Health & Fitness
New Hoboken Community Gym Opens With Ribbon-Cutting
The gym at Seventh and Monroe streets, used for children's programming by day and open to the public by night, was donated by a developer.
HOBOKEN, NJ — Mayor Ravi Bhalla cut the ribbon on Wednesday afternoon to open a new community gym at Seventh and Monroe streets, open for children's programs in afternoons and for some public use at night.
Bijou Properties, which built the luxury development 7 Seventy House two blocks away, donated the gym. It was among several givebacks from the developer, whose 424-unit residential project is among a group of luxury buildings sprouting within a few blocks of the Ninth Street Light Rail station. Bijou also built a playground nearby and is finishing up an outdoor public plaza and 42 units of affordable housing. A 2-acre resiliency park adjacent to the gym is designed to retain floodwater.
The new 6,835-square-foot gym was built alongside the Jubilee Center, a community center for local kids that was constructed in the 1990s. The new gym hosts kids from the center from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. on weekdays, said the city's recreation director, Leo Pellegrini. From 4 p.m. to 8 p.m., the gym is used by the city's recreation basketball programs. Those programs hold their games during the weekends until 5:30 p.m.
Find out what's happening in Hobokenfor free with the latest updates from Patch.
On Mondays, Tuesdays, and Fridays from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m., adults can come in and use the gym for basketball, he said. It's first-come, first-served, with no online signups right now.
Pellegrini said the gym is mostly used for basketball, but the city is considering starting a recreation volleyball league for older girls there later this year. The city is also looking at various adult programs, such as tennis.
Find out what's happening in Hobokenfor free with the latest updates from Patch.
The city said that due to the incorporation of the gym, Hoboken has been able to increase the amount of children participating in recreation basketball from 694 in 2019 to 832 participants in 2020, a 16 percent increase. The gym has also allowed the city to add a division for girls in grades five to eight with three extra teams, and expand the total amount of teams in in grades three and four from 20 teams to 28 teams.
Pellegrini said that more information will be posted on the city website. Sign up for the city's recreation programs here.
Get more local news delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for free Patch newsletters and alerts.
