At a Bay Street opening, the ironies of the Powerhouse Arts District are on view.
On a warm night in late February, just as the skies darkened over the Powerhouse, people gathered in an art studio without a name. Present in the long concrete-walled room on the ground floor of 130 Bay Street: organizers, curators, community leaders, and curiosity-seekers.
They’d come to see a show by the San Salvador-born oil painter Daniella Portillo and celebrate the unveiling of the newest exhibition zone in a neighborhood dedicated, by municipal ordinance, to the arts. Representatives of Kushner and KABR Group, an Englewood-based real estate company, have pledged a quarter of a million dollars to art exhibition in the Powerhouse Arts District.
Directly across Warren Street from the party at the Arts & Powerhouse Building, there is a quieter lot. Behind a tall black fence is an entire city block of nothing at all — nothing but the bricks of the building that once stood there, stacked in bundles and left to weather on rotting palettes. Seen from the upper floors of 130 Bay Street, the block feels like a real estate impossibility: a totally undeveloped sector of a pricy neighborhood crammed with newly-minted towers and towers-to-be. It’s a scar on the District from an old wound that went all the way to the bone.
Those bricks and this empty earth are all that’s left of the Arts Center at 111 First Street, once the creative heart of Jersey City before its demolition, nearly two decades ago, over the protests of a devastated arts community. The Arts Center is the reason that the District is here in the first place.
A few months from now, the neighborhood will be alive with visitors. They’ll crowd into the halls and studios at 157 Bay Street for Art Fair 14C, the largest event of its kind in the Garden State. It’ll be held at Project 14C, an ambitious residency program engineered by Fair director and organizer Robinson Holloway, and opened to the public for the first time this winter.
Should attendees wish to wander around the District, they’ll find shows at the galleries at 150 Bay Street, the beautiful Novado Gallery on Morgan Street, and the multi-purpose arts complexes at Nimbus and Art House Productions. In May, we’ll be closer than we’ve ever been to the dream, nurtured at 111 First Street, of a pedestrian-friendly neighborhood of galleries, happenstance, and creative experiments conducted right out in the sunshine. It’s ironic, and sad, that so few of the artists from the Arts Center will be around to see it.
A marvelously anarchic creative community coalesced and thrived at 111 First Street. That happened because property was cheap. Few people wanted to venture to the Warehouse District, as it was then called, and fewer still cared to live there. Nineteen years after the demolition of the Arts Center, the District contains some of the most expensive pieces of property in a very expensive state. Unable to afford the rents here, many 111 tenants moved away long ago.
The party at 130 Bay Street was a celebration of the opening of “The Sky in Layers,” Daniella Portillo’s lush airscape paintings. But it was also a real estate event in a building that cost thirty million dollars to renovate. Portillo’s meticulous renderings of sunlight in cloud layers were presented to the Jersey City public for the first time. So were Kushner and KABR Group’s available commercial spaces — big, unfinished, promising, suitable for masters of the universe or enterprising arts organizers who might fancy a view of the city skyline that is our great municipal work-in-progress.
The battery of harsh fluorescent lights — illumination better suited for a cubicle — in the lobby did Portillo’s work no favors. Neither did the unfinished walls and bossy exposed ductwork on the ceiling. It’s possible to see how 130 Bay Street could become a gallery, but in March 2025, it’s a very raw space, and it’s a little surprising that a company committed to arts development would consider it a suitable space for the presentation of subtle paintings.
For the Salvadoran painter, who now lives in the Hilltop neighborhood of Jersey City and maintains a studio in the basement of MANA Contemporary, the party was an opportunity to introduce her work and her voice to local arts leaders. The tastemakers from 14C were present, as were neighborhood gallerists and intrigued passersby from the residential towers nearby.
Portillo arrived in the PAD with the imprimatur of the Long Meadow Arts Residency, a colony in the Berkshires founded in 2021 by David Feldman and Jennifer Herman Feldman. She was also enthusiastically championed by the audacious printmaker Nicholas D’Ornellas, her neighbor at MANA and one of the most emotionally forthright artists in the whole complex. By the end of the evening, Daniella Portillo was more firmly embedded in the arts community than she was when the night began. One important mission was accomplished.
Yet it’s unclear how the building intends to follow up the opening. Portillo’s paintings will hang in the unfinished gallery through the spring months, but there aren’t plans to make the Powerhouse & Arts Building foyer a place where people can drop in and see a show. The space may be open for events or for special exhibitions — and hopefully during 14C — but there aren’t any gallery hours. There’s an arts organization supervising the bookings, but no day-to-day showrunner with a direct relationship to the community.
Kushner and KABR Group may not be ready to make that kind of dedication to the PAD. That commitment may be forthcoming. But until it does come, its developers are not participating in the District as it was imagined in the rougher, wilder building that once stood across the road. The artists at 111 First Street cherished the idea of an entire neighborhood that was wide open to the public. Since they existed on the rumbling fault line between creativity and commerce, they understood the relationship between art and real estate, and to the bitter end, they were willing to make compromises with developers to save the Arts Center. But they also knew that, for it to be meaningful, an art opening must be something more than an enticement to get prospective renters inside a property. Honoring their legacy and the history of the neighborhood means respecting that vision.
We’ve been inching toward a realization of the Arts District dream — too late to save the community that gave us the inspiration, but not too late to save our own souls. The ground floor exhibition space at the Arts & Powerhouse Building can be part of that effort. But if they want to play the game, they need to know the ground rules. They need a liaison. They need proper lighting. They need to open their doors on a regular schedule. And for Pete’s sake, they need to give their poor gallery a handle.
