After a years-long saga with countless twists and turns came to end last month, new reports signal that the site once prepared for the Centre Pompidou’s Jersey City museum has been eyed for affordable housing and community space.
As reported by Gothamist (beneath a headline that begins “Au Revoir, Pompidou”), Jersey City Mayor James Solomon, shortly after taking office in January, “announced Monday that the city would work with Kushner Real Estate Group on new plans for the Artwalk Towers development at 808 Pavonia Ave. in Journal Square.”
That runs starkly counter to once-ambitious plans for a starry outpost of Paris’s Centre Pompidou in a city just across the Hudson River from New York. As reported by ARTnews when the plans were summarily canceled, the Centre Pompidou x Jersey City “was first announced in 2021 as a 58,000-square-foot museum set in a 109-year-old building on Journal Square. But as often happens in New Jersey, local politics interfered, and the plan quickly festered.”
Concerns over the budget were raised in 2023, and in 2024 the plans—initiated by Jersey City’s previous mayor, Steven Fulop—were amended to envision an even-bigger museum at a different location within Jersey City. But when Solomon took over for Fulop in City Hall, he reported a $250 million budget deficit. As noted by the Hoboken Girl, “An audit found nearly $20 million was spent on consultants for the Pompidou museum project, including $7.5 million to a single architecture firm, yet nothing was ever built.”
