With the addition of 500 new apartments in recent years and hundreds more in the pipeline, local officials in Bound Brook are forging ahead with efforts to revitalize their downtown.
In Hackensack, a proving ground for Cap Hospitality
In crafting the design of the new Cap Diner, Nicolas Geeraerts said he wanted to “bring a little bit” of New York and Brooklyn, while also staying true to New Jersey. He also aims to create a younger, millennial vibe that is also going to attract families. The overall objective is to create a place “that is approachable, pricewise, for everybody (and) … where a community can get together without one person being better than the next,” said Geeraerts, who oversaw the development of a high-end food hall above New York Penn Station.
Editor’s note: Mastering the middle
Even before I started covering commercial real estate full-time, I still came across development stories during my earlier days as a metro reporter in Central Jersey. One of those stories came when I was covering Bound Brook, a borough in Somerset County that had a tired downtown and a history of being battered by flooding from the Raritan River. But in early 2011, we learned that a developer named George Capodagli was interested in building the type of new apartments that were starting to crop up elsewhere in the state.
