Eric (left) and Paul Silverman, brothers and principals of SILVERMAN, are pictured at Andco North, a coworking space within their newest mixed-use development in Jersey City’s Hamilton Park section. — Photo by Aaron Houston for Real Estate NJ
By Joshua Burd
Sarah Sacco may well be the quintessential resident and business owner in Jersey City’s Hamilton Park neighborhood.
Her landlord, Paul Silverman, is understandably eager to explain why, starting with when he convinced Sacco, a onetime tenant at the developer’s artist studio space on Erie Street, to hold a pop-up store at one of his nearby residential properties. The response to her lifestyle and home goods products dwarfed the business she was doing at weekend events in Brooklyn, he said, prompting her to drop the commute and open a permanent store at the firm’s Hamilton Square building in late 2022.
Sacco’s shop, Love the Clutter, is also just a block from her apartment at another Silverman-owned building.
“Sarah is one of my life success stories,” said Silverman, who cofounded the development firm SILVERMAN in 1981 alongside his brother Eric. “Love the Clutter is a great example of that.”
Hamilton Park, the idyllic, brownstone-lined enclave that surrounds the five-acre green space of the same name, is filled with such stories. The Silvermans have had much to do with it, having built some 500 residential units and 150,000 square feet of commercial space in the neighborhood over the past 35 years. Equally if not more important is their highly visible, hands-on style and high level of engagement with their tenants that continues long after their buildings open — creating an ecosystem where many residents live and work, often helping them move from one SILVERMAN property to another as their families and businesses grow.
The firm is marking its latest milestone in Hamilton Park — which sits just south of the Holland Tunnel approach and west of the city’s Newport section — with the mixed-use project known as Swift & Co. Located at 220 9th St., the nine-story building houses 59 apartments and 80,000 square feet of commercial space that’s now fully leased, including office space that is home to a real estate brokerage, marketing and engineering firms and multiple health care users, as well as businesses such as a bagel shop, a ceramics studio and a hair salon, filling out a neighborhood that now seemingly wants for nothing.
Importantly, the building also houses an upscale, 20,000-square-foot coworking space known as Andco North, supporting dozens of other entrepreneurs and providing much-needed event space for local businesses and community groups.
“It’s been a real hub for activities there and a magnet for the neighborhood and for business production,” Paul Silverman said. “People can be very productive walking to work and meeting people locally.”
The brothers’ Hamilton Park story is more than 40 years in the making. Eric Silverman recalls being in Jersey City in the early 1980s, when he was working for the developer that would repurpose a sprawling warehouse on Erie Street into what’s now the Port Authority Technical Center. Fresh out of college, he made a point of exploring the neighborhood and came upon Hamilton Park just three blocks to the south, where he found a space with an unsightly chain link fence but a “nice square” shape that fit seamlessly with the street grid.
“It popped into my mind that this has some kind of future,” Eric Silverman said. “I guess, at that point, it resonated as a personal ambition to fixing up that neighborhood.”
SILVERMAN’s earliest acquisitions in the city, in the mid-1980s, included a condominium building about two blocks from the park. In 1998, the brothers purchased a century-old former brass foundry building at 10th Street and Jersey Avenue, a block north of Hamilton Park, which they would restore and repurpose to create luxury apartments that were accented by the structure’s historic industrial features.
Their plans to develop other projects in the area leapt forward in 2006, when SILVERMAN acquired the defunct St. Francis Hospital complex that included five buildings on a two-acre superblock just east of the park, between 8th and 9th streets. The firm began by rehabilitating a large, 11-story section of the former hospital along Pavonia Avenue to create Hamilton Square, a collection of 124 condominiums and 50,000 square feet of retail space that opened in 2009.
It was also in those years that SILVERMAN opened the 60-unit Schroeder Lofts at 234 10th St. and another 25 homes at 210 9th St., in 2007 and 2013, respectively, in projects that also included a restaurant and a school. In 2018, it unveiled a ground-up, 99-unit luxury apartment building adjacent to Hamilton Square known as Park Francis with additional retail and restaurant space.
