WHERE: Weehawken and Union City, New Jersey
START: Bergenline Avenue station (Hudson-Bergen Light Rail), fully accessible
FINISH: Palisade Avenue and 16 Street, Union City, then NJ Transit bus #123 to Port Authority Bus Terminal, Manhattan
DISTANCE: 2.8 miles (4.5 kilometers)
Photographs by Michael Cairl except as noted. Map courtesy Google Maps.
Route of this walk, reading from top to bottom.
On this walk, accompanied by my neighbor Michael, who is recovering from Guillain-Barre Syndrome and also has impaired mobility, I climbed the stairs in Weehawken, New Jersey I didn’t do a month ago. The walk started at the Bergenline Avenue station of Hudson-Bergen Light Rail. Bergenline Avenue is the busy commercial spine of Union City and neighboring West New York. We walked east along 48 Street to Boulevard East and then south, at the eastern edge of the steep cliff called Bergen Hill. I described Boulevard East in the post “The Stairs of Weehawken, Part 1” on this page. Just past Hamilton Park we dodged inland a bit and then downhill to the first set of stairs, at Jefferson Street.
Jefferson Street stairs from JFK Boulevard.
The Jefferson Street stairs are in very good condition except for the absence of a handrail on the right side, going up the bottom set of stairs. Total 74 steps.
Looking down from Jefferson Street.
Walking toward the Jefferson Street stairs we noticed this very old street sign.
From the top of the Jefferson Street stairs we had a short walk to the next set of stairs, 46 steps down from the corner of South Marginal Highway and Gregory Avenue to Park Avenue. These stairs are in excellent condition.
We then continued downhill on Park Avenue toward the Lincoln Tunnel entrance and the Shippen Steps, a continuation of Shippen Street. From Wikipedia:
In the past, the steps provided townspeople with access to Weehawken's original town hall, as well as the old police station, which was headquarter[ed] in the building at 309 Park Avenue. It was built in 1890, and the first floor features a jail cell where police operations occurred. The building was last used as the VFW post 1923 meeting place.In 2009, the town decided to renovate the building, which became the Weehawken Historical Society Museum. Across the street at the bottom of the steps is the granite wall which overlooks the art deco Lincoln Tunnel entrance. The Shippen steps have even been regarded as the haunted "Steps of Weehawken". In the mid-to-late 19th century, a pregnant woman fell down the steps, losing both her life and her child's, and in 1898, it was reported that a Shippen Street resident committed suicide at the head of the steps.
The lower set of the Shippen Steps, looking up from Park Avenue toward Hackensack Plank Road. Source: Theornamentalist, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
There are 100 steps up from Park Avenue to Hackensack Plank Road. A short distance from the top of these stairs in a second set of 39 steps up from Hackensack Plank Road to the end of Shippen Street. Both sets of stairs are in excellent condition.
Historical marker at the top of the second set of the Shippen Steps.
From the top of the Shippen Steps we walked west to Palisade Avenue, then south past Hackensack Reservoir Number Two to a good lunch at Fork Hill Kitchen in Union City. Entry to the restaurant is by way of 3 steps but it is accessible once inside. We were told they have a wheelchair ramp they can deploy.
Michael noticed that, in contrast to the stair streets in the Bronx, hardly anybody seems to use the stairs we climbed, that perhaps they were only for People Without Cars. It is true that in the Bronx the stair streets are generally well-used, fully part of the streetscape. The stairs in Weehawken are in excellent condition, except for the lack of a handrail at the Jefferson Steps and a missing section of handrail at the stair tower from Pershing Road to Boulevard East. It would have been nice to see more people using the stairs today. Nevertheless, it was a good walk, well worth doing through pleasant surroundings.
Lastly, a note of thanks to the driver of the crowded bus we boarded, who got the people sitting in the front seats to vacate them for us.
Steps climbed today: 213 up, 46 down, total 259.