
So stay tuned.
