The man who destroyed The Record to develop former headquarters site Stephen Borg, who pushed aside his father to take over The Record and then start the spiral of turning the local daily newspaper into a Gannett rag, was the subject of a long, glowing article on his plans to develop the former headquarters site into apartments.
The story, reprinted in the Hackensack Chronicle on Friday, is so long that it jumps three times to inside pages, but I couldn't find the number of apartments that will be built there now that The Record's landmark headquarters have been torn down. In the past, city officials have said as many as 700 apartments would be built on most of the 19.7-acre site next to the Hackensack River.
Now, apartment developments like this one pass for local news in The Record and on NorthJersey.com.
Two things struck me about the experience of living there for the first tenants of the luxury apartments in 2021:
The noise of construction of the second phase and the clatter of freight trains passing the site will be a constant, and the rusting hulk of the 312-foot USS Ling submarine will be a curiosity and eyesore for people walking along the Hackensack River.And the Heritage Diner will remain.
As reflected by the reporting in the article, Borg and the other developers are desperate to portray their site as "connected" to the majority of new apartment buildings along Main Street, but there is no mention of pedestrian bridges across the speedway known as River Street.
I wonder how many pedestrian fatalities will occur when large numbers of tenants and visitors to the retail components of the development try to cross River Street.
The site wasn't vacant, as the story claims: Borg monetized the parking lot by leasing spaces to the courts and Hackensack University Medical Center until shortly before the building was torn down.
One of Borg's development partners is The Hampshire Real Estate Cos., started by Jon Hanson, a close friend of Malcolm Borg, former chairman of North Jersey Media Group, publisher of The Record. NJMG was sold for nearly $40 million in cash in July 2016 to Gannett, which eventually laid off more than 350 employees. Hanson, who was the chief fundraiser for Chris Christie, and Malcolm Borg once owned a private jet together.Stephen Borg is calling his development company Fourth Edition. The first apartments will be completed in early 2021 and the project is to be finished by 2025, for a total of five buildings with retail on the first floor of each. As shown in the article, the low-rise buildings are indistinguishable from all of the other apartment projects in Hackensack with the exception of the old United Jersey Bank Building and the 14-story apartment project on Main and Mercer streets that is years behind schudule.
The story carefully avoids naming Stephen Borg as one of the people responsible for putting nails in the coffin of Main Street when he pulled out more than 1,000 employees from the River Street building in the last few years before the site became vacant in 2009. At least one Main Street restaurant, Naturally Good, closed and others struggled.
Stephen Borg also was responsible for the biggest newsroom downsizing in The Record's history before the sale to Gannett. He announced that downsizing only a few months after obtaining a $3.65 million loan from NJMG to buy a McMansion in Tenafly, as this post from
Eye on The Record explains:
http://eyeontherecord.blogspot.com/2012/05/which-borg-is-calling-shots.html
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