Jersey City, NJ, December 15, 2021 – At the December 7 meeting, the Jersey City Planning Board approved the design drawings and site plan for Edge Works, the centerpiece of SciTech Scity, the 30-acre “City of Tomorrow” being developed by Liberty Science Center. The Planning Board also approved subdividing the land into plots for two other key components of SciTech Scity: Liberty Science Center High School and Scholars Village.

Edge Works, an eight-story business incubation hub, will consist of the Co-Creation Center, a 40,000-square-foot state-of-the-art conference center and bleeding-edge tech exhibition gallery, and The Works, 60,000 square feet of research and development labs, workspaces, and co-working desks for start-ups and entrepreneurs plus skunkworks suites, product showcases, consumer testing labs, and offices for select established companies in industries that are particularly important to our collective future on the planet.

“Edge Works will be a business optimizer, a new breed of innovation center that maximizes commercial success and social impact,” said Paul Hoffman, Liberty Science Center’s President and CEO. “Our goal is to convene experts from multiple disciplines and harness science and technology to solve social problems and turn leading-edge ideas into a reality that makes the world a radically better place.”

The approval from the Jersey City Planning Board to move forward with the construction of Edge Works is the third recent major development for SciTech Scity. A few weeks ago, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop, and Hudson County Executive Thomas DeGise presided over the groundbreaking for the site. It was also announced that Israel’s Sheba Medical Center, the largest hospital system in the Middle East and one of the top 10 hospitals in the world, will be the first innovation partner and first international tenant of Edge Works. Sheba will bring the near-term future of healthcare technology to life through a state-of-the-art “hospital of the future” simulation space.

At the heart of the community, Edge Works will be interconnected with each of the SciTech Scity elements in several exciting ways. Innovators, scientists, entrepreneurs, students, individuals and families can test new high-tech products being developed at Edge Works in their homes before the rest of the world while living in Scholars Village, the residential housing being developed by Alpine Residential. Guests of the existing hands-on Liberty Science Center can see these new technologies come to life in previews on the exhibition floors. The students of Liberty Science Center High School, the world-class public magnet STEM Academy to be built by the Hudson County Improvement Authority and operated by the Hudson County Schools of Technology, will have access to internship opportunities and tools throughout the Edge Works facility. Four acres of Public Commons—including an events plaza that rivals Rockefeller Center in size—will connect each of the facilities providing activations that encourage exploration, creativity, collaboration, and innovation for members of the SciTech Scity community and the visiting public.

The existing Liberty Science Center and the new SciTech Scity construction will be called the Frank J. Guarini Innovation Campus, named for the former member of the U.S. House of Representatives, New Jersey State Senator, real estate developer and philanthropist from Jersey City who made a $10 million gift to LSC toward the creation of Edge Works. That gift, the largest received to date by the Center, was matched 50 cents on the dollar by a $5 million pledge from LSC Board Co-Chair David Barry. Four companies so far—EY, Verizon, Bank of America and Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey—have signed on as Corporate Founding Sponsors and made seven-figure contributions. All in all, $42 million has been raised for Edge Works, with the remaining funding expected to come from bank financing and government sources.

About Liberty Science Center
Liberty Science Center (LSC.org) is a 300,000-square-foot, not-for-profit learning center located in Liberty State Park on the Jersey City bank of the Hudson near the Statue of Liberty. Dedicated to inspiring the next generation of scientists and engineers and bringing the power, promise, and pure fun of science and technology to learners of all ages, Liberty Science Center houses the largest planetarium in the Western Hemisphere, 12 museum exhibition halls, a live animal collection with 110 species, giant aquariums, a 3D theater, live simulcast surgeries, a tornado-force wind simulator, K-12 classrooms and labs, and teacher-development programs. Before COVID more than 250,000 students visited the Science Center each year, and tens of thousands more participated in the Center’s off-site and online programs. Welcoming more than 750,000 visitors annually, LSC is the largest interactive science center in the NYC-NJ metropolitan area.