Former Train and Ferry Station in NJ

Tweet

The Jersey City Terminal of the Central Railroad of New Jersey was one of seven fully developed railroad maritime passenger terminals that once existed at the Port of New York. The maritime terminal was a harbor side terminus of a railroad that provided direct transfer to regularly scheduled ferry boats connecting the terminal with a city center separated from the terminal by a body of water. These maritime terminals, as an architectural type and in their technological development, were unique to the New York/New Jersey Harbor and the San Francisco Bay. They were excellent solutions to one of the most complex circulation problems that had yet been encountered in railroad station design.

Large terminal railroad stations have often been acknowledged as being the essential architectural type of the Victorian/Edwardian era and presented one of the most challenging circulation requirements of any building type fostered by the Industrial Revolution. These maritime terminals were further complicated by the unique intermodal nature of the train/ferry terminal. In addition to handling both train and ferry passengers (both commuter rush traffic and baggage carrying long-distance travelers) and express and mail haulage, the ferry terminal also was required to accommodate local vehicular traffic (originally horse-drawn, later motorized).

The seven physically unified railroad maritime passenger terminals that emerged fully developed by the latter 19^th century, after the evolution that began with the earliest railroad construction to the New York harbor's edge in the late 1830's were:

Each of these terminals were developed during the Victorian Period in response to or anticipation of technological development in ferriage. The ferry boat began as a simple single-ended, single-decked boat that docked parallel to a pier. Next, the end docking boat was introduced, followed in the 1860s by the double-ended ferry, which ran in both directions and docked from either end. Boat design then remained essentially static until the 1890's when the second deck was added to the ferry, followed after the turn of the century by cantilevered walkways from the second deck that allowed direct embarking/disembarking from that deck, as well as the lower deck.

The maritime terminals (and their corresponding nonrailroad ferry terminals on Manhattan) were physically adapted and redesigned to meet these ferry boat innovations, which were prompted by the steadily increasing ferry traffic and the subsequent need to minimize the loading, unloading and docking time.

The physical layout of the railroad maritime passenger terminal began in the 1830's and 1840's simply as a standard terminal transfer station operated by the railroad, proximity linked to an adjoining or nearby ferry terminal. At first, the ferry franchises were held by separate companies and only from the 1850's and 1860's did the railroad companies begin to acquire control of the ferry companies. With this joint ownership came the first design solutions for a physically unified railroad maritime terminal.

The railroad portion of the terminal remained a very functional structure with little aesthetic appeal until the 1880s, when the railroads began building substantial maritime terminals with brick head houses and iron framed train sheds. The ferry sheds, although definitely a physical part of the terminal, remained very plain wooden structures. Just after the turn of the century when the second ferry boat deck had been introduced and the obvious advantage of direct access to and from this deck had been recognized, the maritime terminals underwent their major conversion, into two-level structures. Two maritime terminals of this last period remain today, the D.L. & W.R.R. Terminal at Hoboken (now Erie-Lackawanna Railroad) and the C.R.R. of N.J. Terminal in Jersey City. Both exhibit the two-level ferry terminal configuration.

These two-level ferry houses were treated as architectural entities, as worthy of embellishment as the station head house proper. A light steel frame replaced the previous timber framed structures and they were sheathed with a copper facade of some architectonic pretention, rather than plain wooden siding. The ferry house was, of necessity, built beyond the bulkhead line, thus the weight of the structural and architectural materials had to be minimized because of pile foundations (The D.L. & W. Terminal at Hoboken was an exception to the otherwise consistent locating of head house on solid fill and ferry house on piles). At Hoboken, both head house and ferry house are copper sheathed and are built beyond the bulkhead line.

The train shed was the third element that combined with the head house and ferry house to give the maritime terminals their distinct form and unique function. The train shed went through an evolution of form just as did the head house and ferry house portions of the terminals. The train shed was not unique to the maritime terminal but enjoyed general railroad usage. However, it was a necessary part of the maritime terminal complex.

In the late 1880s, long span iron framed train sheds were erected at most of the maritime terminals. They were extremely costly to erect and maintain and consequently lasted only about a generation when they were replaced with lower sheds of either the Bush type (at D.L. & W.R.R. Terminal and C.R.R. of N.J. Terminal) or the less substantial butterfly or balloon variety.

