The Golden Cicada Tavern, which is between Jersey City’s downtown and waterfront districts.Credit...Bryan Anselm for The New York Times

The Death and Life of Jersey City

The downtown boom, visible in the new night-life scene along Newark Avenue, poses a threat to the urban pioneers from the city’s grittier days.

Between Jersey City’s downtown and waterfront districts sits a single-story windowless pillbox of a bar with a sign outside that says “Golden Cicada.”

Inside you’ll find pizza parlor chairs, flypaper chandeliers and fluorescent lights, some of them pulsating.

On a recent night, a middle-aged man with a Stetson hat and salt-and-pepper goatee entered the Cicada with his right arm in a sling.

“What happened?” someone asked.

“I got into a fight.”

“With who?”

“Jack Daniel’s.”

The man with the compromised arm was Peter Kingsley, a self-described “gentleman actor” and part of the Goon Platoon, a group of Cicada regulars who were spending the night at their customary corner of the bar, ribbing one another over Tsingtao beers and whiskey while “PBS NewsHour” played on the bar’s TV.

Terry Tan, the owner of the Cicada, moved along the bar to serve two nervous first-time customers, 20-somethings who had come to participate in a well-known ritual at this place: downing a $5 shot of the bar’s infamous baijiu, a fiery Chinese liquor made of sorghum. The wincing men were awarded two Golden Cicada necklaces of red and black painted brass by Mr. Tan.

The Cicada, around since the 1980s, has managed to stay in business throughout downtown’s development renaissance, which seems to have reached a new level. In early 2017, the readers of the New York real estate blog Curbed voted Jersey City “neighborhood of the year.” (Manhattan’s financial district came in second place.) And downtown Jersey City’s boom is nowhere more visible than in the growing night-life and culinary scene along Newark Avenue, which has posed something of a threat to local dives and old-school ethnic restaurants.

“I always find myself highlighting the growth of the restaurant and bar scene,” said Jeremy Kaplan, chief operating officer of the Kushner Real Estate Group, one of the major players in the development boom here. (President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is a nephew of one of the founders of KRE Group.) “I’m screaming it from the rooftops.” The Kushner Group owns four large residential buildings with 1,800 rental units and has two more buildings under construction.

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The pedestrian mall on Newark Avenue, with new restaurants and clubs.Credit...Bryan Anselm for The New York Times

The boom, however, doesn’t really include the Golden Cicada Tavern and other longtime, old-school holdouts from Jersey City’s grittier days, like the Italian-American Barge Inn (scene of a bold F.B.I. raid two years ago) and the African-American-owned bottle-and-billiards joint Indio’s Place. This spring, the Latin Lounge Sports Bar, which sometimes featured live salsa music, closed.

There are also the bars that heralded the early signs of gentrification in the ’90s: the art bar LITM, the brunch spot Beechwood Cafe and Lucky 7 Tavern, downtown’s graffiti-covered punk rock dive. Popular and acclaimed recent arrivals include a cocktail bar (Dullboy), a tiki bar (Cellar 335), a whiskey bar (the Archer), an elegant Southern-style restaurant (Mathews) and a sausage-and-beer hall (Würstbar), as well as a handful of Brooklyn and East Village transplants like the celebrity chef Dale Talde’s Talde Jersey City, the Williamsburg video game bar Barcade and a Two Boots pizzeria.

This vibrant scene is at the heart of Jersey City’s revival. But it has also made way for large and rowdy nightclub-like spots along Newark Avenue near the PATH train station. These bars, often owned by companies with multiple properties, may well price out the indie upstarts and Brooklyn exiles.

“In my opinion, Jersey City downtown is only two to three years away from becoming Hoboken,” said Danny Harrison, a Jersey City resident and vice president for real estate at B&D Holdings, “which will significantly increase the real estate value but will take away from the flair and uniqueness of Jersey City.”

The enduring flair and uniqueness of Jersey City is in no small part the result of Mr. Tan’s perseverance.

A small man with a wide grin and a monkish buzz cut, he is an autodidact and former engineer and the reason educational PBS is on the TV. He provides Scrabble and discussions on Thomas Paine for a slew of regulars ranging from English expat investment bankers to restaurant deliverymen ending their shifts. In order to keep his place of business running just the way he likes, Mr. Tan has engaged in legal battles and adapted to significant cultural shifts, watching the demographics of his own bar change from blue-collar, born-and-bred Jersey types and street toughs to young bankers, local artists and college students who initially arrived from somewhere else.

“This used to be a working-class bar,” said Mr. Tan, 72. “We had one guy in here who worked for City Hall. He couldn’t read! Spoke English fine but couldn’t read.”

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Watching the news on PBS at the Golden Cicada Tavern.Credit...Bryan Anselm for The New York Times

When Mr. Tan bought the Golden Cicada Tavern in 1986, Jersey City had been a blasted landscape for years, the result of the collapse of the local railroad industry in the 1960s and 1970s.

