Although this column is punctiliously focused on the architecture and urbanism of Gotham, the ever-expanding skyline of Jersey City is so manifest a backdrop for anyone on the West Side of Manhattan that it compels our attention. At times, Jersey City’s accelerated development is so energetic that it recalls Shanghai, where high-rises shoot up in almost incontinent profusion seemingly overnight. But it also feels like New York itself in younger days, before every plot of land was claimed and spoken for.

When I first visited Jersey City in the summer of 2000, there was no real skyline to speak of. Sure, you could spot a high-rise here, a slab there, and a few squat buildings in between. But for a skyline truly to deserve the name, it must exhibit the sort of height, density, and continuity that have been achieved in the intervening five years. Indeed, viewed from Manhattan the accumulation of tall buildings on the Jersey side of the Hudson seems scarcely less imposing than our own financial district. Clearly this is by design. New Jersey is so intent upon rivaling the Big Apple – upon having its own catenary of skyscrapers – that, however impressive Jersey City may appear from the West Side of Manhattan, the visitor to the site feels that he has arrived in a kind of Potemkin village.

This is because there are two crucial differences between our skyline and theirs. Whereas our downtown developed piecemeal – and at the behest of hardscrabble developers – over the past century, the building explosion in Jersey City betrays a strong sense of central planning. You feel this in the spaciously laid-out streets, the newly planted trees that do not yet afford any shade, the simulated old black lampposts that add a historicist touch, and perhaps most of all, a new tramway with a distinctly old-fashioned feel.

One thing that is missing from this equation, however, is humans. On a recent visit around lunch hour, I saw none of the frantic hordes of hungry office workers clamoring for a hot dog or a slice of pizza. There were some people about, but not many, and they did not seem in any particular hurry.

On the face of it, this would appear to be an object lesson in the limits of urban planning. The regnant attitude of the people I encountered seemed to be suspicion of anyone who was there for any other reason than to duck into an office cubicle for eight hours and then return home. While I strolled aimlessly about, pointing my camcorder at the various buildings as a way of taking notes (something I have done for years without incident on the streets of Manhattan), I was informed by a sequence of decidedly humorless security guards that it was illegal even to photograph the exterior of the buildings! The animating premise was that no one could possibly be interested in the architecture of Jersey City for any other reason than to inhabit it or to blow it up.

On the contrary, some interesting architecture can be found in these parts. For anyone looking across the Hudson from Battery Park, the most inescapable presence is the Goldman Sachs building, a grandly tapering tower billed as the tallest building in New Jersey. This nearly completed structure on 30 Hudson Street was designed by Cesar Pelli & Associates. A cylindrical mass of bluish glass faceted with artdeco-inspired details and spindly metal accents throughout its facade, its mythic re-enactment of the generic skyscrapers of the 1930s recalls the architect’s earlier World Financial Center across the Hudson.

Nearby, the two 36-story Liberty View Towers, with somewhat oval footprints, emerge from a shared base. Designed by the firm of Gruzen Samton, they are conceived in a more or less modern idiom that is decently deployed, though hardly enterprising or original.

A great many of the new buildings in Jersey City, like a great deal of its confected urban context, favor Postmodern contextualism. Perhaps the most conspicuous example of this is the pair of buildings at 10 and 30 Exchange Place Centre directly north of Goldman Sachs. Adorned in off-white stone cladding, they come equipped with coigns and cornices, a vulgarly fluted base, and a glazed arcade at the summit that all aspire to fit in as inconspicuously as possible with such prewar buildings as survive in the area.

But the best buildings are the most unapologetically modern. Harborside Plaza 5 was designed by the local firm of Grad Associates, with credit for the facade going to Gordon H. Smith. The surface of this 34-story building is a skillful overlay of shifting geometric planes whose insubstantiality contrasts ostentatiously with the stern, monumental massiveness of the building overall. The tower emerges from a wide, redbrick base that is visually very attractive, though it is really only the thin cladding thrown over a huge garage complex.

Formally the cladding works very well, but an abundance of garages does not speak well for the civic health and vitality of any urban complex. The inconvenient scarcity of parking in Manhattan, for example, attests to the feverish desire to exploit to the utmost any particle of real estate that a developer can get his hands on. Jersey City, by contrast, abounds in garages. One of its most harmonious facades belongs to the long and low-lying structure of the Harborside Plaza 4-A, designed by the reliably expert Manhattan firm of Kohn Pedersen Fox. Despite a sophisticated interplay of glass curtainwalls and monolithic redbrick passages, the bulk of the building, it appears, just puts up a screen for the parking lot concealed within.

Is all this garage space being used to house cars? Even if it is, you can’t escape the lugubrious sense that the office workers who frequent this part of the world arrive by car, enter their office, and return home by car in the evening. That would explain the desertedness of the streets. This is the sad condition of downtowns throughout the nation, from Buffalo to New Orleans. And it is a tribute to the irrepressible vitality of New York that the streets of Midtown and the financial district are, at least in daylight, a summa of movement and jostling.

Perhaps the finest new structure of all in Jersey City is the recently completed Paulus Hook Ferry Terminal. Resolutely modern in all its details, this one-story glass and steel affair, with its scraping, cantilevered cornice, feels like a miniature re-enactment of Mies’s Chicago Convention Hall. I am sorry that I was not able to learn the name of its architect. The gleaming steel of the facade is expertly reprised in the detailings of the dock from which one boards the ferry itself. And how fitting it seems that this worthy little pavilion should be the last and the best thing one sees in Jersey City, as one sets off once more for the blessed shores of Manhattan.