"Sign" of the times: "A Jersey City Where Success Is a Requirement"?
If you’ve been traveling by PATH train into Manhattan lately, you may have seen the above ad for the Jersey City Economic Development Corporation. The ad features a picture of the Jersey City (aka Chilltown) waterfront with the text “A JERSEY CITY WHERE SUCCESS IS A REQUIREMENT” in the bottom left of the image; just below the frame of that image are the words: JERSEY CITY MEANS BUSINESS.
People are free to interpret this any way they like. For me, “A Jersey City where success is a requirement” naturally evokes “as opposed to one where success isn’t a requirement”? I think the business definition of success is popular enough for a meaning of this ad to “successfully” get across straightaway, but if you can bear in mind that success comes from a combination of personal achievements along with arbitrary things outside of one’s control, read on.
Jersey City was written off for a long time, roughly from the late seventies (post-white flight) to the early 2000s. Success during that time was, as it always is, somewhat subjective. But moving out of JC, to the county’s edges and their closer proximity to a better quality of life, was one form of success … people successfully getting away from the trappings of a city marred by disinvestment and the addiction epidemics of the eighties. Others were either in one of the slightly easier of the many versions of JC that existed, or wherever they were, JC was all they knew … with its sections (during that era) where people would literally come to dump trash. Others just simply didn’t have that option of better beyond JC. Maybe they weathered and found solidarity in the “Jersey City Curse,” and made that place where people from other places or neighborhoods dumped trash that much better; they picked trash up when people around them increasingly did less and less of that.
Isn’t that successful?
Many of those people, particularly in the city’s historically redlined section, continue to wait to feel like that sensibility in them is reinforced externally — by the city — and still have some sense of security about being able to stay there as the city undergoes its renaissance bolstered by being a nyc-adjacent real estate boomtown.
There’s a short video on YouTube where a man apparently tries to leverage his “350,000-year salary” as him inherently knowing more than the Dunkin Donuts employee he’s accosting for not taking an expired coupon. Let’s take the video’s narrative at face-value — just in the man thinking that him saying he makes that much money, possibly four times as much as the person he’s accosting, means that he knows more than the person behind the counter. “Success” there seems to be a kind of trump card.
Trump cards are big where there’s only so much to go around — or where there seems to only be enough for that. But they’re also a natural element of being in more “successful” waters … maintaining that by getting one’s offspring into the pipeline that gives them a trump card to stay there.
Hakim Hasan, a longtime resident of the city’s historically redlined Greenville section, had this to say: “In the next 10 to 20 years Jersey City will be unrecognizable to regular people. The PATH train stop at Journal Square (location-wise the heart of JC) clearly shows the demographic shift taking place due to high-rise apartment buildings being constructed in the area.”
Some people would see this criticism and say the point of the ad is fairly clear … it’s about business … but that’s the thing, if you see that and you ever successfully weathered anything in your own local Chilltown, maybe that ad feels like the kind of business as usual you’re already tired of dealing with.