Development of the Central Railroad of New Jersey to Harborside

The C.R.R. of N.J. was a comparative latecomer to the west bank of the Hudson directly opposite Manhattan. The three railroad terminals further to the north in Jersey City and Hoboken occupied preferred sites because of their more centralized location Manhattan and because much less landfill was required to site them at the established pierhead line.

The ferry lines that operated to the Jersey Central Terminal were known collectively as the Communipaw Ferry. Communipaw, now a neighborhood in Jersey City, is located approximately a mile directly west of the present terminal. The site of Liberty Park was largely a marsh or tidal flat. High ground began only at Communipaw which was the original landing point of the Communipaw Ferry. Ferry service to Manhattan from Communipaw began in 1661, but it was only with the 19^th century railroad development that the present ferry terminal site was created.

The 1889 portion of the Jersey City Central Railroad Terminal was designed by the architectural firm of Peabody & Stearns of Boston, Massachusetts.

Robert Swain Peabody (1845-1917) was a Boston native who studied under Atelier Daumet at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris after graduating from Harvard University in 1866. While in Paris Peabody formed close associations with Frank W. Chandler and Charles Follen McKim.

Returning to Boston in 1870 he formed a partnership with John G. Stearns, an architectural engineer who excelled in industrial substructures and building construction. The firm lasted until Peabody's death in 1917.

Other commercial buildings done by Peabody and Stearns included: Matthews Hall & Hemenway Gymnasium, Harvard University, Machinery Hall at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and the buildings of the Buffalo and San Francisco Expositions.

Most of Peabody and Stearns' work is concentrated in the New England area although they did construct a number of structures in the New York and Philadelphia area. The Jersey City Terminal is the only known work of this firm in New Jersey, although others may exist.

Ellis Island formed the hub of American immigration while Jersey City was one of the spokes from 1890 to the 1930s. Prior to the 1880s individual states generally screened and processed immigrants. These inspections were usually unorganized, corrupt, or incompetent. In the 1890s the United States Immigration Authority created a central Fast Coast processing center on Ellis Island, formerly a munitions stockpile, in order to adequately inspect incoming foreign populations.

After achieving processing, clearance, and cleaning the immigrants were then transported by ferryboat to the mainland United States. The three major ports which received these immigrants were New York, Hoboken, and Jersey City.

In an unfamiliar environment, immigrants, especially those with no relatives or friends in America, often opted for Jersey City, being within shouting distance of Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, possibly making this the most important immigration city of the lot.

Consequently, the huge influx of foreigners into Jersey City in the late 19th-early 20^th century was to affect the cultural and industrial development of the city for decades to follow.

Site Description

The existing terminal complex essentially dates from 1914, when a new train shed and ferry house were built around a remodeled 1889 station house. The 1889 complex set the basic arrangement of a symmetrical plan about a longitudinal axis that was retained in the 1914 layout. The head house served as a connecting space between the train shed and the ferry house. Traffic from the train platforms and ferry bridges was collected on the respective train and ferry concourses, and was routed between the train shed and the ferry house either through the station house waiting room, or around the station house in flanking passageways for baggage and pedestrians.

In the 1889 configuration, these circulation spaces were on a single level at grade. But in the 1914 plan, the new ferry house had a second level to accommodate direct access to the upper ferry boat deck. This second level also contains a concourse, exclusively for pedestrians, and its own connecting spaces to the new train shed which remained on a single level at grade.

The 1889 Terminal

The 1889 terminal was jointly designed by the prominent Boston architects, Peabody and Stearns, and the engineering staff of the C.R.R. of N.J. The architectszx were responsible for the design of the station house, while the railroad staff designed the train shed, ferry house, and wooden pile foundations for the entire complex. Peabody and Stearns also designed several other railroad stations, two of which are the Boston and Providence Railroad Terminal at Park Square, Boston (1874), long since demolished and replaced by South Station, and Union Station, Duluth, Minnesota (1891), stylistically similar to the Jersey Central Terminal and rather well preserved.

The three-aisled train shed had a central aisle that clear spanned 142 feet and was flanked by two smaller shed-roofed appendages for a total width of 215 feet covering 12 tracks. 17 wrought iron Prat trusses were placed on 32-1/2 feet centers for a total length of about 550 feet. The 142 feet span was not particularly outstanding since in the same year, 1889, the Pennsylvania Railroad, at their Jersey City terminal, completed the first balloon shed of the Reading Terminal/Broad Street Station type with a clear span of 252 feet.

