WHERE: Weehawken, New Jersey
START: Port Imperial station (Hudson-Bergen Light Rail), fully accessible
FINISH: Boulevard East and Hudson Place, Weehawken, then NJ Transit Bus #128 to Port Authority Bus Terminal, Manhattan
DISTANCE: 0.5 mile (0.8 kilometer)
Photographs by Michael Cairl except as noted. Map courtesy Google Maps.
Map of this walk, reading from top to bottom.
Directly across the Hudson River from midtown Manhattan, Weehawken, New Jersey is best known for two things: the duel in 1804 between Alexander Hamilton, the first U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, and Vice-President Aaron Burr, and the western approach to the Lincoln Tunnel. Somehow I found out that Weehawken has a lot of stairs, so I went to see for myself and do some stair climbing. There are more stairs than I imagined, so after going up two stair towers with a total of 368 steps I stopped, choosing to do the rest another day.
The main part of Weehawken is up a very steep cliff from the flat lands on the riverfront. It was on these flat lands that the Burr-Hamilton duel took place. Hamilton, mortally wounded, was rowed back to New York to die. For over a century from the mid-1800s the lower part of town was taken up largely by passenger and freight railroad terminals, chief among them the West Shore Division of the New York Central. The image below shows what this looked like viewed from the top of the hill, at the intersection of Pershing Road and Boulevard East, around 1940.
Image courtesy pinterest.com.
The gabled building in the center of the image still exists; it is now a Mexican restaurant. And there is still a filling station where the Esso sign is.
Freight trains once transferred their cars to barges to be moved across the river and around the harbor. Passengers did the same, taking ferries to the foot of West 42 Street in Manhattan. The railroad terminals are gone, replaced by the Lincoln Harbor and Port Imperial mixed-use developments, parks, and the NY Waterway ferries to Manhattan. New Jersey Transit’s Hudson-Bergen Light Rail serves this area from Hoboken and points south. North of Port Imperial station, where this walk began, the light rail uses a portion of the West Shore right-of-way, including a tunnel under Bergen Hill that includes the only underground station on the system.
At the Port Imperial station there are stairs and a clean, working elevator to an overpass leading to Port Imperial on the east and a stair tower to Pershing Road on the west. The stairs are in excellent condition but the climb is arduous: a first flight of 11 steps followed by 11 flights of 12 steps each, for a total of 143 steps.
Port Imperial stairs, looking up.
Port Imperial stairs, looking down from Pershing Road.
From the top of the stairs I went downhill on Pershing Road’s narrow sidewalk to another stair tower, the Liberty Stairs. I was not prepared for what a climb this would be, and took a short break at each landing. But I made it up 225 steps to beautiful Boulevard East. These stairs are also in excellent condition, although a section of handrail is missing on one of the upper flights. Nice job, Township of Weehawken!
The Liberty Stairs, looking up from Pershing Road.
I biked along Boulevard East twice in the 1990s as part of a route from the George Washington Bridge to Hoboken and Bayonne. Then as now, the view of Manhattan was amazing and the houses with that view are enviable. Facing the river is lovely Hamilton Park, the centerpiece of which is Weehawken’s World War I memorial, flanked by smaller memorials to the Weehawken residents who died in World War II, the “police action” in Korea, and the Vietnam war.
Homes on Boulevard East across from Hamilton Park.
World War I monument.
The Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge is visible in the distance.
Historical marker on Boulevard East describing a long-gone amusement park. Interestingly, a short distance north of here was Palisades Amusement Park, also at the top of the cliff, that ran from 1894 to 1971.
I picked a beautiful day for this walk. There is much more to see around here and more stairs to climb. Today, these two stair towers were enough. I’ll be back to Weehawken for more.
Allow me a sidebar on those new super-tall towers visible in Manhattan. I’ll leave aside my distaste for them (alright, they’re disgusting). When I’m not full of bile about them, they call to mind a town in Tuscany, San Gimignano, where in the Middle Ages the leading people in town competed with each other to build tall towers in a long-running game of one-upsmanship. Most of the towers are long gone but on a visit there in 1991 I got to climb to the top of one. The view of the town and the green countryside was worth the climb. I doubt the towers on “Billionaires’ Row” will last nearly that long.
