For decades, waves of immigrants and artists have caught glimpses of sea and skyline from the hills of Union City — a New Jersey town just across the Hudson River from New York City.
The spectacular views remained relatively off the luxury real estate radar, keeping prices reasonable enough to allow two winding roads along the edge of a cliff — aptly named Mountain Road and Manhattan Avenue — to become a sanctuary for sculptors and painters.
The Beaux-Arts sculptor, Raffaele Menconi, who designed the flagpole bases at the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue, co-owned a 13-room mansion on Mountain Road, starting in 1912. Charles X. Harris, a painter of Americana, and Olive Kooken, a sculptor known for her lamps and toy soldiers, lived in a house just up the road at different times in the early 20th century.
Even into the 1980s, the cliff-side community atop the Palisades remained a home to creatives: The photographer Bonnie Berger, who owned a three-family brick house, ran a collectibles shop down the hill in Hoboken and served as a landlord to a photographer while a jewelry designer lived next door, recalled her daughter Jennie Berger.
“It was an amazing place to grow up,” Ms. Berger, 45, said from her home in Chicago recently. The mother and daughter lived on the first floor and collected rent from the two upstairs tenants. “We had a great backyard. My mom had vegetable gardens. We had hammocks, and a turtle was living there. It was a little oasis. We could see the fireworks every year. It was pretty unique.”
But in 2005, Bonnie Berger, who had bought the house for $130,000, got an offer she couldn’t refuse: A group of investors paid her $1.7 million for the property, and three years later, another group of investors paid $2.8 million to take it off their hands.
One by one, investors began taking over Mountain Road and Manhattan Avenue. Between 2005 to 2009, investors bought 12 contiguous properties on the cliff — many with century-old buildings displaying unique architectural features — for between $360,000 and $6.5 million. There were initial plans by a developer, Sky Pointe LLC, to build 450 to 500 residential units in five towers.
And then, nothing happened.
For reasons neighbors are only partly aware of, neither development nor demolition has occurred on the properties since they were bought. Instead, they’ve suffered from fires, intruders, graffiti, broken fencing, and overgrowth that make it difficult for an onlooker to believe they were occupied and full of light 18 years ago. In a hot real estate market (where other developments have risen on the hills to take advantage of the views), such a promising neighborhood has been left to crumble.
On a recent afternoon, shafts of sunlight squeezed through thick trees to brighten boarded windows and ivy covering the structures. Across the road, the thump of someone’s drums emerged from a street-level window.
David Spatz, the city planner for Union City, said he has not heard from Sky Pointe in “probably six to seven years.”
“I think the city would like housing developed on that property, but in a way that is sensitive to the existing neighborhood and the cliffs itself,” Mr. Spatz said, “developing something that wouldn’t block views to the people live to the west of the property, but also be sensitive to the Palisades.”
He said the investors — who have been embroiled in a series of legal battles since 2015 — still have not submitted formal plans for a development project to the city.
In September 2015, Union City’s board of commissioners designated the 12 properties and one vacant city-owned lot as a “noncondemnation area in need of redevelopment.” That designation gave Sky Pointe some protection from local residents opposed to any changes. Several neighbors publicly accused the developer of purposely ignoring the properties in order to attain the special privileges. They also argued that the properties could still be fixed up without a special designation.
Still, other residents just want the houses torn down.
Kate Sparrow, who has lived in a stately, century-old Mountain Road home since 1999, started a petition to raze the houses in 2015, writing, “These buildings are a fire hazard, an eyesore, reduce our property values, and give Union City a disgusting presentation.”
She got only 33 signatures.
“There was nothing wrong with the houses,” Ms. Sparrow said recently from her living room overlooking the cliffs, thumbing through a folder of paperwork from hearings she attended in the mid-2010s. “They didn’t have to let them rot. But now that they did, why aren’t they tearing them down? There have been fires, vagrants, critters.”
In yet another camp is a retired social studies teacher, Joe Sivo, 94, who owns two Manhattan Avenue homes he bought after moving to Union City in 1958. He said he was among the few neighbors who supported the investors’ quest to develop the cliffs.
“They were going to give us a park,” said Mr. Sivo on a recent day, as he and wife Caroline, 87, prepared to drive down the hill to the Hoboken ShopRite.
The residents thought there was new movement in the summer of 2019, when lawyers for Sky Pointe advertised a community meeting to discuss a new plan for two towers, totaling 99 units, with an 8,500-square-foot park between them.
The meeting was canceled.
Ms. Sparrow and other residents said so much time has passed that they fear developers will build an out-of-scale project to recoup their money. “I’m not against development,” Ms. Sparrow said. “Only when it’s too big and too much. When they overpay, they want everyone else to make good on their investment.”
But even if the houses are eventually razed and a development is finally approved, a project could run into obstacles. Other new condo developments planned on the cliffs face the challenges of the topography and more. “Before we can build any of these four buildings vertically, we must first blow the mountainside asunder. We continue to dynamite the rocks away,” reads a 2021 construction report for a planned 55-unit luxury condo development at 1300 Manhattan Ave., called Hoboken Heights. The project was just 400 feet south of Sky Pointe’s lots, but the year after that report, the property owners filed for bankruptcy, leaving yet another chunk of the mountainside with an uncertain future.
Whatever the outcome, the stately houses tucked into the cliff-side will never be what they once were. Ms. Berger, who sat in her backyard as a child and watched the fireworks shoot into the sky from the Hudson River., cried, thinking about her home and community of artists that have disappeared.
She remembered how her imaginative mother, who drove a powder blue Volkswagen Bug, painted the word “increase” in giant script next to a peace symbol on the wood fence outside their house in different colors.
Today, a metal fence separates her former home and the other dilapidated houses from the street, bearing a phone number for a property management company.