Mack-Cali Unveils Latest Phase of Jersey City Waterfront Campus

As part of the ongoing growth of Harborside, its 4.3 million-square-foot office campus on the Jersey City, N.J., waterfront, Mack-Cali Realty Corp. on Monday unveiled the project’s latest phase by previewing a fully renovated and repositioned Harborside 1.

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The 422,590-square-foot, nine-story office building features a new façade, a reimagined lobby, as well as substantial infrastructure upgrades and is considered the anchor for the five-building Harborside campus.

A private terrace on the fourth floor offers views of the Hudson River and Manhattan skyline. The lobby level of Harborside 1 connects to a marketplace offering retail designed to cater to the professionals working there, as well as dining options and a waterfront boardwalk. The building is expected to achieve LEED Gold certification.

Mack-Cali also unveiled new public open spaces and announced summer programming, including the first New Jersey location for the country’s largest weekly open-air food market, Smorgasburg.

The company touts the campus’s ability to provide for office workers’ needs in a post-COVID-19 environment. In addition to five Class A office buildings, Harborside features more than 71,000 square feet of retail, indoor and outdoor dining options, fitness and wellness programming, and a daycare center.

More than 3,000 residential units are within walking distance, and the Hyatt Regency Jersey City, a five-star, 351-key, full-service hotel on the Harborside pier, serves as both a neighborhood and business amenity.

Hills yet to climb

Last October, Mack-Cali assembled a team of internal personnel and recent hires to guide Harborside’s ongoing transformation, including former Rockefeller Group executive Edward Guiltinan and Robert Willis, formerly of HEI Hotels and Resorts.

With modest gains in private employment, particularly in financial and professional services, unemployment in northern New Jersey has declined to 10.0 percent, Cushman & Wakefield reports. Despite this, the overall office market has seen a 90 basis-point increase in vacancy so far this year.

In Hudson County specifically, overall vacancy is a painful 20.0 percent on an inventory of 24.8 million square feet, although this submarket at least avoided the substantial net absorption that was common elsewhere in northern New Jersey, according to a first-quarter report from Cushman & Wakefield.