A bleak expanse of coastal New Jersey, polluted by paint pigments and abandoned for decades, is undergoing a makeover that will bring a major development of housing, retail space and office space a half-hour’s drive from Lower Manhattan.
In coming weeks, the O’Neill Properties Group will officially break ground on the 5.8 million-square-foot project, The Pointe. The 418-acre site, south of Staten Island, is at the heart of a highway network that already carries some 400,000 vehicles a day directly past the site, and on summer weekends, hundreds of thousands more.

The groundbreaking will make way for the anchor retail tenant, Bass Pro Shops, to build a 200,000-square-foot store. The store is expected to open in June 2017 as the first stage …show more content…
O’Neill said. The interchange is being constructed at a cost of $85 million, $15 million of which is being paid by the developer and the remainder by the state.

New Jersey, America’s most densely populated state, has long sought to redevelop its so-called brownfield sites, abandoned and often contaminated tracts formerly used for commercial or industrial purposes. O’Neill Properties, based in King of Prussia, Pa., specializes in brownfield redevelopment.

O’Neill bought the Sayreville site for $80 million in 2008, some two decades after it was abandoned by NL Industries, formerly National Lead, which had manufactured paint pigment there since 1934. In early 2014, the Environmental Protection Agency directed the company to pay $79 million to clean up a 40-acre lagoon on the east side of the site, where Bass Pro Shops will build its new …show more content…
O’Neill Sr. said. And millions of customers riding along the parkway, he added, “can’t block it out.”

The new development was welcomed by Kennedy O’Brien, Sayreville’s mayor, who said the borough’s officials approved it because it was a mixed-use project with a residential element. That offers Sayreville the prospect of reviving its depressed center, he said, which was built more than 100 years ago and has scarce parking and very little economic opportunity.
“It’s not a gathering place for the people of Sayreville anymore,” Mr. O’Brien said, in contrast to the new development, which he called “a natural evolution for a town like ours.”

Sayreville, which formerly made bricks for the construction of Manhattan and munitions for World War I, is a middle-income community of some 43,000 people where homeownership is high, foreclosures are low and church attendance is widespread, Mr. O’Brien said. “It’s a Norman Rockwell American town,” he said.

Mr. O’Brien added that the development would be a good source of new tax revenue to bolster the local