By: Jy Hung Ong

For decades, immigrants and artists alike have caught a glimpse of the Hudson River and New York City from Union City, a New Jersey city across New York City by the Hudson River.

The town’s housing prices are not extremely high, so two winding roads — Mountain Road and Manhattan Avenue — have become a hotspot for sculptors and painters.

Raffaele Menconi, the designer of the flagpole bases at the New York Public Library, co-owned a mansion on Mountain Road back in 1912. Charles X. Harris, a painter of Americana, and Olive Kooken, a sculptor, both lived in a home up Mountain Avenue at different times during the 1900s.

Even in the 1980s the area still housed creativity. Bonnie Berger, the owner of a collective’s shop in Hoboken, owned a brick house in the area, her daughter Jennie Berger recalls.

“It was an amazing place to grow up,”, Jennie said. “We had a great backyard. My mom had vegetable gardens. We had hammocks, and a turtle was living there. It was a little oasis. We could see the fireworks every year. It was pretty unique.”

However, in 2005, Bonnie Berger, who bought the house for 130,000 dollars, received an offer she was unable to refuse. A couple investors offered her 1.7 million dollars for the property, and three years later, in 2008, another group of investors paid 2.8 million dollars for the property.

Slowly but surely, these investors bought a total of 12 houses on Mountain Road and Manhattan Avenue for between $360,000 and $6.5 million. Initially, a developer, namely Sky Pointe LLC, wanted to build 450 to 500 residential units in five towers. Instead, for reasons partly known by neighbors, nothing happened.

The houses have neither been developed nor demolished. Instead, fires, intruders, graffiti, broken fencing, and overgrowth have made the place feel unlivable. David Spatz, the city planner for Union City, said he has not heard from Sky Pointe in “probably six or seven years.”

“I think the city would like housing developed on that property, but in a way that is sensitive to the existing neighborhood and the cliffs itself, developing something that wouldn’t block views to the people live to the west of the property, but also be sensitive to the Palisades,” Spatz said.