What was the impact of urban renewal?

From 1949 to 1967, government agencies and universities spent hundreds of millions of dollars on urban renewal projects in Newark. In the process, at least 10,000 historic buildings on 2,500 acres were demolished and 50,000 people were displaced, 65% of whom were Black and Hispanic. Newark undertook more urban renewal spending per capita than any of the nation’s thirty major cities. Neighborhood clearance for interstate highways and the campuses of Rutgers University, the Newark College of Engineering, and the University of Medicine and Dentistry contributed to the July 1967 uprising. Thousands of Blacks, who saw their neighborhoods, families, and businesses displaced by powerful institutions, rose up. In the resulting battles between protestors, Newark police, and national guards, 727 were injured and 26 died.

Long-term patterns of White flight, urban decay, and under investment accelerated after the 1967 unrest. From 1960 to 1990, 130,000 fled Newark, leaving abandoned neighborhoods behind them. Urban renewal started displacement, but White flight and urban decay continued it. The extent of neighborhood demolition expanded from urban renewal areas into surrounding neighborhoods, rich with hundreds of historic structures but no communities left to preserve them. In addition, Blacks from displaced “slum” clearance projects moved into neighboring White neighborhoods like Vailsburg, Weequahic, and Irvington, in turn causing White flight from those communities. Demolition continues today of the precious little architectural and historic fabric that survives of lost Newark. Most of the neighborhoods that are parking lots and empty lots today were destroyed after, not before, the 1967 unrest.

Through photos, this digital exhibit documents the impacts of urban renewal, White flight, and abandonment on Newark neighborhoods. From 1959 to 1968, Samuel Berg MD documented Newark’s built environment in 2,400 photographs of street scenes, old houses, small businesses, factories, churches, schools, and public spaces. His photos are a unique document of Newark’s rich and varied built environment before demolition. In 2018, the Newark Public Library completed the digitization and tagging of these photos. In 2022, the photo collections were georeferenced to their contemporary locations on Google street view, so as to empower the comparison of change over time.

Launch interactive map >

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In the archives of the Newark Public Library, the photos are stored in these 15 volumes:

Each volume contains hundreds of labeled photos. Here is how the photos were stored before scanning, organizing, and georeferencing on this website:

Who benefited and who lost in Newark?

The motivation for urban renewal…

And its effect on millions of Americans, according to James Baldwin

“A boy last week who was 16 in San Francisco told me on television – thank god we got him to talk maybe somebody will start to listen – he said I got no country I’ve got no flag. He’s only 16 years old, and I couldn’t say you do. I don’t have any evidence to prove that he does. They were tearing down his house because San Francisco is engaging as all most northern cities now are engaged; it is something called urban renewal, which means moving the negroes out. Getting it means negro removal; that is what it means. And the federal government is is an accomplice to this fact. Now we’re talking about human beings.”

– TV interview for Perspectives: Negro and the American Promise
May 24, 1963 (full recording)

Above: Time-lapse photo series of New and Newark Streets by Camilo José Vergara illustrates the transformation of 19th-century homes into a multinational corporation’s biomedical research lab.

Newark residents reflect on a city that survives only in memory. Contribute your story.

In this series of images with annotations, Newark residents reflect on the streets and places where they grew up, in buildings that are now demolished. Each comment corresponds to the image of that person’s demolished childhood home.


The Westinghouse Factory in 2011.

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Project lead: Myles Zhang
Research method, credits,
and notes on naming conventions