by I live in a tower named for a square named for a newspaper. My building is called Journal Squared, three glass sections rising beside the Journal Square PATH station in Jersey City, one of the busiest stations in the system. The square below is Journal Square, which the city created in 1923. The newspaper was the Jersey Journal, which ceased publication on February 1, 2025, at the age of 157. Two of those three things still exist. The paper is not one of them.
The old Journal building stands about three minutes from my lobby. It holds its ground at 30 Journal Square, low and solid against the towers around it, and a red sign bearing the paper’s name still sits on its roof above the plaza. The letters are the first thing I see when I come up out of the PATH. The sign reads JERSEY JOURNAL. Nothing beneath it has meant that for years.
The paper announced its own end on October 30, 2024. The Jersey Journal would cease publication on Saturday, February 1, 2025, after 157 years of covering Hudson County. David Blomquist, its editor and publisher, supplied the epitaph in one sentence. “We fought as hard as we can for as long as we could.” Seventeen employees remained at the end, eight of them full-time. All were let go. On its final day the paper ran its own history under the head “The voice of Hudson for 157 years,” and reprinted a note from its eleventh birthday in 1878. The young Evening Journal had entered its twelfth year, the editors wrote, “in vigorous health, and has a good prospect of long continued and useful life.” The prediction held for a century and a half. Then it failed.
The cause of death was a printing press. The Journal no longer owned one. It had outsourced its printing years earlier to the Star-Ledger, and in 2024 the Star-Ledger’s owners decided to close their Montville plant and end their own print run. A new printer would have cost more than a small, newsstand-driven circulation could carry. An online-only edition, Blomquist said, would lack the scale to support “the strong, politically independent journalism that has distinguished The Journal.” Five papers that shared the Montville plant lost their print runs. The Journal was the only one that died outright.
The paper was independent, and its survival was always improbable. Two Union Army veterans founded it on May 2, 1867, with $119 and a hand press in two rooms on Exchange Place. They called it the Evening Journal and printed four pages. The first issue promised to be “frank and fearless, neither dreading the displeasure, nor fawning for the favor of anybody.” A reader that spring could hold the whole enterprise in one hand.
The paper grew into the county’s spine. Joseph A. Dear II renamed it the Jersey Journal in 1909, and it spent the twentieth century chronicling Frank Hague’s eight terms as mayor, the machine he built, and the machine’s slow decay. Circulation passed 80,000 copies a day at the peak. The Journal printed as a tabloid because its readers rode buses and trains. Its front pages were built to stop a commuter racing to the PATH. One longtime favorite head read “Sex … fries, & ‘punch in the nose.'” The paper absorbed the Bayonne Times in 1971 and the Hudson Dispatch of Union City in 1991. Ambitious reporters used it as a first rung, and George R.R. Martin watched Hudson politics from its newsroom before he invented a crueler one.
The square owes the paper its name, and the debt was literal. The Journal had worked at Bergen and Sip Avenues since 1911. In 1923 the city condemned and demolished that building to carve a broad intersection out of the old blocks. The paper built a new headquarters on the spot, and the new square took the newspaper’s name. This was a bargain between ink and asphalt. The Journal lent the city’s new front room an institution, and the city lent the paper the kind of immortality conferred by maps and station names. The name was always partly real estate.
The paper moved into 30 Journal Square in 1925. That May it marked its fifty-eighth birthday in the new home. A red sign went up over the roof. The newsroom worked beneath it for nearly ninety years, which means the sign advertised a living thing for most of a century. Times Square kept its name after the Times moved uptown, and the Times kept printing. Jersey City is trying the harder version.
The square in its prime was the city’s second downtown. The Stanley Theater opened in 1928, and the Loew’s Jersey followed a year later with 3,200 seats. Across the plaza, the Labor Bank Building at number 26 was the city’s first skyscraper. For half a century the square held the crowd at rush hour that downtown held at lunch.
John F. Kennedy tested the square’s pull two days before Election Day in 1960. Senator Kennedy came to Journal Square on November 6 and opened his remarks by naming Governor Meyner and Mayor Kenny, the old machine’s heirs, before a crowd packed into the plaza. Hudson County then gave him 174,754 votes to Richard Nixon’s 113,972, a plurality of 60,782 in one county. Kennedy carried the whole state by 22,091 votes. Hudson’s plurality alone ran nearly three times his statewide margin. A crowd drawn to the square, in the paper’s shadow, could outweigh the rest of New Jersey.
The paper’s long contraction began quietly. Management warned in 2009 that the Journal would close without new revenue and deep cuts, and concessions by the staff plus support from readers and local businesses bought it fifteen more years. The paper announced the building’s sale in late 2012. Secaucus took the newsroom in January 2014, and a small office stayed on Montgomery Street. The paper had left the square eleven years before it died, and I never knew the plaza with the paper in it. The name stayed on the roof and on the map, practicing to be an epitaph.
