Jersey City’s Universal Building Placed on 10 Most Endangered Historic Places 2025 List
On Saturday, May 3, 2025, Jersey City’s UNIVERSAL BUILDING was placed on Preservation New Jersey’s 10 Most Endangered Historic Places list for 2025. One of Journal Square’s first skyscrapers — and the location in the 1930s of Frank Sinatra’s first live-radio performances — the building is threatened with demolition and erasure as Jersey City looks to widen a pedestrian walkway for the benefit of well connected developers.
“The history of the Universal Building at 50 Journal Square is often underrepresented. It is a unique, early skyscraper to the area, and a marker of entertainment and technology history. Sinatra, among others, performed at the state-of-the-art studios of the WAAT Radio Station on the 8th floor while the public tuned-in afar. Others enjoyed live performances at the Loew’s Wonder Theater next door. Together these sites created an entertainment campus and examples of the shifts in technology and design at the time. They tell a story together and can’t be separated.”
Universal Building, 50 Journal Square, June 29, 2023, via Reena Rose Sibayan for The Jersey Journal
UNIVERSAL BUILDING IMAGE GALLERY
UNIVERSAL APPEAL NEWS ARTICLE
The Jersey Journal, Monday, July 10, 2023
