Bayonne, New Jersey Walking Tour

Filming Dates: Tuesday December 17th and Thursday December 19th, 2024

I went to Bayonne, New Jersey and walked around the whole residential city next to Staten Island, New York and Jersey City. I have never done a New Jersey video before. This is my first time doing a Bayonne walking tour in New Jersey. Bayonne has a growing population of +70,500 residents. It's named after a city in France with the same name as its origin (from the other Bayonne, France). Bayonne in New Jersey is a small, nice, urban city that's extremely close to New York City with its rich industrial history involved in shipbuilding and manufacturing. The city is home to the former site of the Standard Oil Refinery.

When I first heard about Bayonne, I thought it was a ghetto-type of city. But I was already wrong about it. Bayonne actually looks nice, and as nice as it gets every year with new developments and new up-and-coming businesses in the community. Bayonne is close to a ghetto hotspot: Jersey City's Greenville hood. I took an Uber ride from Staten Island to arrive at John F. Kennedy Boulevard to do this walking tour. It only costs $40.00 or less to get there. In Bayonne, you can find nice suburban houses, residential apartments, new luxury apartments and business buildings, diverse amount of residents, busy-like daily traffic on the 440 highway, commercial stores (such as Walmart, Costco, T.J. Maxx, Lidl, Lowe's etc.), complex amount of restaurant chains, Bayonne Golf Club, public gyms, the War of the Worlds film location at 11 John F. Kennedy Boulevard, the main street of Broadway, Stephen R. Gregg Park, and the bowling alley Hudson Lanes.

Bayonne's demographics is filled with Italian Americans, Mexicans, other Hispanics/Latinos (Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans, Guatemalans, Venezuelans, Ecuadorians etc.), a fewer Chinese people, Indians, Irish Americans, several Arabs (mostly Egyptians, Palestinians, Jordanians, Syrians), Pakistanis, some African-Americans making it 10% there, some Jamaicans, Polish immigrants and Polish Americans, and then Greek Americans. By racial breakdown, the demographics are 41.3% White, 23.9% Hispanic/Latino, 10.4% Black, 10.3% Asian, 8% Mixed race/multiracial, and 6.1% other races if I got that correct.

This is not the first time I visited Bayonne. I first went here last year in 2023, just to tour around with my family. It turns out to be a nice place. If Bayonne is developing more with new luxury apartments under gentrification, then Staten Island is getting on the list for new developments and will expect to have similar developments to either what Brooklyn, Bayonne, Elizabeth, Carteret, or Jersey City have. For Bayonne, it's experiencing gentrification at the right time as developers are attracting this small city for NYC commuters and more homeowners. It's shocking to see this city change for long-term residents and everyone else, due the property values increasing like insane during inflation. Bayonne in the future will continue to change more, and might look like a "second Jersey City" with a changing demographics arriving in for the new developments. Besides Bayonne, there are several other cities experiencing gentrification as they change a lot with luxury buildings, new businesses, higher property taxes, and recently new demographics of people (such as upper class residents, hipsters/yuppies moving in, more middle class families, several more ethnic groups of immigrants, and some working class people).

Background song: DIVERSA - Crow (VIP) (Leafy Radio)