The craft held to the end. The New Jersey Press Association gave the Journal its general excellence award in April 2024, the second time in three years the paper won or shared the state’s top prize for a community daily. Its reporters had uncovered mismanagement and excessive spending inside Jersey City’s government, and they exposed the depth of the fiscal crisis at New Jersey City University. Seven months after the award came the announcement. Excellence was never the problem. Logistics was.
A city loses something specific when its paper of record dies. Jersey City held 292,449 people at the 2020 census, the state’s second-largest city and the seat of a county of 724,854. The Journal was the last daily whose only assignment was those twelve Hudson municipalities: the council chambers and courtrooms, the obituaries and legal notices, the high school gyms. A paper of record is where a community’s facts get sworn in, day after day, in an order anyone can find later. The facts will keep happening. Fewer of them will get written down anywhere permanent.
Hudson County is the wrong place for facts that nobody keeps. This is the county that gave American corruption its textbook, from Hague’s machine down to July 23, 2009. That morning FBI agents arrested 44 people in Operation Bid Rig, among them the mayors of Hoboken and Secaucus and the deputy mayor of Jersey City. A daily paper cannot prevent that. It can remember the names when the next case comes. The next indictment will draw cameras for a day. The routine meetings that precede indictments draw almost nobody now.
The remaining watchers deserve an honest count before any eulogy. Hudson County View streams and reports the Jersey City council meetings with real persistence. Jersey City Times, a nonprofit startup, covers the city. Patch keeps a reporter in the county, and NJ.com sends its own. Some of this work is excellent, and I read it. The math still fails. No combination of the survivors fields seventeen sets of eyes on Hudson alone, and seventeen was already a skeleton. What vanished in February was the last full-time assignment desk whose sole jurisdiction was this county. When a spokeswoman’s statement becomes the record, the record becomes what the spokeswoman says.
I moved here after the paper had already gone. What I inherited was the name: on the tower’s leasing materials, on the PATH map, on the roof of the old building. In the week the last edition came off someone else’s press, the sign above the plaza read exactly what it had read the week before. That is what an epitaph does. It never has to update.
Skeptics will say newspapers die everywhere now. Hudson County has had more practice than most. The Hudson Reporter chain collapsed in 2023, laid off its staff, stopped printing, and sold its domain name, and Patch reporters say what publishes there now steals their work and signs fake bylines to it. Practice at losing papers is the problem. A county that keeps losing its witnesses stops noticing what goes unwatched. I am not mourning a myth. The Journal at the end was a small newsroom and a newsstand circulation. I am counting what those people did, and what zero will do.
The developers prize the word precisely because the economy threw the paper away. Journal Squared leases roughly 1,840 apartments off the borrowed weight of “Journal,” in towers whose tallest section rises seventy stories over the station. The word promises newcomers a real place with a real past, and it does for rent rolls what it once did for readers: it holds attention. Authenticity is an amenity now, listed somewhere between the pool and the package room. The paper spent 157 years building the trust the name carries, and the name now compounds rent. My own building is proof. I pay for that word every month.
Kushner Companies owns the old Journal building now, and its approved plans show what the word is worth. The current design, greenlit in late 2019 and extended through January 2027, calls for a 68-story tower rising 718 feet behind the historic property, 745 apartments drawn by Morris Adjmi’s firm. No affordable units are required, and none are included. The redevelopment plan keeps the red sign on the roof until 2100. That sign gets a guaranteed home for the rest of the century, while the reporters got three months of notice. The paper that would have asked about the affordability math is no longer available for comment. For now the tower exists only on paper. When it rises, the sign will still be the oldest thing up there.
Two transactions deserve separating. In 1923 the city named a square for a working institution, by ordinance and condemnation, and you could walk off the plaza and buy what the name made. In 2025 the market preserves a word whose product has ceased, by easement and rendering, and you can lease what the name makes. The first naming was public business, argued in the open. The second is private extraction, approved by planning boards that vote on bulk and parking and never on meaning. Nobody voted for the epitaph. Nobody was asked.
A city loses the difference between being remembered and being watched. That is what happens when its paper of record becomes a place name. A name on a map sits there remembering. A newsroom goes out and watches, on deadline, with a phone and a grudge. Jersey City keeps the word “Journal” on tower glass and PATH announcements and the red sign, and the word is finishing its change from promise to ornament. The council keeps meeting. Budgets keep passing. The county goes on being the county that produced Hague and Bid Rig, with fewer people paid to notice.
Night comes down over the plaza the same as ever. Buses pull out, the PATH exhales its crowd, and the red letters on the old building hold their position against the dark, facing people who never heard the presses and never will. The square will be here in 2100, and the sign with it. The paper is gone, and the paper was the point. Over the plaza the red letters hang like a front page held up to the crowd. The date on it never changes: February 1, 2025.
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