Hoboken Museum To Screen Gentrification Documentary And Host Talk

HOBOKEN, NJ — The Hoboken Historical Museum has planned a host of events from this weekend through early February that may have special meeting to longtime residents but will also educate newcomers, particularly about the painful gentrification that took place in the city in the 1980s.

On Saturday, Feb. 1, at 7 p.m., the Museum will screen the award-winning documentary "Delivered Vacant," which then-Hoboken resident Nora Jacobson filmed in the 1980s and early 1990s as tenants were being forced to leave (or were burned out of) their apartments during a wave of condo conversions. The museum calls the film a "deeply researched and very human story of Hoboken's struggles with gentrification and displacement in the late 1980s-1990s."

The title of the documentary refers to the fact that during that period, apartment buildings and brownstones that were "delivered vacant" to buyers (in other words, without existing tenants) were more valuable.

The next day, Sunday, Feb. 2, at 4 p.m., Princeton scholar Dylan Gottlieb will visit to discuss his recent Washington Post article about the suspicious fires that occurred as Hoboken's apartments were converted to condos. In some cases, entire families were killed and their names didn't even make the newspapers.

This past December, the city voted to place a plaque in a small park as a memorial to residents who died in suspicious fires in town in the 1980s. At the time, the organizers of the project said, "There has been no official recognition or remembrance in the mile-square city for the horrific loss of life and the anguish Hoboken residents suffered. In their place, new residents moved into refurbished condos having no idea what occurred at an old tenement building before their arrival."

These museum events will provide some background.

The museum has also planned other important events, including a memorial this Sunday for Hoboken resident and artist Peggy McGeary, who was killed in Jersey City recently when her bicycle was hit by a truck. She was 79.

There will also be an event Feb. 9 for Black History Month, educating attendees "about the remarkable life New Jersey native Paul Robeson. The Museum is pleased to host a multimedia celebration of the great American actor and activist by actor Grant Cooper and Stevens Institute of Technology [in Hoboken] African American Studies scholar Dr. Lindsey Swindall."

To find out more information about the events, click on the Museum site here.