The 6th annual Hamilton Park BBQ Festival is less than a week away – this Saturday, September 26th from noon to 8pm at Hamilton Park! The BBQ Festival is going to be a great time for the whole family. This event is not just a great party, with delicious food, live music and fun for the kids, this event is to raise money for the Hamilton Park Conservancy (HPC).
The HPC is a non-profit organization formed to help preserve and improve Jersey City’s Hamilton Park. I recently went to interview Yvonne and Bob who are part of the conservancy to get their background story and also tour the park. A week later I met with Paul Silverman of SILVERMAN who is organizing the BBQ Festival to get the scoop on what to expect at this year’s big event.
What are your names? Yvonne Thurman-Dogruer. My name is Bob McHugh.
What do you guys do?
Yvonne: I am chair of the Hamilton Park Conservancy and Bob is vice chair and head of community relations and communications.
What does the Hamilton Park Conservancy do?
Yvonne: Partnered with the community, we help preserve and maintain Hamilton Park which is in this historic district of the Hamilton Park neighborhood.
Bob: The idea of a park conservancy came from Jersey City developers Eric and Paul Silverman five years ago. SILVERMAN, who has a large development presence in the area, was fundamental in starting the conservancy. Paul is a member of the board and SILVERMAN provides some in-kind services which is great. We have ten trustees, mostly residents from a wide range of the community, as well as a VP from Provident Bank. Our goal is to raise money for the maintenance and the improvement of the park.
How long have you guys been involved?
Yvonne: Since the beginning of the year for me.
Bob: About the same, I’m still active in the Hamilton Park Neighborhood Association (HPNA) which is a little different. The conservancy board was formed a couple of years ago, when we got our 501 (c)(3) status from the federal government, we became more active, and elected a new board and we’ve been board members since.
So basically what you do is you raise money to maintain the park, it’s beautiful. It’s one of the nicest parks in Jersey City.
Yvonne: It’s a gem.
Can you talk about the specifics of what Hamilton Park has and how it’s different from other parks in the city?
Yvonne: It’s a very neighborhood-centric park. It’s a five-acre public park which just underwent renovation in 2010 and the renovation included two incredible tennis courts, a great basketball court. The gazebo was renovated, the centerpiece of the park, multiple lawns, large and small dog runs and it’s become a real hub for everybody in Jersey City. The basketball tournament is one thing in the summer that brings a whole lot of people.
What do you do to raise money for the park?
Yvonne: Well right now our primary fundraiser is the BBQ Festival that’s going to be held on September 26th. It’s held in September every year, it’s the sixth year that it’s being held. So right now that’s the primary fundraiser and the board is putting together a strategic fundraising plan to see what we can do throughout the year.
Are there people who work fulltime to maintain the park?
Bob: The city owns the park, the city maintains the park, and there are city workers in the park right now. We have a fairly lofty goal of perhaps taking over all or at least part of that along the lines of what the Central Park Conservancy does in New York. New York City doesn’t do any work in Central Park, the Central Park Conservancy does. Much bigger park, a lot more money, I know it’s not even close, but it is sort of a model for us and we would like to think somewhere down the line there would be a staff of people whose job it was just to maintain the park.
Yyvonne: One of our neighborhood counterparts said that the conservancy’s tagline should be, “Keeping the grass green.”
Do you have any future plans for the park?
Yvonne: Our focus right now is partnering up with our community. We are working with local government offices, and the HPNA, which has been an incredible force in this neighborhood and has overseen everything that’s gone on in the park until now. So we’re figuring out how we can best work together and collaborate.
Bob: We’re still really getting started; we’ve only been at this for a few months, everybody’s a volunteer, so some people have more time than others, but I think we’re probably going to pick a few specific projects pretty soon. Again it’s the city’s park so even if we had $10million and we wanted to go in there to rebuild the gazebo, which we don’t, we would have to get the city to let us do that. So a lot of stuff is still on the drawing board.
Yvonne: I kind of see this as were serving as advocates for the park and prioritizing the maintenance projects and helping out when we can.
So you guys live in Jersey obviously, how long have you been in Jersey City?
Bob: I live right here on 8th street and I’ve been here for five years.
Yvonne: I’ve been in Jersey City for 15 years and I’ve been in Hamilton Park for the last four years. I chose Hamilton Park when my husband and I decided to settle into a neighborhood; we had been renting at Newport at that point. I’m from New York City originally, my husband is from Istanbul. Jersey City, and especially this neighborhood, it just feels so perfect for us. It’s a real home, it’s a real community. You have neighbors that say “Hello,” to you on the street which you don’t get everywhere.
