Hoboken is Temporary

 Matthew Kearney


Hoboken is Temporary

In the face of climate change, Earth's climate is becoming more dangerous by the day. Dr. Philip Orton, a research professor in ocean engineering at my university of Stevens Institute of Technology, explains that as our global sea levels rise, whether increased by 1 foot, 5 feet, or 10 feet, Hoboken and many other coastal communities will face immense changes. All modern infrastructure, from roads to real estate, must be reconsidered for the long-term projections subjected by climate change. Like the rest of the world, Hoboken must prepare for these severe events to promote future public safety.

I felt a sort of twisted feeling, being able to hear about such immense changes coming to my college city as it were, on this sunny, blue-sky day. It was a timely privilege. Had it been some years later, the Hoboken Pier C may not have looked, or even resembled as it did. Would I be able to touch the water then? Or would the pier even be here at all? Our societies must invest deeper in preventative flooding measures, which must be researched and implemented for the regions deemed at risk. 

Neil DeGrasse Tyson on his podcast StarTalk, provides a strong historical perspective on changing shorelines, helping us understand the modern climate migration crisis. While modern coastlines may seem fundamental, or inherent to our Earth, they obviously do not stay the same over time - they change. Our societies have also industrialized fairly recently, particularly in terms of the grand scheme of Earth and climate history, and we also know that many people now reside in very close proximity to shorelines, areas at high risk for flooding. 

Tyson exaggerates, that the coastlines we see, whether looking at the coastlines of Jersey, Florida, or California, are merely the coasts of today. Tyson’s co-host Chuck Nice explained the modern approach to a changing coastline, that is the transition from a natural stasis of shorelines and climate towards an "anthropomorphic engineering" response to coastline resilience, that is it is designed of, by, and for humans. Tyson adds, “We grew civilization on a stable climate and a stable coastline … in a timescale of decades, we’re looking at maybe changing all of that.”. 

Hoboken, the square-mile village city that my peers and I call home, experiences regular flooding from the city's position off of the Hudson, affecting areas in lower elevations. The community has begun preparing for the future of climate change with rising sea levels. According to the City of Hoboken, Northwest Resiliency Park is the newest addition out of three Hoboken parks focused on stormwater management. Northwest Park, located off of 12th Street and Adams Street, consists of two city blocks and 6 acres that used to be an industrial chemical plant from 1922 to 2004. 

Today, Northwest Park reserves up to one million gallons of stormwater runoff. Hoboken’s Southwest Resiliency Park, which opened first in 2017 holds up to 200,000 gallons, and the Resilience Park on 7th and Jackson Street can hold up to 450,000 gallons. In the past 8 years, Hoboken has developed the storage for over 1.5 million gallons of stormwater runoff in the case of extreme flooding or rainfall events, which many understand as a great win for urban resilience in the face of rising sea levels and an intensifying climate. 

Hoboken’s series of resiliency parks is a fundamental example of Chuck Nice’s previous meaning of anthropomorphic engineering. Hoboken was perhaps always a precarious location to put a city, as marshes and swamps used to cover the back ends of the city, and flooding seems to have only become more of an issue through urbanization. The area has done a lot of developmental work to overturn these wetlands into further urban sprawl. 

However, when Hoboken, or any other region, was settled and developed through the years, it would be very difficult or impossible to know how the land would fare for years in the future without modern insights from climate science and flood forecasting. The original settlers of Hoboken were not concerned by a changing Earth and rising seas, but today these are factors that our governing body needs to face head-on. We have huge populations, throughout the US and certainly throughout the world, residing in areas prone to dangerous weather events like flooding. Contemporary science allows us to understand future projections for the city’s future environmental and infrastructural state, and we should be eager to understand what impacts our different regions will be facing and how to begin preparing for the future now.

I don’t mean to suggest Hoboken is temporary, or that any other region should go underwater shortly. But we should be accepting of the idea that Hoboken as we know it today, is temporary. We should always be able to foresee and practice for extreme occurrences, on an independent, community, and federal scale. We should trust science and policy, to save lives in the future by laying out the groundwork now for actionable coastal and flooding resilience implementation.


















Works Cited

“Northwest Resiliency Park.” Northwest Resiliency Park, nwpark-cityofhoboken.opendata.arcgis.com/. Accessed 29 Oct. 2024. 

DeGrasse Tyson, Neil, and Chuck Nice. “How Our Coastlines Will Change.” YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiltX1ltHUM. Accessed 29 Oct. 2024. 

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