The ferry house was an undistinguished single-story wooden structure containing four slips for boats which ran to terminals at the foot of 23^rd Street and Liberty Street in Manhattan. The slips each terminated with special ferry docks that connected the boats with the ferry concourse. This single-level plan required both pedestrians and vehicles to use the same concourse and docks. The three spaces between the docks contained secondary terminal functions, one of which was an emigrants' waiting room. At this time many emigrants were routed directly from Ellis Island to the maritime terminals for immediate transport to inland settlement.

The 1914 Terminal

As previously stated, the terminal complex today essentially dates from 1914, when traffic increases through the terminal had prompted the C.R.R. of N.J. to undertake modifications to accommodate the growth of the previous 25 years.

The new train sheds are of the Bush type, first built at the Hoboken terminal of the D.L. & W.R.R. in 1906. The Bush shed was an ingenious solution to the problem of smoke venting found in the earlier clear span balloon shed, while still retaining the platform coverage not possible with the conventional butterfly and umbrella type sheds. The Bush shed consists of a low concrete and steel roof supported by cast iron columns completely enclosing two tracks per aisle, except for a narrow smoke slot directly above each track.

At the Jersey Central terminal, 9 aisles with two flanking cantilevers cover 20 tracks, making this Bush shed the largest ever built. Natural light is provided by 3 rows of skylights per aisle. This design was about half as expensive to build as the old balloon shed and far less expensive to maintain, being almost completely free from smoke and fumes. In addition, it retained the advantages of almost complete weather protection that was found in the balloon shed. At the Jersey Central Terminal, the Bush sheds, including the plate girder spanned train concourse, cover about 330,000 sq. ft. in a rough rectangle about 390 feet by 850 feet. The bush sheds possess a high architectonic quality and timelessness in their formal simplicity and modern aesthetic. Only the paneled and pedimented train indicators and Ionic column capitals suggest an architectural place in time.

The station house was not drastically altered by the 1914 remodeling. The exterior and upper floors of the interior remained basically unchanged. On the ground floor the main waiting room and ticket office was moved to the north side of the building, being replaced by a general circulation space connecting train shed with ferry house. The original ticket office was replaced by a stairway from ground level to the new upper ferry concourse. The restaurant areas were expanded to include the entire southern third of the main floor.

The ferry house was completely rebuilt with a second story to provide direct access to the upper boat deck. The upper ferry concourse was reached directly from the train concourses by new ramped passages which flanked the north and south sides of the station house. The ferry house was framed in steel, and its Hudson River elevation, over the four ferry slips, sheathed with soldered sheet copper in a neo-classical style. The dramatic copper facade was contrasted by the straightforward technology of the ferry dock. Pilings, called racks, line the curved slips and direct the boat to its engine reversed end docking against the bridge.

The bridge is a partially floating, partially suspended platform framed around four composite wooden and iron trusses simply supported by a pontoon at the outer end and a pivoted bearing on a movable platform at the inner end. The bridge is also suspended from the frame of the ferry house by motor operated hoisting chains to control the exact bridge elevation to fit the conditions of tide or boat design.

The movable or spring platform is a timber deck on piles which transmits the docking impact to an inner platform called the buffer platform. The buffer platform is also built of timber, but its pile framework is independent of its deck. The buffer platform is separated from the spring platform and concrete bulkhead by steel springs which absorb the rocking shock. The buffer platform slides beneath its deck which is rigidly fastened to the bulkhead.

The station, or head house, is of an eclectic. Victorian style best described and Richardsonian Romanesque with French Renaissance Revival overtones, particularly in the roof massing. The building was probably the finest, architecturally, of all the maritime terminals. The head house is rectangular in overall plan, about 215 feet by 125 feet, but is massed in the form of a "T" with the head of the "T" forming a riverside backdrop for the ferry slips and sheds. The riverside elevation is composed of a five-part Palladian facade with a dominant central pavilion linked to symmetrical end pavilions by lower elements. The pavilions are roofed with steep hips, with the central pavilion featuring a large fleche-like cupola and a large clock-faced wall dormer.