At the time, Hoboken was starting its revival, though the spread of New York wealth and development across the Hudson was slow, said Max Herman, director of the urban studies program at New Jersey City University. “In the 1980s, Hoboken had fallen so low that people were setting buildings on fire for the insurance money,” he said. In the ’90s, professional New Yorkers saw opportunity in the inexpensive brownstones that remained in Hoboken, as well as its compact, neighborhood-like footprint. An established working-class Irish and Italian community in Hoboken offered “an already-existing infrastructure of bars and taverns,” Mr. Herman said.

By contrast, Jersey City was sprawling, covering an area almost the size of Manhattan. With its abandoned buildings, long-neglected waterfront and larger minority communities, it was seen as a rougher place and more risky for investment. What passed for night life in many neighborhoods took place in “social clubs” in peoples’ basements and backyards, where the membership rules skirted the licensing laws. According to Dr. Herman, artists slowly occupied the old buildings; cafes, bars and restaurants followed.

Mattias and Alice Gustafsson moved to the area in 1990 and opened their first restaurant, Madame Claude, in 2002. It sat alone on a corner far from public transportation, its charming yellow walls covered with framed photographs of French film stars of the ’50s and ’60s.

“There was nothing there,” Mr. Gustafsson said, “except the drug dealers around the corner. The streets were empty at 8 o’clock. On the first night we opened, we had our windows broken. But then we even created a friendship with the drug dealers. We learned their names. We earned their respect.”

The restaurant soon became a go-to date spot, serving moules-frites, crèpes and other classic French comfort food.

“Everything was word of mouth, and people started venturing out,” Mr. Gustafsson said. “They had a hard time finding us — the streets were all dark — then they saw our string of little fairy lights around the awning.”

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The interior of Madame Claude Bis during dinner.Credit...Bryan Anselm for The New York Times

Opening a restaurant or bar in New Jersey, rather than in New York, comes with its own challenges. Nowhere is this more evident than in New Jersey’s byzantine liquor laws, helpfully explained in an 85-page document on the state’s Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control website. These rules are the reason the honest strip-club owner must choose between hard liquor and full nudity.

Most important, the laws govern the sale and distribution of liquor licenses, which are pegged to the size of a municipality and must be purchased outright rather than leased, as they can be in New York.

The original Madame Claude had no liquor license but allowed customers to bring their own wine, the only economical course for such a small establishment.

“B.Y.O.B. was good for us as long as the rent was O.K.,” Mr. Gustafsson said. “But Jersey City has a lot more corporate than family restaurants because they have deeper pockets.”

Mr. Harrison, the real estate investor, agrees, pointing out that rising rents, combined with such a big start-up outlay for a license, can be crippling.

“The boom is unreal; the price per square foot has tripled,” said Mr. Harrison, who said he has lost over 20 real estate bids in this intensely competitive market. He explained that investors are buying buildings at high prices with low returns, which means that they are increasing rents significantly. This, in turn, is pushing out small-business owners.

The current boom has occurred under the watch of Jersey City’s dynamic young mayor, Steven Fulop, 40, who has encouraged large-scale development while simultaneously championing small businesses. According to the mayor, there are 10,000 new residential units under construction and another 17,000 approved. At the same time, he says, 650 new small businesses have opened within the past three years, many of them bars and restaurants.

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The crowd at South House on Newark Avenue.Credit...Bryan Anselm for The New York Times

The Gustafssons saw the change coming. When they were given an opportunity to open a larger space nearby, they leapt at the chance, closing down the first restaurant and finally purchasing a liquor license for $150,000. They opened Madame Claude Bis, a basement bar with high ceilings, brick walls, a round-the-corner speakeasy entrance, Gypsy jazz and a full menu of French wines.

The Golden Cicada’s genesis, on the other hand, was something of an accident. Driving past a for-sale sign, Mr. Tan called and bought the nearly burned-out building. Discovering that the purchase came with a liquor license, he found himself a bartender and kept at it.

“Having a liquor license in New Jersey is like owning an asset,” said Shen Pan, an owner and manager of the new Pet Shop, Jersey City’s first exclusively vegetarian bar and restaurant, the realized ambition of 10 local investor-friends who have all lived downtown for at least a decade.

“We bought a license for $130,000 two years before finding a space,” Mr. Pan said. “We were confident downtown was going to explode. We wanted to do this before we got priced out.”

The only way you can fight gentrification,” he added, “is by owning a piece of it, unfortunately.”

Downtown’s boom is most obvious on Newark Avenue.

