The Congress for the New Urbanism’s Public Square August 2024 journal featured our recent project with Jersey City’s Department of Infrastructure to renovate the historic Bergen Square.
Bergen Square was the first urban square established in the American colonies and is the oldest continuously-inhabited European settlement in New Jersey. Once the land of the Lenni Lenape, the Dutch pushed in and started the village of Bergen around the public square in 1660. By the 1950s the square’s western quadrants operated as small parking lots, which persisted until 2023.
The renewed square includes lot of circulation, safety, and public space elements, including: a road diet, protected bike lanes, parking lots to public space conversion, raised intersections, bus boarding islands and shelters, green infrastructure (rain gardens, new trees, etc.), a variety of new public seating options, a decorative Lenni Lenape ribbon-work pattern around the perimeter honoring the areas original inhabitants, and new delivery and school bus loading zones.
To learn more about the project, check out the article here.