Architectural History Experienced on the Journal Square Walking Tour

May 17

Written By JCLC

The Jersey City Landmarks Conservancy (JCLC) partnered with the Journal Square Community Association (JSQCA) for the Journal Square Walking Tour on Saturday, May 16, 2026 — an event that turned out being a picture-perfect day for experiencing, with each step, Journal Square’s nearly 350-year-old architectural landscape!

This specially curated walking tour — which the JCLC and JSQCA are planning to offer regularly starting this summer — offered participants the opportunity to:

Contemplate Anthony Padovano’s (1933–2023) iconic spherical stainless steel sculpture situated prominently since 1975 in the public plaza of the 1972 Journal Square PATH terminal;
Look down into a still-active railroad cut blasted through Palisades bedrock in the early 1830s and utilized primarily by PATH;
Stand in front of a graffiti-scarred vernacular stone house erected by the Newkirk family circa-1690 and shadowed by new skyscrapers;
Gain exclusive access to the vestibule, lobby, staircase, and atriums of the 1926-1928 Stanley Theatre, now a stunningly preserved and adapted movie palace space owned, managed, and cared for by Assembly Hall of Jehovah's Witnesses;
Walk through the super-block-long Operation Breakthrough (Summit Plaza), a pioneering modular construction federal housing project that was the first and last urban public housing vision of its kind;
Sit in front of the Five Corners Public Library, erected in 1962 as part of an ambitious civic building campaign in and around the Square;
Stare up at the former First Baptist Church of Hudson City, a Civil War-era house of worship on Summit Avenue, a once-quaint city artery being transformed daily by galleries of massive glass towers;
Peek inside the intact barrel-vaulted and stained-glass ceiling banking room of the former Labor Bank on Sip Avenue, an early Journal Square skyscraper designed by prominent architect John T. Rowland Jr. and erected in the late-1920s for members of local construction unions;
Visit Journal Square’s famous, and now-threatened, Boulevard Drinks, a Depression-era walk-up diner serving all-beef hotdogs, spicy sausage sandwiches, and store-made, brain-freeze-generating grape and orange drinks.

JCLC extends a special thanks to Margaret Doman of the Journal Square Community Association for helping to organize this specially curated walking tour of Journal Square!