A Centre Pompidou satellite museum that was expected to open in Jersey City is officially not happening anymore, the city’s Mayor said on Wednesday.
The museum, officially known as the Centre Pompidou x Jersey City, would have been the only North American satellite operated by Paris’s biggest museum of modern and contemporary art, which is currently closed for renovations.
The Pompidou also runs satellites in Shanghai and Málaga, Spain. Others are expected to open in Hanwha, South Korea, and Paraná, Brazil, yet both pale in comparison to the most ambitious Pompidou satellite in the offing: Kanal, a new museum in Brussels. Some have raised concerns, however, about whether Kanal will ultimately open as Belgium continues to face a prolonged government shutdown.
Like the rest of these satellites, the Jersey City museum was years in the making. It was first announced in 2021 as a 58,000-square-foot museum set in a 109-year-old building on Journal Square. But as often happens in New Jersey, local politics interfered, and the plan quickly festered.
In 2023, Republican lawmakers began to raise concerns about the Centre Pompidou x Jersey City, claiming that the museum would cost $200 million, with some $58 million of that coming from the pockets of taxpayers. After months of back and forth between Democrats and Republicans, the state pulled money from the project, causing the plan to implode.
The next year, the Pompidou renewed its effort, announcing a new plan for an even bigger Jersey City museum, which now had a new location. Now, it appears that rebooted version of the Centre Pompidou x Jersey City won’t happen either.
“We will not be doing Pompidou, to be clear,” said James Solomon, the Democratic Mayor of Jersey City, according to NJ.com. “It is dead.”
The Centre Pompidou’s website lists all of the museum’s satellites, both the ones currently running and the ones still to come, but it notably does not feature information about the Jersey City institution. A Centre Pompidou spokesperson did not respond to request for comment.
OMA, the architecture firm that was expected to design the Jersey City museum, lists the institution as “ongoing” on its website. An OMA spokesperson did not immediately respond to request for comment.
The Centre Pompidou x Jersey City project was begun under the Mayorship of Steve Fulop, a Democratic who served three terms before leaving office last month. He had previously urged Solomon to continue seeing the museum to fruition, warning that Jersey City would lose money if the institution did not happen. Doing so would “cost tens of millions of dollars to reverse,” Fulop told NJ.com.
Solomon had railed against the project prior to his election, saying that “the current administration failed to deliver a credible plan to fund the Pompidou. Based on its own calculations, the Pompidou has a nearly $250 million budget hole over the next decade.”
It remains unclear how much money Jersey City did ultimately spent on the Pompidou project, a repeated point of contention during the planning proceedings. In 2024, NJ.com reported that Jersey City had allocated $11.5 million to the project. That report also noted that OMA had received nearly $12 million since the planning began in 2018. In 2025, the Jersey City Times reported that the city’s 2025 budget listed a new $1.1 million cost for the museum.
