Scarinci: Jersey City’s New Art Museum Will Pay for Itself

Instead of criticizing New Jersey’s investment in the Jersey City branch of the Centre Pompidou x, Republican lawmakers should join with Democrats and applaud the outstanding accomplishment of Steve Fulop and the Jersey City Council members.

Pompidou x Jersey City will be a satellite of Centre Pompidou, Paris’s famed museum of modern art. It will not be located on the waterfront.  Instead, it will be in Journal Square’s iconic Pathside Building, where local residents can easily visit and where hundreds of thousands of state residents will have easy and affordable access by public transportation.

The museum is the Centre Pompidou’s first North American outpost. It will join existing locations in Shanghai, Brussels, and Málaga, Spain.  How could anyone dispute the prestige for the City of Jersey City, and for the State of New Jersey to join this roster of branch museums?

The Jersey City museum will exhibit art from the Centre Pompidou’s extensive collection, which includes artists such as Frida Kahlo, Joan Miró, Henri Matisse, and Marcel Duchamp. It will also host cultural events and educational programs, making international modern art accessible to the city’s population.

Project Will Deliver Culture and Revenue

In addition to making a name for the city and the state in the global art world, Pompidou x Jersey City is expected to further bolster the city’s economic growth and redevelopment. Fulop has worked diligently to revitalize the Journal Square transit hub into a cultural arts center.  The Pompidou x will be a showcase for the area and will certainly advance Mayor Fulop’s vision for the arts in Jersey City.

The Centre Pompidou x Jersey City will become a cultural mecca and will feature works from around the world. Its location in Jersey City, where nearly 20% of the population lives below the poverty level, will open the world of art to people who might have financial difficulty going across the river to New York, no less travel to Paris.

Equally important, the tourism dollars that will be brought to Jersey City as a result of visitors from all over New York and New Jersey will be a boom to the economy and its residents. Mayor Fulop is right when he says the new museum will be a draw for people to visit Jersey City and spend money at local businesses, just like the Liberty Science Center does. In time, however, the Pompidou x Jersey City has the potential to be so much more. For evidence, just look to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao — the NYC museum’s outpost in Spain has turned a virtually unknown city into a destination.

The Centre Pompidou x Jersey City is one of Mayor Fulop’s bold, ambitious ideas that he and his municipal council turned into a reality.  Future generations of Jersey City residents may very well consider this as one of his greatest accomplishments as Mayor and a turning point for the city.