How do you feel Jersey City has changed in the past couple of years?
Yvonne: Building up, exciting. Downtown, Jersey City definitely, we’ve seen so much change in the past five years.
Bob: I think Jersey City’s on fire, it’s remarkable. As we walk around Downtown, we can point out different residential building projects just in this neighborhood, there must be seven or eight of them. And so many new coffee shops, restaurants and bistros – this is an exciting time to be in Jersey City.
Yvonne: Really good places with good food, I mean some of the best ice cream you’ll ever taste is right around the corner from here.
Do you guys have a favorite Jersey City hangout spot?
Bob: Hamilton Park, that’s where I hangout.
Yvonne: If you want to find Bob, you go to the park.
What do you do in Hamilton Park?
Bob: I live in a studio so in the summertime Hamilton Park is my studio. I bring a book, I’m lucky enough now, being here for a while and being active in the community that I have lots of friends in the neighborhood. So it’s rare for me to go through the park without bumping into somebody and we have the farmers market every Wednesday and I’m active in that.
What about eating?
Yvonne: There are so many places in this neighborhood and Downtown where we know we can just go and feel welcome a basic coffee shop is one of them since we moved here. Smith & Chang is great, Hamilton Inn is a great place to eat, Ninth and Coles is a pub we tripped on right when we moved here, great people there.
Bob: White Star and G.P.’s are good too.
Always, there’s always something going on here.
And it’s true in other parks, but we’re getting to the point where we’re really hitting our stride in this park.
Yvonne: Yeah, and it’s a draw.
Bob: People come, they absolutely come.
It’s a great park!
What’s your name? Paul Silverman.
What do you do? Together with my brother, Eric, we build neighborhoods while we develop real estate.
And we’re talking about the Hamilton Park BBQ Festival right? Right, our 6th BBQ Festival.
Can you tell me how it started? Sawyer Smith came up with the terrific idea to celebrate Hamilton Park and get a bunch of barbecue vendors, and he did it.
What can people expect this year? Tons of barbecue, great music, great beer and drinks and neighborhood camaraderie.
What is the Hamilton Park BBQ Festival for? For the last five years we’ve been raising money for the Hamilton Park Conservancy, a non-profit that we started five years ago.
Which is a beautiful park. Yes!
What are you going to wear to the BBQ Festival this year? I’m not sure but you might see me with the hat over my left shoulder. The hat is from Another Man’s Treasure.
Can you be more specific in terms of food vendors? Jimmy’s BBQ from Pennsylvania and Dinosaur BBQ will be here from Newark. We will also have Ben’s BBQ, he’s an attorney whose passion is barbecue on weekends.
Also, The Hamilton Inn, NJ Beer Co, Delaney BBQ, GP’s Hamilton Park, JC Wingery, Ahri’s Kitchen, Lizzmonade, Milk Sugar Love and Pick a Bon Bon.
Our major sponsors are SILVERMAN, Charles & Co., Sawyer Smith Residential Brokerage, Provident Bank, M&T Bank, The Historic Downtown Special Improvement District and Bayonne Community Bank.
Any performances? Dancing Tony of Rock-it Docket will be coordinating the music with a special appearance by Ari Hest and Chrissi Poland from the Bluebirds of Paradise. We will have a bouncy castle, face painting, GP’s mechanical bull and more!
Anything else you want to tell people about the festival? It’s always been a beautiful day, you’ll see lots of people from the neighborhood and new faces will come in, it gets bigger and bigger every year. The proceeds go to a really good cause. SILVERMAN pays the expenses for the BBQ Festival and every vendor that’s there makes a donation to the conservancy. So we support it all, we produce the festival, but we don’t take any money from it, all the vendors pay a fee that goes towards the conservancy. And the conservancy, we have a great local board now run by Yvonne and Bob.
We want to raise a couple hundred thousand dollars every year for the conservancy to be able to put a fulltime employee overseeing the park and to be able to pay for repairs and maintenance and all that.
Is Hamilton Park your favorite hangout spot? I have a lot of favorite places including Hamilton Park.
Any last words about the Hamilton Park BBQ Festival? Be there – this Saturday, September 26th from noon to 8pm at Hamilton Park! The other interesting thing this year is because we’ve started construction on Hamilton Square South where the festival has been the last few years; we’re moving the festival to McWilliams Place, and Hamilton Park. We’ll put some things in the park; Not Yo Mama’s Craft’s Fair will be set up in the park and the food and drinks will be on McWilliams Place!
Yee-Ha!
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