Castle Point Park was established in 1995 as a joint venture between Stevens, City of Hoboken and State of NJ

Stevens Institute of Technology owns Block 259, Lot 2, the land and water area at the base of Castle Point. The land portion is just 1.15 acres, a narrow strip along the 700 and 800 blocks of Sinatra Drive. On January 4, 1995, Stevens President Hal Raveche and Hoboken Mayor Anthony Russo signed their names to a 50-year lease agreement that paved the way for the creation of Castle Point Park. The lease requires the City to pay a nominal $1 per annum. 

Six days later, the City of Hoboken granted an easement to the New Jersey State Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) restricting the land’s use for a public space  “for walkway purposes, being those activities including walking, jogging, bicycling, fishing, sitting, viewing and other like activițies consistent with and compatible with the enjoyment of the waterfront area.”  The easement states that the grantee (NJDEP) “agrees to construct all portions of the Walkway which are in the Easement Area and access thereto.”

By October 2000,  the state’s Green Acres program and the Department of Transportation allocated $1.35 million for the  project. A federal grant added another $1 million. The City of Hoboken provided additional funding.

The construction of Castle Point Park became a joint venture of the City of Hoboken, the NJDEP and the State Division of Buildings and Construction (DBC). On November 30, 2000, the DBC received bids for the construction ranging from $2.8 to $5.6 million. The parties agreed to accept the lowest bid. 

In 1988, the State of New Jersey conceived a 30-foot public walk — the Hudson River Waterfront Walkway — that would stretch the 18.5-miles from the Bayonne Bridge to the George Washington Bridge. The requirement for property owners to construct their portion of the walkway was written into the state’s Coastal Zone Management Rules as a condition of their NJDEP waterfront development permit.  

In the mid-1990s, Stevens Institute of Technology recognized that there was no development potential for this narrow strip of land. The pile supported concrete decking over the Hudson River was collapsing. The lease arrangement relieved Stevens from the obligation of building the state-mandated walkway.

As with all Green Acres funding, Castle Point Park was permanently placed on the state’s ROSI (Recreation and Open Space Inventory) for Hoboken.  In addition to the walkway, the park included a fishing pier. Later, a skate park was added at the north end. 

Rebuilding Castle Point Park 

In 2024, a major sinkhole opened up on Sinatra Drive near the skate park, prompting an investigation of the structural integrity of Hoboken’s shoreline. The City hired Colliers Engineering & Design, whose marine engineers used scuba divers, ground-penetrating radar and geotechnical borings to assess the extent to which the structure of the bulkhead (seawall) had failed. Colliers determined that the fill beneath the concrete seawall built by the State of New Jersey in 2001 had been washed away in sections, leaving a void and leading to the further erosion beneath Sinatra Drive.