Living In ... Hackensack, N.J.
CreditTony Cenicola/The New York Times
Hackensack, N.J., could not have been farther off the radar screen when Bibi Masara and her two teenagers began looking to move from the Bronx. Ms. Masara, 41, who works for a venture capital firm in Midtown Manhattan, wanted a slower pace and initially considered Westchester County. But her research into home prices pointed her to New Jersey.
Last spring she closed on a three-bedroom, two-bath colonial near a nature preserve in the leafy Fairmount section of Hackensack. “For what I paid, $399,000, you couldn’t get a house in Westchester,” Ms. Masara said. Her new address is a mile from the shopping she prizes — the Whole Foods Market in Paramus. She and her daughters, who attend school in Manhattan, have a reasonable 15-mile, 45-minute bus ride to the Port Authority terminal.
What’s more, “there’s a sense of community here,” Ms. Masara said. “My neighbor next door takes in my recycling bins in the morning because she knows I’m a working girl with two kids. Everyone looks out for everyone. My older daughter even has been asked to babysit.”
Immortalized in an unflattering Billy Joel lyric — “Who needs a house out in Hackensack? Is that all you get for your money?” — the Bergen County seat is an ethnically diverse city of 45,000, suburban in feel but with an urban center hugging the Hackensack River. For decades, Hackensack’s Main Street was the county’s commercial hub and even boasted a pair of ornate movie theaters. The advent of shopping malls in Paramus touched off a long decline that the city is now addressing in earnest.
Six years after a zoning change permitted residential construction in a swath of downtown deemed in need of rehabilitation, about 10 rental apartment projects are in varying stages of construction or planning. One, Meridia Metro, with 222 units, was completed in 2016. The Current on River, with 254 units, is going up on the site of a former tennis club. An art deco, 10-story bank tower and an adjacent building are being converted into 119 luxury apartments.
The projects include fitness centers, rooftop decks and other amenities sought by young professionals, and those fronting Main Street will have ground-floor retail. The hope is that new businesses will follow apartment dwellers downtown, creating a pedestrian-friendly core, burnishing the city’s cachet and bolstering property values.
Continue reading the main story“We don’t want it to be just a shopping area with a bunch of Starbucks,” said Jerome J. Lombardo, chairman of the Hackensack Main Street Business Alliance, the public-private partnership championing the redevelopment. “We want to keep our local flavor. But we want lots and lots of eateries, maybe even a brew pub or an active brewery.”
Mayor John Labrosse sees Hackensack, with its rail and bus links and proximity to highways, as a less-expensive Garden State alternative for millennials. “A one-bedroom luxury apartment in Hoboken is now $2,300 or $2,400 a month, and we’re looking at $1,700 to $1,800,” Mr. Labrosse said. “Plus, the accessibility of Hackensack is above and beyond Hoboken and Jersey City. We’re right in the middle.”
Drew De Grado, 35, a Bergen County native who works from home in digital marketing, moved to a one-bedroom in Meridia Metro after considering Hoboken. He and his wife, who commutes to Manhattan by bus, are encouraged by the construction around them. “I’d love to see what they’re going to do with the little stores on Main Street,” Mr. De Grado said. “If they keep doing what they’re doing, they can really turn this place around.”
Coles Brook
Hackensack
Borg’s Woods
Nature Preserve
New
York
City
The Shops
at Riverside
N.J.
HACKENSACK
RIVER COUNTY
PARK
Hackensack
Fairleigh Dickinson
University
ESPLANADE
MAIN ST.
4
RIVER ST.
Anderson St.
station
ATLANTIC
80
CEDAR LN.
Johnson Park
Hackensack University
Medical Center
Foschini Park
Hackensack
Performing Arts Center
295
Essex St.
station
46
Bergen County
Courthouse
Hackensack
River
17
BERGEN County
80
Hudson St.
1/2 mile
Teterboro Airport
As part of the redevelopment, two-way traffic will be restored to Main Street, and the city is looking to increase the number of downtown restaurants that can serve alcohol. A crucial piece of the plan is in place: A 240-seat performing arts center opened in November, in a 19th-century former Masonic temple.
“Mr. Joel is welcome there anytime,” Mr. Labrosse said.
What You’ll Find
“The wide variety of housing choices in Hackensack lends itself to all types of living situations,” said Dominie Healey, a sales associate with Vikki Healey Properties in neighboring Maywood. “And I’d characterize the buyers as varied as the housing stock — from young to old, first-time buyers, empty nesters, investors.”