All of which has given way to Swift & Co., where it redeveloped a former hospital parking garage and unveiled the first of its 59 rental homes in early 2022. And the firm recently completed its lease-up of the property’s 80,000-square-foot commercial component, whose tenants also include a veterinarian, Tiger Schulmann’s Martial Arts and a photo studio, among others.
“Now we’re back to 2025 and the story really has emerged perfectly in Hamilton Park, because it’s a great place to live,” said Eric Silverman, whose firm has developed some 1,500 residential units and 250,000 square feet of commercial space overall in Jersey City. “And there’s just so many things, you don’t have to leave the neighborhood.”
That’s especially true for those residents who also work or own businesses in the district. The Silvermans estimate there are 15 or so such examples, including Sacco and Love the Clutter, which have emerged over the past 20 years as they’ve curated a mix of shops, services and eateries with a focus on building an all-inclusive environment.
As the brothers note, that goes hand in hand with constantly walking their properties and speaking to tenants, giving them a real-time sense of the types of services that residents and merchants feel are missing from the neighborhood. They’re also master networkers who are deeply involved in foundations, community events, education and other philanthropic endeavors in Jersey City, which often leads to encounters with or introductions to entrepreneurs that see an opportunity to expand to Hamilton Park.
“It’s a lot of serendipity that way,” said Paul Silverman. He recalls, for instance, convincing the owner of the Jersey City Bicycle Co. to expand from the city’s McGinley Square section to Hamilton Park, in part by giving him pop-up space during the pandemic. The brothers also point to Betty’s Ceramics Club, whose co-owner is the daughter of the Silvermans’ landscape architect. The business opened at Swift & Co. in 2023, but only after several years of coaxing the proprietors, McKendree Key and Sam Spratt, to move from their pottery studio in Brooklyn.
“It’s opposite the model that a lot of the institutional real estate operators have, where they just hire a broker, put up a sign and see who calls them,” Eric Silverman added.
“We’ve flipped it around and we meet with our team and some of the established neighborhood people and say, ‘What do you need?’ and then go after that company.”
While he concedes that “not everything has been a success,” that approach has served the neighborhood well and fostered a diverse environment. That’s also on display at Andco North, whose 160 members include many Hamilton Park residents and range from graphic designers and music producers to doctors who conduct telehealth visits from the site.
Led by John Tokar, the coworking space offers a mix of desks that are available via day pass, 10-day pass or an open membership costing roughly $350 monthly, as well as reserved desks and private offices. Users have access to shared amenity spaces, conference rooms and in-house bar and kitchen areas with filtered water, coffee and beer on tap. All of it adorned by design choices that draw directly from the neighborhood — from hundreds of handmade, custom tiles from Betty’s Ceramics Club to preserved elements from St. Francis Hospital, including clocks from the operating rooms and turquoise pharmacy cabinets that have been incorporated into the kitchenette.
SILVERMAN debuted the space last fall as an expansion of its Andco coworking hub about a mile away at Charles & Co., a mixed-use building on Montgomery Street with 99 apartments and office and retail space. That allowed the firm to enhance its offerings in many ways, including technology such as an app-based entry system and, perhaps most notably, in the realm of event space. To that end, Andco North has a large meeting or lounge area that’s separate from the main coworking space, allowing users to host functions without interrupting the day-to-day activities.
That space is for rent, and not just for Andco members, but for community groups and other users, providing a feature that the Silvermans say was missing from the area. In recent months, it has hosted everything from fundraisers for local nonprofits to a back-to-school night for the neighboring Scandinavian School.
“It definitely fills a need for people who are stuck in their apartments working, people who need a place to go,” Eric Silverman said, noting that the space has hosted roughly 40 events to date. “It’s become a hub in the short amount of time it’s been open.”
