THE SIXTH BOROUGH

 

By Jason Sheftell

May 18, 2007

 

If you were ever looking to live anywhere besides the five boroughs, your first choice should be Jersey City-already home to many New Yorkers who jumped at the Manhattan skyline views and low housing prices.

 

NEWPORT:

 

“There was nothing here but environmental waste and packs of wild dogs when we bought it,” says Jamie LeFrak, whose family has been developing the mixed-use residential, commercial and retail area known as the Newport waterfront since 1986.  “Now it’s a beautiful area of a growing city.”

           

The LeFrak Organization, which also built LeFrak City in Queens during the ‘60s, have turned the Newport waterfront into a minimetropolis with a modern skyline, office parks, and a shopping mecca.  Young people who live in the luxury rentals enjoy the waterfront walkway and outdoor restaurants on warm spring days.

 

The numbers revolving around Newport are staggering.  Directly across the river from Manhattan’s Financial District, Newport is a 600 acre area that will eventually contain 10,000 luxury rental and condominium apartments, 6 million square feet of office space and 2 million square feet of retail space.  The retail space includes a mall with JC Penney, Kohl’s, Macy’s and Sears, a 12-screen AMC movie theatre and a nearby Target.  Every form of public transportation including a PATH train, the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail and a high-speed ferry are in the immediate vicinity.

           

Currently, the LeFraks are lengthening the riverfront walkway, building an ice skating rink, a Westin hotel and three new residential buildings.

 

One of the residential buildings, the Ellipse, is a 350-unit, all-rental high-rise shaped in an oval.

 

The Newport area sits on the abandoned railroad tracks that had belonged to the Erie Railroad, a name familiar to fans of the board game Monopoly.

 

The LeFrak Organization acquired the land from a bankruptcy trust in the early 1980s.  In total, $3.1 billion have been put into the master-planned community.  Rental units start at $1,600 for studios, $1,850 for one bedrooms and $2,600 for two bedrooms.

 

“We’re the second, not the sixth, borough,” says LeFrak. “We blow Brooklyn away.”