First Look At How The New Secaucus Senior Center Will Look

SECAUCUS, NJ — On Friday, the town of Secaucus released never-before-seen renderings of how the new Secaucus Senior Center will look.

The new Senior Center will be a two-story building and it will be located on the site of the old senior center, at 101 Centre Avenue. The current building has been closed for several years now, after contamination was found in the soil, due to an underground oil tank.

Construction on the new Senior Center is scheduled to begin this May or June, and the town is hoping for a spring or summer 2024 opening date, said Secaucus town administrator Gary Jeffas.

The new Senior Center will be mostly for the town's seniors, but it will also serve as a sort of community center: There will be a large room downstairs for senior events and for people to gather; new offices for the Senior Services Dept. and a much larger kitchen to prepare all the Secaucus Meals-on-Wheels deliveries. There will also be a community room upstairs that anyone in the community, plus seniors, can use for meetings or community events, said Jeffas.

It will cost approximately $9.9 million to build the new Senior Center, and Secaucus' Congressman, Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-NJ9), secured $950,000 from the federal government to help pay for it.

"We needed this money to get the new Senior Center," said Secaucus Mayor Gonnelli in a press conference announcing the funding Friday morning. "Thank you so much to our congressman Bill Pascrell. I can't say enough about him."

It was Jeffas who applied for the federal funding in 2021 and had the town's first application rejected, as part of a much larger federal funding package that was approved by the House of Representatives, but did not pass through the Senate. Jeffas applied again for the $950,000 and was approved in 2022.

"It was cheaper to tear down the old senior center and build a new one than to do remediation from the oil tank," said Jeffas Friday morning. "We would have had to tear up the entire basement. It would have been very expensive."

"You're going to have a very nice building when you finally get this done," Congressman Pascrell told the Secaucus mayor and town Council Friday morning.