Awards for Preserving New Jersey History

The Department of Environmental Protection is joining the New Jersey Historic Sites Council and Preservation New Jersey in honoring projects that preserve the state’s history, Acting Commissioner Catherine R. McCabe announced. The 2018 award honorees include restoration of a World War II battery, a 19th-century lighthouse, a Victorian greenhouse, two downtown adaptive reuse projects, restoration of a Revolutionary War-era bridge, and a nomination of multiple maritime properties in a southern New Jersey community for listing on the National Register of Historic Places.

Awards were presented this month during the 28th Annual Historic Preservation Awards held at the historic Hamilton Club Building at Passaic County Community College.

One example is the East Point Lighthouse, which is located at the mouth of the Maurice River and Delaware Bay. Erected in 1849, East Point Lighthouse operated until after World War II. Once decommissioned by the U.S. Coast Guard, however, deterioration set in.

Since 2000, a combination of public funding sources has provided much-needed restoration work to address water damage, moisture levels, electrical and mechanical upgrades and accessibility. Today, the lighthouse is open to the public as a historic site.

A rehabilitation project that successfully combined development, design and preservation to become a model for urban revitalization is the historic 1901 Hahne & Company Department Store in downtown Newark. It was once one of the nation’s largest department stores until it closed in 1986.

Today, it is a 400,000 square-foot building that houses residential, retail, commercial and cultural uses as well as a newly expanded Rutgers University campus. The ornately detailed masonry and limestone exterior was meticulously restored as was the original monumental skylight over the interior public arcade.

A bridge on Route 206 over Stony Brook (Princeton, Mercer County) known as the Stony Brook Stone Arch Bridge, was built in 1792. It is New Jersey’s oldest stone-arch bridge still in use.

The ruins of Worth’s Mill Run, built in 1714, are next to the bridge, and the late 19th-century Stony Brook Floodplain Bridge is connected to the stone arch span. The collapse of a portion of the Stone Arch Bridge’s parapet in 2016 triggered a combined project to restore the Stone Arch Bridge and replace the Floodplain Bridge. Adhering to the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards, the design and preservation project yielded historic and scientific research benefiting the understanding of 18th-century stone bridge design and historic grist mill technology.

To learn more about the New Jersey Historic Preservation Office and its programs, visit: www.nj.gov/dep/hpo

SOURCE NJDEP - News Release 18/P048