Jersey City Waterfront & Downtown
Paulus Hook: A Revolutionary Attack in a Future Financial District
Listen at the stop, then read the transcript and follow the sources behind the story.
Listen
Transcript
Glass towers make Paulus Hook look like a neighborhood with no eighteenth-century past.
In 1779 this was a fortified British position.
After taking control of New York City and surrounding harbor positions, British forces occupied Paulus Hook.
Its location opposite Manhattan made it strategically useful.
On the night of August 18 into August 19, 1779, American troops under Major Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee approached through marshy ground.
They surprised the garrison, captured prisoners and withdrew before stronger British forces could respond.
The raid did not liberate Jersey City.
There was no Jersey City yet.
The British continued to control the wider New York base.
But the attack gave the Americans prisoners, morale and a successful example of striking close to the heart of British power.
Lee later became the father of Robert E. Lee, which can distort how Americans remember him.
At Paulus Hook, his significance belongs to the Revolutionary generation, decades before the Civil War.
The modern neighborhood is also historically useful because almost nothing about the terrain reads the same way.
Shorelines were filled.
Marshes disappeared.
Street grids and towers replaced military earthworks.
That is a recurring Jersey City problem.
The most important historical landscape has often been physically rewritten by infrastructure and real estate.
So this stop asks you to perform a mental reconstruction.
Remove the high-rises.
Restore marsh and tidal water.
Imagine Manhattan as enemy-held territory.
Then place a small American raiding force moving through darkness toward a fort on the edge of the Hudson.
The history is still here.
The land simply stopped looking like it.