The 4.3-square-mile city has 4,200 condo and co-op units and 6,000 rental units, in properties from low-slung garden apartments to boxy red-brick mid-rises and high-rises offering unobstructed views of the Manhattan skyline. Prospect Avenue is lined with ’70s- and ’80s-era luxury towers bearing such names as Ritz Plaza, The Camelot and Bristol House. These condominiums, near the sprawling Hackensack University Medical Center and doctors’ offices, are popular with empty-nesters downsizing from elsewhere in Bergen County.
Among the single-family houses, colonials, Capes and ranches are plentiful. The largest and priciest are on Summit Avenue and the streets perpendicular to it in the Fairmount section, northwest of downtown. Properties tend to be smaller in the city’s southern portion.
Hackensack River County Park, Foschini Park and Johnson Park, all bordering the river, are the largest open spaces. Next to the county park is the upscale Shops at Riverside mall, where a nine-screen cinema opened last year.
What You’ll Pay
On Jan. 8, the New Jersey Multiple Listing Service website showed 78 homes listed for sale, from 11 co-op apartments priced under $100,000 to a circa-1900, four-bedroom Tudor on Anderson Street, priced at $798,000. A third of the listings were for single-family houses, most in the $350,000 to $600,000 range.
The priciest condo listing was a two-bedroom, two-bath unit in World Plaza on Prospect Avenue, for $405,000; the next most expensive condo was $299,900.
From April 1 to Dec. 31 last year, the median sale price for a single-family house was $335,000; for a condo or townhouse, $183,000; and for a co-op, $91,200, compared with $330,000, $170,000 and $83,000 during the same period in 2016, according to the New Jersey Multiple Listing Service.
The Vibe
Because of the presence of the county courthouse and government offices, the medical center up the hill from downtown, and a campus of Fairleigh Dickinson University, Hackensack’s daytime population swells to more than 100,000, said Albert H. Dib, director of redevelopment for the city. The bustle is noisily compounded by the planes on approach to the nearby Teterboro Airport.
Main Street, a timeworn mix of law offices, beauty supply shops, delis and other small retailers, reflects the city’s diversity. Cuban, Ecuadorean, Colombian, Lebanese, Thai, Indian and soul are among the dining choices, and a German bakery, B&W, has been selling its signature crumb cake for 70 years. One street over on the riverbank, White Manna Hamburgers slings sliders in a tiny diner that stood at the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair.
Construction reverberates now in the city center, but two miles away, all is still at the Borg’s Woods Nature Preserve, where deer have been spotted.
The Schools
Fairmount, Fanny Meyer Hillers, Jackson Avenue and Nellie K. Parker schools serve kindergarten through fourth grade. Students attend Hackensack Middle School for fifth through eighth grade, then Hackensack High School, on First Street, which enrolls around 1,820. Mean SAT scores in 2016-2017 were 510 for reading and writing and 509 for math, compared with 551 and 552 statewide.
The Bergen County Academies, a magnet high school operated by the county Technical Schools district, enrolls 1,065 students on its Hackensack Avenue campus. Mean SAT scores in 2016-2017 were 722 for reading and writing and 748 for math.
The Commute
Hackensack has two rail stations on the New Jersey Transit Pascack Valley Line. Passengers transfer at Secaucus for a train to Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan; the trip takes 40 to 45 minutes and costs $7.25 each way or $210 for a monthly pass. Or they can ride to the Hoboken terminus and catch a PATH train into Lower Manhattan; the 30-minute trip to Hoboken costs $5.50 each way or $170 for a monthly pass.
New Jersey Transit provides bus service to the Port Authority Bus Terminal on several routes. Trips from Hackensack take 35 minutes to an hour and cost $4.50 each way; a monthly pass is $148.
Three highways slice through Hackensack: Route 4 to the north and Routes 80 and 17 to the south. Routes 4 and 80 lead to the George Washington Bridge, and Route 80 feeds into the New Jersey Turnpike.
The History
Hackensack, which for most of its history was a village within the Township of New Barbadoes, owes its lyrical name to the Achkinheshcky tribe of the indigenous Lenni Lenape, who inhabited the area before Dutch settlement in 1693. In November of 1776, George Washington had his military headquarters at the home of Peter Zabriskie, where there is now a Main Street law office. Several Revolutionary War soldiers are buried in the First Reformed Church graveyard opposite the courthouse.
Continue reading the main story