AT THE topping out ceremony held on the upper floors of the first of three towers being built in a hitherto unloved corner of Jersey City, Steven Fulop, the mayor, gazed across the water at Manhattan’s skyline, New York Harbour, the Statue of Liberty and bits of his home state. He shook his head and said to himself, “this is crazy, this is crazy”.

In a city once notorious for political corruption, Mr Fulop sometimes sounds like a character in a Frank Capra film. He is the son of Romanian immigrants who owned a delicatessen in nearby Newark. Mr Fulop is the grandson of Holocaust survivors. After the September 11th attacks, he left his job at Goldman Sachs, a bank, to join the marines. He served in Iraq in the war’s early months. After his deployment he returned to finance and to Jersey City. After an unsuccessful run for Congress, he was elected to the city council in 2005. He had little party backing and was outspent. His 2013 victory over Jerramiah Healy, the sitting mayor, represented a break from the city’s history of political patronage.

The tower, in Journal Square—a neglected commercial and residential district—is part of the first sizeable development there in half a century. Jonathan Kushner, the developer behind the Journal Square project, says “Jersey City has become a t-bill for investors”. Some others, who are not talking their book, seem to agree with him.

This is a turn-up for a place that, thirty years ago, was one of most troubled cities in the state. Manufacturing and the warehouse industries had long since left, leaving behind empty buildings, high unemployment and a dwindling tax base. Financial companies began moving their back offices to Jersey City in the 1990s. Now millennials and arty sorts priced out of Brooklyn are moving in. Jersey City could soon pass Newark as the state’s largest city. Its schools, where around 80 languages are spoken, are bursting at the seams.

Unemployment has dropped from 8.8% when Mr Fulop was elected to 5%. While Mr Fulop, a Democrat, has streamlined regulations and expedited business approvals, he is protective of the city’s industrial past. “Grittiness makes the city special. We don’t want to become a Main Street with chain stores.” He has also pushed a progressive agenda. Under his watch, the city became the first in the state (and sixth in the country) to require companies to grant paid sick leave. It is the first New Jersey city to have a transgender health care programme. More affordable housing has been built, even along the desirable waterfront, in the past two and a half years than in the previous ten.

All this has helped put Mr Fulop on a shortlist of possible gubernatorial candidates. Chris Christie will bump into his term limit in 2017. Getting elected governor would be tough. It is not clear that voters in New Jersey, a mostly suburban state, care all that much about any city. And it usually takes politicians at least one unsuccessful run for statewide office to get elected. Name recognition is hard to come by as the state does not have its own television network beyond its public television service. Southern New Jersey gets local news coverage from Philadelphia, while northern New Jerseyans get theirs from New York. But given his golly-gosh rise, it would be silly to bet against Mr Fulop.



Correction: The article originally stated that New Jersey did not have its own television network. It does have a public television service. This has been corrected.