The tail of the "T" house the main waiting room which rises the full height of the interior. This space is dramatically roofed by exposed wrought iron trusses of special interest. The trusses are essentially built up of stock structural shapes of the period, which are now rarely found exposed in a non-industrial building.

A unique feature of the trusses is the star burst decoration applied to the connections. The iron rings joining the diagonal tension members were a structural detail occasionally found in the late 19^th century. (See, for example, those in the 1883 B §& 0 iron framed roundhouse at Mt. Clare, Baltimore, or in the railings of the 1877 Boston Water Works Aqueduct bridge across the Charles River in Newton.) The waiting room was naturally lighted through the trusses by six dormers and a ridge skylight.

The rooms flanking the waiting room housed typical terminal station functions, while those on the upper level contained various railroad offices. Some of these offices surround the waiting room on three sides from a 2^nd level balcony, while others on the 3^rd floor look toward lower Manhattan. Baggage and pedestrian passageways, parallel to and flanking the station house connected the train and ferry concourses to complete the rectangular main floor plan. An additional architectural feature is the buff-colored English glazed brick that form the interior wall surfaces of the waiting room and the baggage and pedestrian passageways. This is a significant early example of an extensive use of glazed brick.

Existing Condition of Terminal

Train and ferry service at the Jersey Central Terminal ceased in 1967, and title to the property passed to the State of New Jersey. This closure was a result of the implementation of the federally funded and state-sponsored Aldene Plan which provided for the rehabilitation and improvement of the Port Authority Trans Hudson Railroad to accommodate the former ferry passengers of the Jersey Central and the Eric-Lackawanna from its Hoboken Terminal. The Jersey Central trains were rerouted to Newark where passengers transfers to either PATH or the Penn Central for the remainder of the trip to Manhattan.

The Hudson River ferry terminals in New Jersey had begun a gradual decline in patronage and profitability following WWI and subsequent increased competition from the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad (predecessor of the PATH Railroad) and the Pennsylvania Railroad Hudson River Tunnels. This decline was later intensified as a result of the completion of the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels and George Washington Bridge, and the general nationwide malaise of passenger railroads. The Jersey Central Terminal complex has been empty for eight years and has suffered from vandalism and neglect.

Conditions of Train Sheds

Of the three major elements, the train sheds are in the best condition. The reinforced concrete roofs are generally good with some spalling at corners. The extensive skylight glazing has been either destroyed or removed, as has much of the Monel metal of the framing and flashing around the glass. The cast-iron columns are covered with surface rust and some of the bolt-on Ionic capitals have been removed. Roof drainage is through the columns, but preliminary investigation did not reveal major column deterioration from this source. The rails and ties in the shed and of the approach tracks have been removed, as have the track fences, but the steel car bumpers at the head of the sheds remain, as do the iron track gates and train indicators. The plate girders of the shed concourse roof are surface corroded, but appear structurally sound, as do the sheds themselves.

Condition of Station House

The station house is in deteriorating condition caused by the removal of all sheathing on the cupola, dormer window surrounds, and cornice, and nearly all roof flashing. All of this material was copper, and its removal has caused extensive water damage resulting in localized deterioration of floors and ceilings, and some deterioration of wood joists. The iron trusses and timber roof sheathing of the main waiting room are, however, in relatively good condition, most of the water damage being confined to the suites of offices that surround the main waiting room on the mezzanine level. The original woodwork and plan layout of these spaces generally survives from the 1889 construction. The floors, although wet, remain generally sound. The glazed brick cladding on interior wall surfaces of the main waiting room and passages remains in good condition. Water damage to the exterior brick bearing walls is evidenced by localized areas of efflorescence and extensive surface spalling of brick and sandstone trim.

Condition of Ferry House

The ferry house is in fair condition on the interior, although, as does the rest of the complex, it shows evidence of cosmetic damage as a result of vandalism and weathering. The major deficiency of the ferry house is the removal of the copper sheathing from the harborside facade, leaving the light steel structural frame exposed. However, one of the four identical facade bays may have survived, as it was removed from the ferry house and shipped to Italy for exhibition. Jt was returned and is reportedly stored at Monmouth State Park. The structural condition of the four ferry docks has not been determined. The most likely area of deterioration would be the piles and pontoons at the high water line. Visual inspection of the ferry docks at floor level has not revealed major irregularities in the surface plane of the floor.

(1975)

(1975)

(1975)

(1975)

(1975)