Announcing Our Save the Powerhouse Campaign
At the Heart of Our Mission: The Powerhouse
The fight to preserve Jersey City’s 1908 Hudson & Manhattan Railroad Powerhouse sparked the creation of the Jersey City Landmarks Conservancy 25 years ago. Today, this industrial giant still stands — but it needs us. Join the movement to protect our city’s most powerful landmark and ensure its story lives on.
The Jersey City Times: Preservationists Call for Protection of The Powerhouse at Awards Ceremony
Trustees of the non-profit Jersey City Landmarks Conservancy on September 18, 2025, at their Save the Powerhouse-themed preservation awards ceremony
By Tris McCall for the Jersey City Times
September 20, 2025
The founder was feisty. A fight was coming, John Gomez told the crowd gathered at Barrow Mansion (83 Wayne St.) on Thursday night, and he wanted to ensure that preservationists were properly girded. The flashpoint would be the same one that precipitated the creation of the Jersey City Landmarks Conservancy: the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad Powerhouse, the town’s most famous building. Twenty-six years ago, he’d organized, argued, and tilted against giants to shield it from the wrecker’s ball. With the future of the icon and neighborhood namesake still undetermined, Gomez asked Jersey City to recommit to the campaign by enlisting in a newly-minted Save the Powerhouse campaign.
“It needs us,” said Gomez. “This is going to be a battle.”
There were prizes to distribute on Thursday, too. But before his colleagues at the Conservancy distributed the plaques at the 22nd Annual Preservation Awards, Gomez wanted a full assessment of the stakes of the game. That meant showing the crowd a dramatic film by Reena Rose Sibayan that gave viewers a thunder god’s aerial view of the structure. Sibayan’s wordless clip is full of Powerhouse grandeur — but also Powerhouse peril. The cracks in the tower cry out for repair. The industrial-era relic is surrounded, and outnumbered, by impersonal glass buildings that are, in Gomez’s incisive term, overscaled. One lot to the north, the piles of bricks of the former Arts Center at 111 First Street remind us that if they aren’t cared for, and fought for, even landmarks can fall.
No wonder, then, that the awardees and presenters at the Awards spoke with a combination of urgency and pungency. The lively ninety-minute ceremony was shot through with a sense of mission that often felt downright evangelical. The Conservancy, a grassroots advocacy organization that has been in the center of local land-use and development debates for decades, has never been afraid to roar — or to apply moral language to municipal decisions. Gomez’s message was clear: Jersey City preservationists might look well-heeled and upstanding, but they’re ready to give the authorities headaches if they have to. He reminded the crowd twice that, in his work for the Conservancy, he’d nearly gotten himself arrested.
Allied preservationists were, by implication, badasses too. “You don’t [f%*!] with Cynthia Hadjiyannis,” Gomez warned, before presenting the Jersey City Reservoir Preservation Alliance leader and attorney an award. Hadjiyannis began her acceptance speech with a demurral: she doubted she could match the fervor of Gomez’s introduction. But by the end, she was telling builders, developers, designers of bad infill, and disrespectful neighbors that she’d be be watching.
None of these remarks felt rehearsed. Instead, they crackled with the pent-up energy of activists who are passionate about restoration, sustainable construction, and urban history, but don’t often get a chance to talk about these things in a public forum. JCLC board president Christopher Perez and vice-president Chelsea Castro gave the awardees plenty of room to introduce themselves and discuss their contributions to local color.
In what might be a first for awards shows in the history of the world, the longer speeches were the better ones. Stained-glass restorer Zachary Green of the Gil Studio, a former 111 First Street tenant and recipient of the Architectural Craftsmanship Award, was earnest and emotional about his art — one that is now considered endangered. He spoke with sincere appreciation that those accustomed to getting fêted could never summon.
“I feel like I spend my time,” he told the crowd with a wry smile, “in buildings, covered with bird shit, trying to fix stained glass windows. So it’s nice to have a moment.”
Hadjiyannis and Green were two of nine Preservation Awardees. Three others were residents whose efforts to renovate an old home had come to the attention of the Conservancy. All three seemed genuinely surprised by the recognition. Among them was city Cultural Affairs chief Christine Goodman, whose restored Queen Anne-style wooden house grabbed Gomez’s attention while he was walking around the Heights. His claim that he didn’t know anything about the occupant shouldn’t have felt believable. But it did — and it was reinforced by Hadjiyannis’s promise that preservationists are always watching. Should you take a husk of a property and, through sweat, research, and meticulous labor, get it to shine, in Castro’s words, with “renewed brilliance,” you, too, may find yourself standing with a plaque at the Barrow Mansion.
Not all of the awards felt equally merited. The jury is still out on 130 Bay Street, the KABR and Kushner Companies renovation of the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company building. Will it be a cornerstone of the Powerhouse Arts District, or just more eye candy in a visual sweet shop that could use more substance? How will this exercise in adaptive reuse actually be used? It’s still too soon to know, and too early for accolades. More warranted was the Preservation Initiative Award, bestowed on the sprucers-up of an old bank on Ocean Avenue. What was once a financial institution is now, according to Dr. Michael Skolnick, “three floors of colorful, bright, fun, dental adventures.”
By the time the Conservancy reached its Jersey City Legend Award, the hour was getting late, and some attendees had decamped for the banquet tables. Those who did missed Helena Ruman, an architect who fled communist Prague for Jersey City, dedicated herself to historical preservation, and oversaw the restoration of some of the city’s defining buildings, including the Brennan Courthouse, the Priscilla Gardner Library, and City Hall. Her story was salient to the main line of Jersey City history in a way that a tale of brownstone renovation could never be. It’s a shame that the Conservancy waited until the end of the program to tell it.
But the night’s most compelling articulation of the principles behind the mission came from the winner of the J. Owen Grundy History Award. Duquann Sweeney‘s “We Outside” series of shots of Greenville decorate the Oonee bicycle pods that have been erected near the PATH stations; before that, they were part of a series that chronicled life in a section of the city that is too often overlooked. Sweeney called photography an expression of care for its subject, and challenged the audience to hold on to history, love, and imagination. He reminded us that powerful people are actively determined to rewrite our stories, and suggested that historical preservation was a means by which we can remember who we were, and hold on to who we are.
This was remarkably similar to the recent words of the drummer Winard Harper. At the tribute to Ruth Moore of the legendary club Moore’s Place, he called jazz a preservative: a repository for the pain and struggle of a people. As long as we’ve got jazz to lean on, no dictator can ever rewrite history. The terrible, beautiful truth rings out in every note. It was no coincidence, then, that Harper and his trio provided the music for the Preservation Awards. Architecture is a language, too. Our old buildings contain powerhouse stories. They speak to anyone sensitive enough to hear their tales. Should, by neglect or design, we ever let them fall, they’re gone for good. Surely it is worth raising a little hell from time to time to keep them standing.
Editor’s note: This article is published in its entirety, courtesy of the Jersey City Times. Please show your support for Jersey City’s main online news source by subscribing for only $2.99 per month!
Tris McCall has written about art, architecture, performance, politics, and public culture for many publications, including the Newark Star-Ledger, the Bergen Record, Jersey Beat, the Jersey City Reporter, the Jersey Journal, the Jersey City Independent, and New Jersey dot com.
