Page 35 - RE-NJ Nov.2021 #59

By Joshua Burd
The Liberty Science Center has broken ground on a sweeping, $300 million expansion that will add a new business incubator, a high school and 400 apartments to its campus in Jersey City.
The museum and learning center recently welcomed public officials and business leaders, including some top commercial real estate executives, to mark the start of what it calls SciTech Scity, where
it hopes to launch and grow innovative science and technology firms and reshape public school science education. The first pieces of the new 30-acre campus will soon rise across the street from the 28-year-old facility on Jersey City Boulevard, with the potential to open starting in late 2023.
“We’re not breaking ground on just any new buildings today,” Gov. Phil Murphy said during the Oct. 22 ceremony. “When we turn over our shovels, we will be breaking ground on an entirely new and exciting world of possibilities in education, in innovation and in partnership and collaboration — and not just for Jersey City or Liberty Science Center, but for our entire state. Everything we will need to make New Jersey a global leader in innovation and technology, from education onward, will be right here on this campus.”
The first phase of the project
will comprise four components, including an eight-story business incubator known as Edge Works with a conference center and a technology exhibition gallery.
The facility will also have some 60,000 square feet of research and development labs, workspaces and co-working areas for dozens of startups, along with collaboration spaces, product showcases, consumer testing labs and offices for select well-established companies.
“We’re building a business optimizer that’s a new breed of innovation center that’s both going to maximize
commercial success and social impact,” said Paul Hoffman, the science center’s CEO and president. “We want to jumpstart the
creation of early-stage science and technology companies that, if they are successful, will radically change the world, will make the world
a great, better place. And what’s wonderful about an incubator is that, if you look at the statistics, 70 percent of the companies that make it out of an incubator set up permanent shop within five miles of where they’re birthed. So that should bring a lot of jobs here to Jersey City and New Jersey.”
Plans also call for a public Liberty Science Center High School that will provide science, technology, engineering and math education to some 400 Hudson County students, who will have access to the users at Edge Works, according to a news release. Elsewhere on the site, the science center has tapped Alpine Residential to develop some 400 apartments geared toward scientists, entrepreneurs, graduate students and individuals and families that want to be part of the SciTech Scity community, who will be able to test new high-tech products in their homes before the rest of the world.
Additionally, phase one is slated to include four acres of outdoor space, with an events plaza for performances, concerts, maker fairs, farmers markets, large participatory science experiments, hackathons, art projects and food truck festivals.
In describing the project, Hoffman noted that it
Edge Works, an eight-story business incubator depicted in this rendering, is one of four pieces within phase one of SciTech Scity, a planned $300 million expansion of the Liberty Science Center’s campus in Jersey City.
truly ambitious and transformative. To be sure, the mayor said it was critical to have something of scale and impact to go along with the many other high-profile projects taking place in the city — from commercial construction to new investments in arts and culture.
“We wanted to make Jersey City further a destination place to attract people, regardless of where you are, from beyond this region to come here, knowing about what was happening here,” Fulop said. “So we started off on this course to where we are today.” RE
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Steven Fulop
will occupy land that was donated by
the city of Jersey City in 2017, adding that Mayor Steven Fulop challenged him
at the time to develop a use that was