A Smoky Stay at Liberty Harbor RV Park in Jersey City: Campground Review

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travel dates: June, 2023

Anyone planning an RV trip to New York City will have to confront that age old dilemma: stay close to the city in the expensive parking lot that is Liberty Harbor RV Park–right across the water from Manhattan–or stay at a campground campground and deal with a long commute into the city. A few years ago we went with the latter option, and had a great stay at Croton Point Park north of the city. But this time we decided to give Liberty Harbor a try, and we also had a great stay there! Yay!

This is the view that greeted us when we arrived:

But! This probably won’t happen to you if you stay there! Odds are. Smoke from the wildfires in Quebec caught up with us a few times on our trip, most dramatically on our first day at Liberty Harbor. We were in New York because Gus’s wind symphony was playing at Carnegie Hall. They flew in to JFK the day we arrived with the RV, and they shut down the airport to incoming flights a couple of hours after they landed. It was bad! Thanks to Covid, we had plenty of masks with us, and faced the novel situation of needing them for outside this time. It’s always something. Apparently.

Location:

This is why you stay at Liberty Harbor. It’s not just a good location for New York City; this level of proximity would make it a good location for pretty much any big city. Liberty Harbor is in Jersey City, right across the water from Manhattan and comes complete with a view of the Statue of Liberty. If you want to visit the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, or Liberty Science Center, it’s a very short drive to Liberty State Park (or a longer but doable walk–more on that later). And if you want to go into NYC, you have an excellent option on weekdays in the form of a ferry that leaves right from the marina or a less excellent but still very reasonable option on weekends in the form of the the PATH train, about a half mile walk away. A couple more things to note about transportation:

*For the ferry, you have to download an app to buy tickets, and it’s a bit of a pain, so I suggest you don’t wait until you’re walking over to catch the ferry like I did. A guy who takes the ferry every day was waiting with us and offered to help me figure it out…but then he looked, and it turned out I HAD already figured it out, and he told me I was the first tourist he’d ever seen manage it, and I felt very proud of myself. Anyway, the stupid app is called the City Experiences Mobile App.

*The ferry is more expensive than the PATH, at $10 each way (half price for kids 6-12, free for kids under 6), but we found it worth it if only to save the walk back from the train station after a long day walking around the city.

*The ferry only runs on weekdays, which meant we were stuck with the train for most of our trip. And furthermore, the train sometimes (always?) has a wacky schedule on weekends, which meant we kept getting stuck going all the way to Hoboken before it would take us to Jersey City.

I’m going to talk more about what there is and what we did in the immediate area toward the end of the post.

Booking and Arrival

I think this might have been the first campground we booked for this trip, since this stop was non-negotiable owing to Gus’s music commitments, and we didn’t have a good back up plan if Liberty Harbor filled up. There would be, as it turned out, plenty of empty sites while we were there, so we would have been fine waiting. Which I might well do if I had it to do over again, because the cancellation policy is not the least bit generous. Half of the total is due when you book and none of that is refundable if you cancel. Which means we’d have been out nearly $300 had we needed to cancel. We paid $135/night plus tax in June 2023…I just checked now, in September, 2023 and noticed that rates are currently listed at $149/night plus tax. Shrug. What are you going to do? There aren’t any other RV parks in Jersey City.

I was very nervous about driving our trailer through Jersey City (and this was one reason we’d opted to stay farther out last time we visited NYC), but it was…fine. Not great, but no real problems. It’s a city; there’s a lot of traffic; you might need to be slightly aggressive if you want to make it through lights or make turns. We followed the directions on Liberty Harbor’s website from the highway and did fine. We have a 32 foot trailer, but plenty of people make it in motorhomes and 5th wheels, too.

The entrance to the park where you have to pull over to check in can get a little hairy if you get there at the same time as someone else, but that’s more a problem for people who need to get around than for the person checking in. There’s an office where you check in, and they give you a lot of information about the area and how to get around, which is nice. One quirk about check out here is that you have to go to the office and physically sign a sheet saying you’re leaving or they’ll charge you $40. We’ve never seen that before! So not a problem, but definitely make sure to do it.

Campsites

These are all pretty much the same, so there’s not much need to spend a lot of time fretting over which site to pick. There are some that are listed as 50 feet instead of 45, so we made sure to pick one of these. We’re just a hair under 50 between the trailer and the van, and we could indeed have fit without unhitching if we’d needed to.

So you can see in this picture what the sites are like. They’re packed pretty tightly together, and they’re just gravel parking spots with lines painted to show you where yours ends. That said, it’s not really any worse than, say Fishing Bridge in Yellowstone (or than a lot of the sites we’d encounter later in the summer in Newfoundland). And, of course, you’re probably staying at Liberty Harbor because you want to see the city, not to hang out at the campsite. The sites are all back-in and mostly back up to to other sites (except the ones along the very back row, which back up to a fence).

