""It will be like a little city," Arpad "Arki" Busson says one chilly morning as he picks at a croissant in an underheated construction trailer. "That was one of the things that seduced me the most." On the wall hangs a blowup of his site plan, which calls for 23 state-of-the-art soundstages, around a half-million square feet of office and workshop space, a ferry dock, and a helipad. A water tower will bear the name of the development: 1888 Studios."
""I had a bit of this fantasy of being on the water," he tells me, putting a navy-blue peacoat over his knit turtleneck and opening the trailer door. In front of us stretches his empty stage: a nearly 60-acre expanse of weeds and gravel that runs down to a garbage-strewn shoreline. In the distance, the Staten Island Ferry that Pete Davidson and Colin Jost bought sits docked and derelict."
Arpad "Arki" Busson intends to build 1888 Studios beneath the Bayonne Bridge on the Kill Van Kull in New Jersey. The plan calls for 23 state-of-the-art soundstages, roughly half a million square feet of office and workshop space, a ferry dock, a helipad, and a water tower bearing the name 1888 Studios. Busson projects the development will cost over a billion dollars to transform a long-abandoned, nearly 60-acre brownfield into a film and TV production center. Busson evokes waterfront imagery, references Thomas Edison's 1888 patent as inspiration, and notes visible tugboats, barges, weeds, gravel, and a derelict Staten Island Ferry.
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