Jersey City Athletic Club - Clinton Ave at Crescent Ave

In this post we are departing from downtown Jersey City and into Bergen-Lafayette, for a change.

I first saw a drawing of Jersey City Athletic Club in a turn-of the century article (about 1900) about new athletic clubs in the New York area online. Unfortunately I can not remember where I found it - I believe it was a New Jersey state archive or similar. This had the approximate address of the club. Using this, in combination with the old Plat maps from Rutgers, is how I managed to locate the building.

I also saw a drawing of Jersey City Athletic Club by local artist August Will (1834-1910) at the Jersey City Museum. The drawing is available in their online catalog here.

This is an article from 1889, celebrating the clubs 10th anniversary!

When I took the photo I met a long-term neighbor that mentioned that the building had bowling alleys inside and that it had been used as a masons lodge in the 50s that spared no expense on lavish meals.

Given the current condition, I wonder how long it will survive? A shame on such a beautiful building.


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168 to 174 Mercer St at Monmouth St

This building on 168 to 174 Mercer Street in downtown Jersey City is another photo example, in addition to this and this, that shows burnt out and boarded up buildings that were obtained by the city of Jersey City - some were torn down and replaced while others were saved.

The ones pictured above were amongst the lucky ones...


Picture Credits
The old pictures comes from Library of Congress' extensive catalog of historic documents.



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329 - 331 Montgomery St at Jersey Ave

This is another photo of buildings on Montgomery Street in Jersey City from 1979. Jersey City had gone through some tough decades and the buildings were obviously pretty beat up at that point.

Similar to the buildings featured in this post, a couple of buildings were torn down (in this case the ones to the right featured in the photo) and replaced with new ones. The new buildings and the ones left standing were combined into public housing ; the interior of the buildings were combined and one floor runs all the way through all of the buildings - new and old.



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298 Montgomery St at Jersey Ave

In the next couple of blog posts I will focus on Montgomery St and use photos from Library of Congress' collection. Most of the photos are from 1979, at a time when Jersey City was a bit down on its luck.

The buildings that can be seen to the right in the photos are the back of the buildings facing Jersey Avenue. The back of the buildings are configured almost exactly the same today, as they were in 1979 - no new extensions have been built. The only differences that I can spot is that one window has been bricked up, and some lighter colors have been used on the wood work.

It's a completely different story with the buildings to the left, 298 and 300 (?) Montgomery St. Even though the exteriors seem to have been in decent shape in 1979, the ground floor of the building to the left is boarded up.

At that point there seem to have been quite a few abandoned buildings on and around Montgomery St that were obtained by the city of Jersey City. As I will show in upcoming posts several of the buildings were in much, much worse conditions than those that can be seen here.

Some of these buildings were tore down and replaced with public housing. In the example of 298 and 300 (?) Montgomery St above a couple of buildings were torn down and replaced with new buildings and combined with rehabilitated buildings next to them (to the left  of what can be seen in this photo, I'll show it in an upcoming post).

Even though Jersey City went through some hard times in the 70s and 80s, its unfortunate that many beautiful buildings became casualties of these struggles.

TBC.

Picture Credits
The old pictures comes from Library of Congress' extensive catalog of historic documents.



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