Hartz Mountain Industries' twin office buildings on the Jersey City waterfront will soon have a $143.5 million big brother.

Hartz will break ground shortly on 77 Hudson Street, a blue-windowed, 33-story office tower to be built in the Colgate Corporate Center at Exchange Place. The building shares its neoclassical design with 70 Hudson Street and 90 Hudson Street, two 12-story, 412,000-square-foot buildings also being built by Hartz that echo the arched facade work of the original Exchange Place Building nearby.

However, 77 Hudson stretches that style upward and outward at 491 feet tall and a whopping 1.4 million square feet of space within its two-tone, cast-concrete walls.

"This is a building that will offer a variety of textures and finishes that will make for an interesting facade - yet one that fits the surrounding area," Hartz Vice President for Development and Engineering Perry Frenzel told the city Planning Board, before that body voted unanimously Tuesday night to approve the preliminary site plan for the building.

Hartz's new project comes on the heels of investment banking giant Goldman Sachs' announcement that it will erect the state's tallest building on the Jersey City waterfront, right next door to the Hartz buildings.

Before approving the plan, the Planning Board did require Hartz to move six floors of parking up a floor so the ground floor of 77 Hudson could host retail stores that open to the surrounding streetscape on Hudson, Green and Sussex streets.

There will be 22,000 square feet of retail space on the first floor. City planners hope that just like the planned Goldman Sachs complex next door, 77 Hudson's street-level retail businesses will help keep foot traffic in the area around the building safer and more inviting to the surrounding neighborhood.

The parking in the building moves to floors two through seven and will provide space for approximately 640 cars.

City planner Marianne Bucci-Carter, in her comments to the board prior to its vote, said Hartz would have to do more to mask the garage floors' appearance.

"There are currently no special features to take your eye off the idea that this is a garage," Bucci-Carter said.

The Planning Board made its approval contingent on Hartz's willingness to improve the garage section's design, one some neighbors don't like - regardless of any promised tweaking of exhaust vent grills or window casements.

"This is a parking ramp with offices on top of it," Paulus Hook resident Bo Lysyj said during the public comment section of the site plan hearing.

"I know there are costs involved in this, but the parking should've been below grade and the utility lines on both sides of the building should be buried below ground," Lysyj said.

Linda Pelligrino, president of the Historic Paulus Hook Neighborhood Association, said some of the neighbors' displeasure with the new building stemmed from the fact that Hartz, unlike Goldman Sachs, did not reach out to her association's membership to share its plans in direct meetings.

"I have no specific comments abut the Hartz building, because I have not seen it," Pelligrino told the board.

"It was a mistake for Hartz not to have gone to the community," Ward E (Downtown) Councilman Mariano Vega Jr. told the board. "The Paulus Hook Neighborhood Association has in its membership talented architects and designers. It's a shame we didn't have the benefit of their input."

The board still I liked what it saw.

"Hartz has produced another quality building," Board member Jeff Kaplowitz said before the unanimous vote.

Hartz applied this week to the City Council for a 20-year tax abatement. The abatement would require Hartz to make payments in lieu of taxes of approximately $2.9 million annually with periodic increases for inflation. It would also make a $783,000 contribution to the city recreation fund.

The fund was originally designed as a way to get developers to cover the cost of the city's bonding to build parks and ball fields. However, it is now divided up by the fine council members for their use on projects to improve city recreation services.

Hartz is prepaying its PILOT so it can e part of the 2001 budget. The unimproved lot at 77 Hudson paid just $143,00 in taxes this year.

Hartz's vice president and general counsel, Allen Magrini, said his company could work with Goldman Sachs to ensure yhat the roadways and sewer lines in the area are able to handle the increased workload the new properties in the Colgate Center would demand.

Goldman Sachs plans an 875-foot-tall office tower at 30 Hudson Street and a separate corporate training center building it calls "Goldman Sachs University" at 50 Hudson Street that will be connected by an enormous glass atrium enclosing the eastern end of Morris Street.

All the parcels in the 20-acre Colgate Corporate Center, a former soap factory, have been sold. All either are sites of completed buildings or are in various stages of development. Behind the planned Goldman Sachs University, another Goldman Sachs office building of more than 600,000 square feet is planned for a Colgate parcel at 55 Hudson Street.

Just to the south of these office buildings but still within Colgate's boundaries, the Fischer family, a powerful Manhattan real estate dynasty, will break ground this summer on twin 37-story residential towers while at the same time converting the decrepit S.A. Wald warehouse into an eight-story residential building.

Behind 101 Hudson Street, a Colgate Center property completed in 1992, another parcel is in development by international investment brokerage Merrill Lynch, which may build a twin for 101 Hudson.