Museum Parc, a mixed-use project to create a campus around The Newark Museum of Art, will include 250 new apartments and commercial space, plus a 4,000-square-foot, glass-enclosed art and programming facility and other cultural components. — Courtesy: Newark Museum/LMXD
By Rosa Cirianni
New Jersey’s oldest museum has undergone a significant upgrade, solidifying its commitment to serve as a dynamic cultural hub for the region and beyond. It also is considered the cornerstone of the $100 million, blended-use project that’s poised to link two downtown neighborhoods.
Known as Museum Parc, the ground-up development is rising just south of The Newark Museum of Art under a plan that calls for 250 mixed-income apartments across two buildings, with ground-floor retail and additional cultural spaces such as a 4,500-square-foot glass-enclosed gallery. The project along Central Avenue is now about 50 percent constructed, its developers say, as anticipation builds for its full completion in 2027.
“It was really meant to complement the museum,” said Jake Pine of LMXD, which is developing Museum Parc alongside MCI Collective and MSquared. “The focus of the design was to make it inclusive, to go along with the mixed-income component, so we are creating a muse between two buildings. We wanted to feel contextual with its surrounding area, but not trying to be something that it’s not. It is new construction.”
The Newark Museum of Art, which sits on a 3.1-acre campus in the city’s Washington Street and James Street Commons Historic District, features the Learning & Engagement Center, which recently underwent an extensive $2.5 million renovation. Plans to update the space, a former YWCA in the late 1980s, initially began in 2019 during the beginnings of the larger Museum Parc project, which will be connected to it via a courtyard. No easy undertaking as the Learning & Engagement Center was designed in 1990 by the famed, Princeton-based American architect, Michael Graves, who died in 2015 and designed more than 400 buildings across the world including the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin hotel in Orlando and more than 2,000 everyday products.
Yet KSS Architects teamed with Phelps Construction Group LLC of Denville and AKF Group, a member of WSP Global Inc., a New-York based mechanical, electrical and plumbing firm, and began renovating the center in January 2025 to coincide with the beginning of construction for Museum Parc. Three out of the six floors in the Learning & Engagement Center are now open after receiving selective alterations, renovations and repairs to make way for even more visitors, school field trips, education classes, studios, professional development, summer programs, community events and new generations of patrons with airy spaces and improved accessibility.
“Completing the renovation of the Learning & Engagement Center is a major move for us — it’s a game-changer in making the museum a truly welcoming and accessible space for the whole community,” said Shirley Thomas Ward, The Newark Museum of Art’s deputy director of learning and engagement.
Museum Parc development update
The new Museum Parc residences, which have yet to be formally named, are slated for completion in early 2027. The developers will maintain a long-term, nominal lease, with the museum for the signature gallery space that will be housed on the ground floor of its community, LMXD’s Pine said. The architect of record for Museum Parc is Inglese Architecture + Engineering of Cedar Grove.
Designed to complement the museum and be inclusive with a mixed-income component, the two buildings are being constructed with a blend of masonry and stone. At Central Avenue and Washington Street is a six-story structure, while the other is a 12-story tower at the corner of Central and University avenues and intended to somewhat mirror the Rutgers-Newark campus across the way. Both residential buildings have topped out. The developers’ goal is to install the windows and get them closed in so builders can begin working on the inside by this year’s end.
“We also want this to be really viewed as kind of a gateway to the arts and education district, and to really attract and bring folks in the college through our site and into Harriet Tubman Square,” said Pine, a managing director with New York-based LMXD.
In addition to Museum Parc, LMXD and MCI Collective are expanding the New Jersey Performing Arts Center campus, also in Newark’s downtown. That $336 million project includes 350 new apartments, retail and office space and a 58,000-square-foot education center, along with a revitalization of NJPAC’s building on Center Street, just west of McCarter Highway.
Ongoing museum campus transformation
The first part of The Newark Museum of Art’s master plan included the adaptive reuse of The Ballantine House. That $12 million restoration took two years to address the historic mansion’s three-story exterior and interior, including 27 rooms, originally designed by architect George Edward Harney for Jeanette and John Ballantine in the late 1800s, according to the museum’s website.
Next came its renovation of the Learning & Engagement Center, which began about six months ago and includes 6,000 square feet of reimagined public interior spaces. KSS Architects, headquartered in Princeton, with offices in New York and Philadelphia, conducted extensive research and worked with museum leadership to ensure that it understood the scope of Graves’ work and honored his 1990 post-modernist designs. The group carefully removed physical barriers and revitalized the space to meet the institution’s current needs for a large open area to accommodate more interactive learning and engagement programming.
The renovation includes a fresh auditorium lobby in the lower level and revamped main and mezzanine levels. Many of the 1990s partitions that once dotted the main level of the museum for administrative offices, along with portions of walls and stairwells, have been eliminated. Now, more natural light can stream into the building, offering a greater sense of openness.
“As architects, especially with our office being founded in Princeton, we also have a tremendous amount of respect for Michael Graves and the work that was done there, so we were very careful in the renovation that we undertook to honor that,” said Jason Chmura, a partner with KSS, based in the firm’s New York office. “Some of the things that we changed or otherwise renovated brought it back to maybe some of what was a more pure version of Graves’ design.”
The Newark Museum of Art, also referred to as NMOA, showcases the state’s most comprehensive art collection. It boasts more than 300,000 objects of artistic, cultural and scientific importance from Asia, Africa and the Americas and offers the 12th-most extensive collection in the U.S.
“There’s certainly a general inspiration that this space need not compete with any of the work that is on display within the larger Newark Museum,” Chmura said. “There was a conscious effort to create really a canvas that the museum could curate.”
The Learning & Engagement Center now has an improved elevator to the museum’s main level and allows for more seamless connections to previously hidden and hard-to-reach educational spaces such as classrooms, the auditorium, gallery and multi-use event spaces located upstairs that had limited access views. Development organizers said they view the improved Learning & Engagement Center as the gateway to the city’s arts campus, which will strengthen the connection between The Newark Museum of Art and the city of Newark, cementing its place as a cultural anchor to complement NJPAC and other important cultural and academic institutions.
“Our museum has always been a champion of powerful art and stories, and now we’ve added a bold, vibrant space where our visitors can come together, whether to experience the art, learn something new or just connect with one another,” said Ward, the NMOA deputy director.
The Newark Museum of Art is a not-for-profit and receives financial support from the city, the state and numerous corporations, foundations and individual donors. In addition to the Ballantine House mansion, it also incorporates other historically significant structures. They include the Ward Carriage House and the Old Stone School House built in 1860 and 1784, respectively, as well as the Garden State’s first planetarium and the Newark Fire Museum. What’s more, the museum hosts the nation’s longest-running Black film festival and Newark Arts festival.
Up next
During the next phase of development, the existing Horizon Plaza owned by LMXD at the corner of Central Avenue and Washington Street will be connected to the museum’s existing sculpture garden and introduce several new works from artists such as Tony Smith, Holly Wilson, Yinka Shonibare and Sanford Biggers. That area will blend into a new green and public courtyard, converting existing parking lots to communal public spaces that the Learning & Engagement Center will overlook. One of the overarching project goals is to draw people in from Horizon Plaza into the public sculpture garden, Chmura said.
To top it off, when the larger Museum Parc redevelopment project is completed, even more exterior art will be infused to the area with a massive colorful mural by Kelley Prevard. Selected by the museum, the artist is commissioned to create two murals. One will cover the eastern façade of one of the new residential buildings along with a complementary mural on the museum’s Learning & Engagement Center.
Rosa Cirianni is a contributor to Real Estate NJ
