Hoboken Brownstone Donates Riverfront Park to City of Hoboken

By Barbra Murray, Contributing Writer

Hoboken, N.J.–Hoboken Brownstone Company, a real estate development firm established approximately three decades ago, has been committed to socially conscious real estate endeavors along New Jersey’s Hudson River Gold Coast from the start, so its recent gifting of the 13.5-acre Maxwell Park in Hoboken to the City comes as little surprise.

Hoboken Brownstone principals Daniel Gans and George Vallone came into possession of the land that is presently home to Maxwell Park and the Maxwell Place on the Hudson luxury residential condominiums in 1999, when they acquired the property with Gotham Partners Hedge Fund as Gotham Partners L.P. The team commenced with securing all necessary approvals for development, and in 2004 Gotham Partners sold part of the 24-acre site to Toll Brothers Inc., which proceeded to construct the Maxwell Place mixed-use condominium complex.

Infusing $2 million into the Maxwell Park project, Hoboken Brownstone converted the remaining property, consisting of 3.5 acres of waterfront land and 10 acres of water, into a popular public destination with a riverfront walkway, a 500-foot fishing pier, a boat launch, playing fields, a children’s playground and a dog run. Perhaps most notably, Maxwell Park features a natural sand beach and a recreation of the 1865 New York Yacht Club Boathouse, the first yacht club boathouse in the United States. Maxwell Park holds the distinction of being Hoboken’s largest waterfront park on the Hudson River ever developed by a private real estate concern.

“One of the main goals when conceptualizing Maxwell Place was to transform its waterfront, which was formerly used for factory and manufacturing purposes, into open and green space that allows the public access to the river, the way the waterfront was prior to its industrialization in the early 1900s,” Vallone notes in a prepared statement. “Handing over control of Maxwell Park to the City is validation that we’ve realized our vision.”

For some commercial real estate firms like Hoboken Brownstone, it is not always about the money. In many instances, such companies see fit to give, rather than sell. The St. Joe Company donated 4,000 acres in Florida to serve as the site of the new Panama City-Bay County International Airport, and in June of this year The Irvine Company gave Orange County in California 20,000 acres of protected open space and parklands along the Pacific Coast in the final segment of a total 50,000-acre donation.