How The Hudson River Got Its Walkway

By John Weingart*

September 2003

The Hudson Waterfront Walkway grew out of the confluence of a 14-year old report from a non-profit group, a governor’s failed commission, a generally underestimated federal land use law, and a three-sentence New Jersey act that had been implemented for more than 65 years with no accompanying regulations.

The report, The Lower Hudson, published by the Regional Plan Association (RPA) in 1966, recommended “a bicycle-hiking path and maximum public access to the River … on the New Jersey side from the George Washington Bridge to the Morris Canal Basin in Jersey City.” (p.7) The report, which was well researched, well written and nicely produced with captivating maps and drawings, seemed to envision a walkway along the rim of the Palisades that would overlook the Hudson River and New York skyline. While it captured some attention including favorable editorials in The New York Times, it did not lead to direct action.

In 1977, when a group of local non-profit organizations known as the Waterfront Coalition of Hudson and Bergen convened to create a citizens’ plan for the waterfront, The Lower Hudson was pulled off the shelf.

Beginning in 1970, the Coalition had been involved in successfully opposing proposals for several oil tank farms, an oil refinery and a coal transfer station to be built along the Hudson River. The Coalition dreamed of instead opening the waterfront to the public but only 700 feet of the 18 ½ mile waterfront were publicly accessible. In 1974 and 1975, one of the Coalition member groups, the Hoboken Environment Committee, dramatically showed the potential by attracting more than 1000 stumbling people over a crater-filled road to attend River City Fairs held on an abandoned dock at Stevens Institute. The Waterfront Coalition decided to move the Regional Plan Association idea from the Palisades cliffs down to the water’s edge and to propose extending it south of Jersey City to the tip of Bayonne.

When a Hudson River Waterfront Study, Planning, and Development Commission was established by Governor Brendan Byrne 12 years after publication of The Lower Hudson, the Waterfront Coalition made sure the Commission was aware of it and the report became one of the resources and sources of inspiration on which the group relied. Its wording was sufficiently expansive that the Coalition’s significant refinement to locate a walkway along the River came to be considered part and parcel of the original RPA report.

Governor Byrne’s Commission, established in 1978 by Executive Order, was an attempt to extend the success he and his immediate predecessor, William Cahill, had enjoyed in gaining legislative enactment of major regional planning and governance initiatives in the Hackensack Meadowlands, Jersey Shore, and Pinelands. Byrne created this group hoping it would stimulate support for legislation that would lead to another regional mechanism, this time to spur the long-stalled redevelopment of the New Jersey side of the Hudson River waterfront. This was a period when Peter Goldmark, then Executive Director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, remarked at a conference that this real estate was “an area of insurmountable potential.”
The Hudson Waterfront Commission was a failure. It was an unwieldy group with 39 members about half of whom were area mayors and county freeholders who saw neither reason nor incentive to suggest transferring any of their current powers to a new state or regional agency. An article describing the commission in The New York Times was headlined, “Moving Ahead With 39 Left Feet?”

While debate on the possibility of regional governance dominated most of the commission’s discussions, the members had no trouble agreeing on a vision of what they wanted the waterfront to look like. As a result, while their final report included a tortured compromise proposal for a regional body that would have been totally unworkable, it also included a strong, unanimously-adopted recommendation for a continuous public walkway extending along the Hudson River.

The Commission Report submitted to Governor Byrne in 1980 would have been immediately forgotten, particularly since Byrne’s second and final term was drawing to a close, were it not that the Department of Environmental Protection was at the same time completing preparation of the state plan necessary to comply with the federal Coastal Zone Management Act (CZMA). Strictly speaking, states were not required to pay attention to this law as they were, for example, to the federal laws aimed at achieving clean air and water. The CZMA was a different type of federal statute that promised significant funding and other incentives to coastal states or territories that chose to participate by adopting coastal management plans that met standards and criteria administered by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The funds were to be available specifically to implement the state coastal plans. While states could have opted out, the incentives were sufficient that almost all those eligible were willing to adopt policies and in some cases legislation that might otherwise have been considered politically unpalatable.

For New Jersey, this meant seeking a means to regulate new development along the state’s urban waterfronts. While the state had enacted the Coastal Area Facility Management Act (CAFRA) in 1973 requiring major new developments along the ocean shore and Delaware and Raritan Bays to get permits from the Department of Environmental Protection, seven years later no one thought a similar bill aimed at the riverfronts could gain sufficient support to pass. As a result, the DEP looked to expand the use of existing law and focused upon a 1914 statute referred to as the Waterfront Development Act. The DEP had long used this law to regulate the construction of docks, piers and bulkheads, but had never written regulations for the act. As a result, it had never defined what was meant either by “waterfront” or “development.”

