Newark Museum of Art breaks ground on 250-unit apartment project

Construction of 250 market-rate and affordable apartments and a new contemporary art gallery next to the Newark Museum of Art will be completed in early 2027, the project developer said Wednesday during an indoor “groundbreaking” ceremony.

Jake Pine, a managing director with LMXD, an affiliate of L + M Development Partners of Larchmont, New York, said it would take 24 months to construct the long-awaited Museum Parc project.

“We started this journey over five years ago,” Pine said before a crowd of about 150 people in the museum’s skylit atrium. Addressing the museum’s CEO, Linda Harrison, he added. “You have been an incredible partner.”

L + M is developing and will own the project with Manhattan-based MSquared and Newark-based MCI Collective.

The project is on the museum’s 4-acre downtown campus across Washington Street from Harriet Tubman Square.

Work has already gone on for several weeks, with a foundation already dug for the first of two apartment buildings on the site’s southern end along Central Avenue, between Washington and University Avenue.

Plans call for constructing the two buildings on a 1-acre parcel that the developer acquired from the 116-year-old private nonprofit museum as part of the development deal.

One will be a six-story structure with 90 apartments and a 4,216-square-foot gallery space for contemporary art operated by the museum. Pine said LMXD will own the gallery space, but the museum will lease it at no cost for 99 years.

The other building will be a 12-story tower with 160 apartments and 2,598 square feet of ground-floor restaurant and retail space.

Fifty of the apartments, which will be located in both buildings, will be affordable units, charging below-market rents and set aside for people with low and moderate incomes.

The new development will occupy what had been Horizon Plaza, a little-used patch of grass and walkways at the corner of Washington Street and Central Avenue. However, Pine said that a sculpture garden behind the John Ballantine House, a historic mansion that’s part of the museum, will remain an open space.

Wednesday’s event was hosted by the museum board of director’s chairman, Peter T. Englot, a former vice chancellor at Rutgers University-Newark. Englot kicked things off on a whimsical note, singing an a cappella — and on-key — verse from the 1964 Frank Sinatra hit, “The Way You Look Tonight,” subbing in “today” to more aptly address the afternoon crowd.

Englot was among those during Wednesday’s decidedly progressive gathering to refer to President Donald Trump’s shock and awe campaign of federal government layoffs, spending cuts, and immigration raids.

In contrast to Newark’s leaders, Englot said, “In Washington today, people committed to doing the right thing are in short supply.”

Generally, however, the event was an hour and a half of love and shout-outs praising Newark’s arts community, the museum, its departing director, and its arts-oriented mayor.

The museum is an anchor institution of Newark’s Downtown Arts & Education District, conceived by Harrison and officially established in 2023 by Mayor Ras J. Baraka, an accomplished spoken word artist in his own right.

Baraka told the crowd that the Newark Museum of Art was “the greatest museum in the State of New Jersey” and that the project being celebrated Wednesday was one more sign of the city’s renaissance.

“Newark is on and popping right now,” said Baraka, a Democrat running for governor.

Atlantic City-based muralist Kelley Prevard said the work she will create for the project will incorporate “earth, air, fire and water.”

Harrison will step down as museum director in May after six years in the position. Her tenure has included presiding over the completion of a restoration and re-imagining of the 19th century Ballantine House to better reflect Newark’s population of today, adding the words “of Art” to the museum’s name, and planning and negotiations for the apartment project.

“With Museum Parc, we create a multi-use cultural anchor in the heart of Newark, with intention, with expertise and with empathy,” Harrison said. “We are committed to telling inclusive stories through art in our galleries and around our campus.”

Others who spoke included MCI managing partner Siree Morris, state Senate Majority Leader Teresa Ruiz (D-Essex), Newark City Council President C. Lawrence Crump, and his predecessor in that post, U.S. Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-10th Dist.), who succeeded the late Donald Payne Jr. in the largely Newark-based House seat.

McIver and others noted that Museum Parc was conceived in 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic, and then delayed as a result. And there were more recent snags after the project’s planning resumed.

It was McIver who, while still the council president last spring, delayed a city tax abatement for the project due to residents’ complaints of rodent infestation, mold and other sub-par conditions at the Georgia King Village affordable housing complex owned at the time by L + M. The tax break was granted in June after L + M satisfied city officials that sufficient improvements had been made.

McIver said she looked forward to the completion of the Museum Parc project.

“I love groundbreakings,” she said. “But I love ribbon cuttings even more.”

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Steve Strunsky may be reached at sstrunsky@njadvancemedia.com