Even as a City Council member, Mayor Fulop saw enormous untapped potential for the stretch of Newark Avenue surrounding the busy Grove Street PATH station. For years, city law affecting this particular strip had slowed the development of what seemed to many as a potential restaurant row. The regulations, adding to the existing demands of state laws, required that any bar or restaurant on the strip had to stop serving alcohol at 11 p.m. and that liquor licenses were nontransferable. As a result, Newark Avenue at night was a scene of shuttered discount stores and grim bodegas.

The mayor led the city to pass legislation to lift regulations, and change came swiftly, bringing no fewer than seven new restaurants to the strip within three years. A stretch of the street was turned into a pedestrian mall, with planters, bicycle racks and picnic tables.

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The rooftop bar at Porta.Credit...Bryan Anselm for The New York Times

At daytime in nice weather, the plaza is filled with families playing, couples strolling, al fresco diners and buskers. The block plays host to numerous street fairs throughout the year.

One Kushner property, Grove Pointe, towers above the Grove Street PATH station. “Part of being successful in development is being sensitive to local concerns,” Mr. Kaplan said.

The Kushner Group, he added, has “created an environment in our view that has enhanced the quality of life.” He recalled a recent early evening out at the pizza restaurant Porta, on Newark Avenue. “It was a great mix of people out for happy hour and families, too,” he said.

But by 11 p.m. on a Friday or Saturday, the tables at Porta are moved away, the kitchen stops serving its full menu, and black-clad doormen with metal detectors begin checking the IDs of the keyed-up partyers lined up outside. Porta and South House, a Southern restaurant also on the de facto restaurant row, are transformed into nightclubs, with thumping music and intoxicated, loud crowds.

Closer to the PATH station, there is a confused jumble of bars all housed in one establishment and known for cheap beer, multiple television screens and sugary cocktails. The largest of these bars is the Bistro, which has earned the local nickname “the Bro-stro.”

Gentrification has arrived at such a full tilt here that the occasional brawl is more often between the privileged than the poor.

“We went there the other night,” said Mr. Gustafsson, who owns Madame Claude Bis. “All the bars were playing dance music. It’s fine. Leave it over there.”

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Singing at the bar during karaoke night at the Golden Cicada Tavern.Credit...Bryan Anselm for The New York Times

The mayor’s office is well aware of residents’ concerns and has deployed a more visible police presence on the strip at peak hours, while also focusing on family-friendly gestures like increased public programming in the outdoor area and requiring every bar on the block to operate a working kitchen.

“It’s a work in progress,” Mayor Fulop said.

Madame Claude Bis and Pet Shop remain safely off the beaten path of Newark Avenue’s main drag, but not quite as safely off or unbeaten as the Golden Cicada.

“All you see is huge high-rises all around him,” Mr. Pan said of Mr. Tan. “And the Cicada just sitting in that little spot. That summarizes what he’s been through.”

Mr. Tan himself is a chronicle of shrugging opportunity. An ethnic Chinese living in Malaysia during politically restive times in 1969, he walked into the local American library one day and, thumbing through a directory of American colleges, saw the name Antioch, applied to the engineering school, and was accepted. Even the name Terry was a mere suggestion that stuck.

“Somebody just mentioned ‘Call yourself Terry,’” he said. “O.K., I’m Terry.”

The name Golden Cicada was the translation of the Chinese name of his first wife, she in turn named after a character in the epic Chinese novel “Journey to the West.”

In 2005, the city government brought an eminent domain suit against Mr. Tan, seeking to acquire his property in a zone of development that is now booming. Mr. Tan fought back.

“In New Jersey nobody wins eminent domain,” he said. “When the government wants it, they take it.”

During the litigation, Mr. Tan’s wife died of cancer.

“That was the catalyst,” he said. “When your dog is in the corner, you fight for your life.”

When Mr. Tan learned that the city’s intention in seizing his property was to allow the Catholic school next door to expand its football field, he challenged it on First Amendment grounds, putting up a banner outside the bar reading “Thou Shalt Not Steal.”

With the help of the Rutgers University Law Clinic and the A.C.L.U. of New Jersey, Mr. Tan defended himself in court and won.

As the neighborhood changes fast, the Cicada clings on stubbornly, and Mr. Tan spends his spare time on pet projects, chiefly building an electric car engine that he claims will “disrupt Tesla” after he installs it into the rusty chassis of an old Volkswagen Beetle he keeps in the lot out back. He swears he’ll drive it to Atlantic City and back on one charge.

“Terry’s been there as an institution forever,” Mayor Fulop said. “I think his bar traffic has escalated along with the development because he’s got this unique character and feeling of authenticity.”

Minutes after the 20-somethings took their inaugural baijiu shots, a local amateur soccer team filed into the bar after a game. The team it beat was drinking sulkily elsewhere while these athletes, proud members of their self-named Golden Cicada Soccer Club, celebrated victory with shots of baijiu and bottles of Tsingtao.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section MB, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: The Death and Life of Jersey City. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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