In 1980, the DEP proposed and then adopted regulations in which for the first time it asserted authority to regulate essentially the first land use adjacent to the state’s urban waters including the Hudson River. At the same time, it adopted additional regulations to specify the criteria on which it would base its regulatory decisions and included a requirement that proposed developments include a public walkway along any river frontage on the property. Inclusion of this particular regulation was a direct result of the coincidental need for the regulations occurring just as the Hudson Waterfront Commission report was being completed and clearly prepared for permanent shelving. It was also a result of the fact that the Commission’s staff, borrowed from the DEP on a part-time basis, were part of the group leading the DEP’s efforts to meet the mandates of the federal Coastal Act.

The DEP regulations were adopted in September 1980. Though challenged as being beyond the allowable scope of the law by the New Jersey Builders Association, they were upheld by an appellate court.
As developers began to apply for permits under the new rules, several argued that building a waterfront walkway on their particular site was foolish since it would be completely inaccessible from the largely abandoned, rundown, or industrial activities on the adjacent properties. The DEP realized a more specific vision of the walkway was necessary – something that would help the first developers as well as local officials and the general public visualize how, and ensure that, walkway segments on discrete properties could eventually link to each other.

In part as a result of the DEP’s adoption of the Waterfront Development Act regulations, New Jersey’s Coastal Management Program had received federal approval in 1980. As a result, the State was now receiving increased annual grants for coastal plan implementation and the DEP chose to use part of that funding to hire a planning firm to prepare a detailed vision for a Hudson Waterfront Walkway. The firm it chose, Wallace, Roberts, and Todd, after conducting an extensive public involvement process, completed a detailed plan with maps. When the DEP next amended its regulations, it added specific reference to the new plan.
The DEP didn’t anticipate or address all the issues that have become contentious in the 20-plus years since the walkway regulations were adopted, such as 24-hour access, walkway maintenance, or the continual need to monitor the Walkway to ensure that permit conditions continue to be met, but it did establish the development of a continuous Hudson River Waterfront Walkway as New Jersey public policy. It added a design plan and an implementation mechanism to a vision that had already been articulated by others to demonstrate that a walkway could be built on every Hudson waterfront site and that the walkway segments could one day become linked to form a whole much greater than the sum of its parts.

The Hudson River Walkway would not have advanced as far as it has were it not for the continuous advocacy of public access by the Regional Plan Association and the many environmental and civic groups active in northern New Jersey over the past decades, particularly those that formed the Waterfront Coalition of Hudson and Bergen. Nor would it have occurred were it not for Governor Byrne’s willingness to focus public attention on the waterfront by establishing a study commission, the requirements and incentives established by Congress in the federal Coastal Zone Management Act, and the fortunate though unplanned timing that led these strands to form a critical mass in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

The Walkway also benefited from unexpected acceptance and even enthusiasm from several of the early waterfront developers. In particular, the Harborside project in Jersey City found it economically advantageous to include an indoor public walkway through their commercial redevelopment and Hartz Mountain Industries built a generous, attractive plaza and walkway as part of the first phase of their Lincoln Harbor project in Weehawken.

The New Jersey effort was very different from the one employed on the other side of the Hudson where huge amounts of state (and federal?) funds were spent to build the spectacular walkway and waterfront park that begins in Battery Park City and extend north along Manhattan’s west side. When DEP designed its largely regulatory approach, however, the expectation was that eventually public funds would need to be committed to complete those portions of the Walkway that were not part of new development subject to the requirements of the Waterfront Development Act.

Now the challenge is to complete the Walkway and make sure it continues to anticipate and meet the needs of area residents and visitors. Now, as in the 1970s and 1980s, leadership is needed to take advantage of the extraordinary public support for the concept of riverfront access and creatively use existing resources and initiate some new ones while trusting that once again the right dose of luck, coincidence and good fortune will materialize to ensure success and to complete what seemed only 30 years ago to be an impossible dream.

* This is an unpublished paper I wrote in 2003 based largely on my memories from working in the DEP and serving as staff to the Hudson Waterfront Study, Planning and Development Commission. I am grateful to Helen Manogue who helped fill in the gaps in my knowledge of the work of the Waterfront Coalition of Hudson and Bergen.