They’re floored
When the coronavirus hit Jersey City, Mayor Steven Fulop tried to find a tiny silver lining in the lockdown.
A project to restore City Hall, built in 1896, was in the pipeline to kick off this year anyway. If employees were logging on from home and most of the building was going to be empty, he reasoned, minor construction could begin without disrupting as many people.
Among other tasks, construction workers started ripping up vinyl flooring installed in the 1960s, only to discover a pattern peeking out from underneath. As more and more squares were removed, an intricate pattern was revealed.
Fulop was shocked.
“Our initial plan was to rip up the floor, find nothing, and work with historians to put in something that was original to the building,” he tells The Post. “We didn’t think we would find anything. We thought it would all be destroyed.”
Turns out the ’60s-era “upgrades” were covering up slates of caustic tile with a geometric design — original to the building. Initially, Fulop says, covered in grime and asbestos, they seemed unsalvageable.
But after careful remediation and cleaning over three weeks, City Halls is home to some gleaming new floors — sourced from England and installed more than 120 years ago.
Fulop tweeted the astounding before-and-after photos (above) of a workaday hallway transformed, and was floored by the positive response.
“Normally, I’ll tweet something and it’ll get 200 or 300 likes or retweets,” Fulop says. “But I went to sleep late, and the next morning, when I got up, I had at that point 60,000 likes. And now it’s like 150,000!”
Also unearthed during these initial phases of restoration were parquet floors in Fulop’s office, previously obscured by “old blue wall-to-wall carpet.”
“You try to leave things a bit better than what you found,” he says. “It’ll last long past me, that’s for sure.”