From the early 1800s until it was abandoned in the 1920s, the Morris Canal flowed 102 miles across New Jersey, from the Delaware River to the Hudson. For decades now, there has been a robust effort to reclaim segments of the old canal towpath. Today there are close to 40 miles of the Morris Canal Greenway (MCG) completed and open to the public, with many more sections in various stages of development.
In Jersey City, the Morris Canal ran more than 8 miles, south toward Bayonne to avoid the Palisades, then back north toward Liberty State Park and the Hudson River. While the MCG has only a few miles of trail in Jersey City now up and running, efforts are being made to expand that in the next few years.
The MCG is only one of several trails that run through Hudson County. By some counts, there are five other greenways: the Hudson River Waterfront Walkway, Hackensack River Greenway, the Bergen Arches, the Harsimus Stem Embankment, and the Essex-Hudson Greenway. If you include the East Coast Greenway, a nationwide trail network that encompasses some of these smaller trails, there are six.
One big goal is to link all these greenways, to allow people to walk or bike (mostly) off-road through and around Hudson County. To help accomplish that, a group of graduate students from the NYU Wagner School, working with planners from Jersey City and Hudson County, developed the Jersey City Greenway Connectivity Plan, published in 2023.
Activists from the Sierra Club’s Hudson County Group, BikeJC, the JC Parks Coalition, and others have been on the front lines of these efforts. This multi-pronged campaign is a great opportunity for adding green space, building coalitions, and working with public officials.
Here’s a short summary of the various greenway projects:
• Morris Canal Greenway currently has two segments on the east side of Jersey City—a little over 2 miles of trails. One short section runs through Berry Lane Park, and the other runs alongside the old canal basins in the Paulus Hook neighborhood, ending at the Colgate Clock on the Hudson River. Plans are now underway to expand the MCG in Jersey City, adding 3 more miles of trail, including an off-road segment that is almost 1 mile long.
• Hudson River Waterfront Walkway is a popular 18-mile trail along the waterfront that runs through nine towns, from Liberty State Park north into Bergen County. Started in 1988, it is the oldest greenway in the region and is mostly complete and open. The Hudson River Waterfront Conservancy monitors this greenway.
• Hackensack River Greenway (HRG) starts from the northern end of Secaucus and runs about 18 miles south, through Jersey City, to the bottom of Bayonne. There are currently only about 5 miles of trail, in fragments, mostly in city and county parks along the river shore. Skyway Park, a 32-acre remediated toxic landfill and Environmental Protection Agency Superfund site included in the greenway plan, is slated to become a Jersey City park. There is an active HRG Working Group, consisting of planners from towns along the route, Hudson County, the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority (the former Meadowlands Commission), plus two community members. They have been working for a number of years to expand this greenway.
• Bergen Arches is the old Erie Cut, an abandoned 1-mile rail trench, at one point 85 feet deep, through the Palisades. The entire section is prone to flooding. Environmental activists, along with planners from Jersey City, have been in talks with NJ Transit, Conrail, and New Jersey Department of Transportation to gain control of the corridor, which has not been used since 1957, for a linear park.
• Adjacent to the Bergen Arches, Harsimus Embankment is an elevated rail trail soon to become a park. It runs about 0.5 mile along 6th Street in downtown Jersey City, a historic residential neighborhood. The fight to save the Embankment and turn it into a public space has been going on for more than two decades, and it now looks like a compromise solution is at hand.
• Essex-Hudson Greenway, simply called The Greenway by the State of New Jersey, is a 9-mile stretch of abandoned rail that will run from Montclair in Essex County to Jersey City in Hudson County. Groundbreaking for the first section of this linear park started in Newark in July of 2025.
All these greenways currently exist in some form, but much more needs to be done to build, maintain, improve, and connect them. For example, there is a goal for the Essex–Hudson Greenway to connect with the Bergen Arches and the Harsimus Embankment and to continue its run east all the way to the Hudson River. Similarly, we are pushing for the Essex-Hudson Greenway to connect with the Hackensack River Greenway heading south along the west side of Hudson County.
There seems to be enough political will, the result of years of grassroots advocacy—to move this multi-pronged project forward. While funding is always a concern, especially given the cutbacks at the federal level, this campaign is making progress, trail by trail.