Hoboken Museum To Host Gentrification Talk, Film This Weekend

HOBOKEN, NJ — The Hoboken Historical Museum has planned two events this weekend that elucidate the hazards of gentrification in the mile-square city in the 1980s.At 7 p.m. Saturday, 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 (and 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, when apartment buildings and brownstones that were "delivered vacant" to buyers (in other words, without existing tenants), they were more valuable. At 4 p.m. on Sunday, 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. 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.