Van Vorst Park, Jersey City - My Accidental Haven

Jersey City Van Vorst Park Dish

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I still remember the first time I truly enjoyed Van Vorst Park. It was fall of 2011, and I’d lost my voice. Technically, I was “sick,” but it was the kind of sick that makes you look perfectly fine while sounding like a frog that smoked a carton of cigarettes. I stayed home from my elementary school teaching job.

I lived, then, in a tiny studio apartment right behind the school—close enough to hear the back door close if anyone used it. Desperate to get out of the apartment, I told myself I was just walking to the library. I was terrified someone would see me out walking and assume I’d faked the whole thing. The library felt virtuous. If anyone spotted me, I could gesture weakly at the books as if to say, “Yes, I’m ill, but also working.”

The library was around the corner from Van Vorst Park, and that’s when I saw it: my first real fall. Red, orange, yellow. Some leaves still hanging on, others already crunched beneath my feet. Until then, trees for me had been just different shades of green year-round. Autumn felt like a magic trick - as if someone had turned up the saturation on life.

I fell in love with that park. This was a park that was going to be my little haven in Jersey City. That day, little did i know that over the years, I’d return again and again and again. Spring brought tulips and daffodils, summer offered shady benches, and fall always delivered its show of color. During COVID, when were isolated and needs a sense of community, it was the first place I sat and chose to illustrate onto my handmade pottery. It’s also where I learned that in Jersey City, people enjoying sitting on benches to read books with cups of coffee from their favorite local coffee shop, walk dogs that look like their owners, and let their toddlers wobble dangerously close to flowerbeds.

Van Vorst had been on my radar even before I moved to Jersey City. Back when I had just gotten a job to teach in a Montessori school, and decided to move to JC, I was hunting for an apartment online, "it" showed up in all the glossy descriptions: “near historic Van Vorst Park.” I didn’t know what historic meant in this case, but once I arrived, I understood. The brownstones that surround the park have vintage charm and glorious gardens—tiny, idiosyncratic, and fiercely tender. This small area in downtown Jersey City always underwent delightful change, a kind of seasonal performance art I never got tired of.

Even now, after more than a decade, it’s still one of my favorite local JC places ( Liberty State Park comes close, Hamilton Park too.) Van Vorst has that cozy, lived-in charm. It’s the park I always include when visitors come, because there’s no better way to say, “Welcome to Jersey City, we’re not entirely concrete.”

It’s funny: what began as a guilty stroll on a sick day turned into a love affair. A little city park that made me feel at home, one fallen leaf at a time.

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