Corte & Co. Meat Provisions Factory — Lost
Lost: Corte & Company, 414-416 Hoboken Avenue, Five Corners/Jersey City Heights, Jersey City, New Jersey
In April 2024 the Jersey City Landmarks Conservancy was alerted to the complete demolition of the circa-1922 Corte & Company meat provisions and butchery at the northwest corner of Hoboken and Central avenues in the Five Corners and Jersey City Heights sections of Jersey City.
In the eyes of Jersey City and the countless LLC-cloaked developers altering the city at the cost of its irreplaceable cultural resources — not to mention its long-held foundation of affordability and sense of close-knit neighborhoods — the Corte meatpacking factory lacked architectural significance. It was a ruinous eyesore and it was directly in the path of the area’s perceived progress post-COVID.
The Jersey City Landmarks Conservancy passionately disagrees because the building, in spite of being abandoned, vandalized, and roofless for many years, radiated at its brick and timber recesses with the legacy of the Corteses, an early-20th-century Jersey City family with profound roots in Portugal. Manuel Cortes and his wife Encarnacao — pioneers in Hudson County’s Portuguese immigrant community — built a business based on traditional Portuguese butchery skills. Their success and their longevity — Cortes & Co. was sold in 2004 — was due to their commitment to their community, their utmost respect for their employees, and the care they took in making food products that ended up on the tables of many in Jersey City and beyond.
The Corte & Company site deserved, at the very least, mitigatory efforts from city planners — perhaps photographic documentation, perhaps the retention of certain architectural elements, or perhaps the preservation of the Corte name and memory in imagery and text inside the lobbies and common spaces of the planned large-scale development. The cleared site was over a few hours rendered into a vast and stark slate — adjacent mid–to-late-19th-century structures have recently been taken down as well to expand the development potential — that will be filled from end to end with luxury apartment buildings with backyard views of the Bergen Arches and, in the close distance, the Manhattan skyline.