I did note that the back row, farthest from the entrance, seemed to stay less crowded while we were there and also had a wider road in front of it–probably very easy to back into.

Here’s a picture of the sites looking prettier because it’s lit up all pretty at night:

Sites are water/electric; no sewer hookups, but there is a dump station on site (it’s tucked a bit awkwardly into a corner):

There are also, incidentally, tent sites available for $75/night. There was no one there the whole time we were there, but you CAN stay here in a tent:

Amenities:

Perhaps my biggest worry here was that the bathhouses would be terrible, particularly since there aren’t sewer hook-ups. Some of the reviews I read made things sound scary, but it turns out I didn’t need to worry! They were fine! I’d rate them as above average for campground bathhouses! One thing to note is that they seem to spend a full two hours literally hosing the whole place down in the middle of the day, but they don’t actually close the bathhouses for this, so my first trip upon arrival was a little….wet. But mostly–fine!

There’s not a lot else here, in keeping with the no-frills urban camping theme, but there’s also a very passable laundry room (although it doesn’t sell laundry detergent, and it’s pretty tough to find anywhere in the immediate area that sells it. Dave ended up making a Target run one day, which required a drive). No camp store, but they do sell ice at the office.

Local Area

I’ll do a separate post about stuff we did in the city, but I’m going to tack what we saw close to the campground on here, largely because I’ve already blogged about the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. We don’t seem to be able to resist going there when we’re in the area. It’s an awfully nice statue! And last time we were there, the new museum wasn’t open yet, so, of course, we needed to check that out. Last time we were able to get crown tickets for 4 of us (Abe wasn’t tall enough yet, and someone needed to stay with Abe, so Dave was also left out), so my plan was to get tickets again, so Abe and Dave would be able to go up. Sadly, I missed the day when tickets were released, and they were long gone by the time I remembered to look for them. Next time, Dave and Abe! The post I linked to above has details on seeing the crown.

Notes on getting from Liberty Harbor to Liberty State Park: The ferry to Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty leaves from Liberty State Park, which is very close to Liberty Harbor, but, sadly, there’s some water in the way making the route less direct (there’s also a ferry from NYC). You can definitely drive, and there’s plenty of parking, but we opted to make our way there (mostly) on foot. On the way there, we walked to the Liberty Landing city ferry on Warren St, about a half mile walk from the RV park. Incidentally, this is another weekday only option for getting into Manhattan. This takes you right across the water to Liberty State Park; the actual time in transit might literally be less than a minute, and it only costs $2/person. But we found it didn’t really save all that much walking compared to just going across the bridge on Jersey Ave on the other side of the campground, and we didn’t want to be held to the ferry schedule, so we skipped the ferry and just walked on our way back. We did a LOT of walking that day. And, honestly, probably kind of wished we had driven when we were doing that walk back at the end of the day.

Then we got on the ferry to Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty and barely waited at all, which is not consistent with my earlier experiences, so that was nice. This was one of our wildfire smoke days, and I accidentally activated some weird setting on my camera, and I took this picture which was supposed to be of the skyline but wound up being of this random family, and I’m sort of in love with it, especially that guy leaning on his hand in the corner. Thanks for a fun picture, random family!

They used to only give out a single Junior Ranger badge for Ellis Island/the Statue of Liberty, but now there are separate ones! So Abe had to get them. The book for Ellis Island is a good one; it has a couple of fictional kids as characters, and it pairs well with the family audio tour.

Then back on the ferry to climb a statue!

I don’t know if the Junior Ranger book here is a work in progress or what, but we just got a single sheet with activities to complete on it, which was a bit of a disappointment after Ellis Island. All of the activities, IIRC, can be completed in the NEW MUSEUM.

I don’t know how new this actually is; I think it might have opened a few years ago now. But it’s new to us, anyway. It has a lot of the same stuff as the old museum in the statue pedestal, but in a nicer setting. (In fact, the old museum is still there and you can go in, but they have cardboard print outs of all the actual artifacts that are now in the new museum. It’s slightly creepy).

Speaking of creepy:

Somewhat less creepy:

Not at all creepy; just a regular old exhibit without dismembered statue parts:

Walking back to the campground….hazy harbor:

On our first day–the day that looked like that picture up at the top–we decided to get inside and drove over to the Liberty Science Center, right by where the Ellis Island ferry leaves from. We only had a couple of hours, so we didn’t see nearly everything, but we got in free with our ASTC membership. Anyway, it’s a nice science museum and definitely worth checking out, particularly with kids.

There was an exhibit where you can smell emotions. Okay!