At a cost of $40 million, 469 structures were demolished to displace 4,600 people in Newark’s Little Italy of the Old First Ward. This panoramic photos shows the extent of demolition by December 1, 1953. Caption: “First Ward area takes on tornado-tossed appearance as demolition proceeds. View south from 8th avenue with High street at left.”
Italo Calvino describes the city of Maurilia in his 1972 novel Invisible Cities. The book is a collection of paragraph-length descriptions of 55 imaginary cities drawn from across space and time. Here is one chapter, with each mention of Maurilia replaced with Newark.
In [Newark], the traveler is invited to visit the city and, at the same time, to examine some old postcards that show it as it used to be: the same identical square with a hen in the place of the bus station, a bandstand in the place of the overpass, two young ladies with white parasols in the place of the munitions factory. If the traveler does not wish to disappoint the inhabitants, he must praise the postcard city and prefer it to the present one, though he must be careful to contain his regret at the changes within definite limits; admitting that the magnificence and prosperity of the metropolis [Newark], when compared to the old, provincial [Newark], cannot compensate for a certain lost grace, which, however, can be appreciated only now in the old postcards, whereas before, when that provincial [Newark] was before one’s eyes, one saw absolutely nothing graceful and would see it even less today, if [Newark] had remained unchanged; and in any case the metropolis has the added attraction that, through what it has become, one can look back with nostalgia at what it was.
Beware of saying to them that sometimes different cities follow one another on the same site and under the same name, born and dying without knowing one another, without communication among themselves. At time even the names of the inhabitants remain the same, and their voices’ accent, and also the features of the faces; but the gods who live beneath names and above places have gone off without a word and outsiders have settled in their place. It is pointless to ask whether the new ones are better or worse than the old, since there is no connection between them, just as the old post cards do not depict [Newark] as it was, but a different city which, by chance, was called [Newark], like this one.
The flowering of the American city was short and came to a quick end. America was never an urban nation, at least it did not think of itself as urban for most of its history. But for a brief few decades between the end of the U.S. Civil War and end of the First World War, the American downtown prospered. Department stores, factories, banks, insurance companies, and the homes of wealthy and poor people alike were all clustered around the American downtown. Downtown was the center, first of people, then of industry, and then of the cultural institutions built by public funds and industrialists’ donated wealth: public libraries, public museums, and public parks.
1913 map by Harland Bartholomew
All streetcar traffic converged on Broad and Market, as shown on the map above. Stretching out from downtown like legs on a spider was the web of radial streets and streetcar tracks. Five miles from downtown Newark and ten miles from Lower Manhattan, the city came to an end wherever the streetcar lines stopped. In Newark, streetcars extended north and south on Broad Street, northwest on Bloomfield Avenue, west on Market Street, and southwest on Springfield Avenue. A few miles distant, where land was cheapest, the streetcar lines ended with their maintenance yards and storage sheds adjacent the city cemeteries. In an age before the automobile, the size of the American city was limited by the size of its commuter transport system on horse cars, trolleys, railroads, and omnibuses.
Consider this 1916 description of downtown Newark glowing with life, written by literary critic Walter Prichard Eaton on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of Newark’s founding:
The colors leap out from the women’s hats and dresses, and faces flash white. Flags high aloft and the myriad shop windows along the curb supply additional color, while in Newark especially the big orange-yellow trolley cars, moving slowly along the centre of the way, keep the color note prominent. It is this bright, animated stream of life, in ceaseless motion, now black with shadow, now flashing into color, forever pouring through the bottom of a cañon which displays the shifting lights and shades of Nature’s handiwork together with flags and glittering window-panes and gilded signs of man’s making, that constitutes the peculiar feature of American commercial cities.
All traffic and all people went through downtown. There were no highways the way there are today – like Route 21, Interstate 78, and Interstate 280 – for high-speed traffic to bypass downtown. By the time Newark’s Public Service Trolley Terminal opened at Military Park in 1916, 300 trolleys an hour passed through the adjacent intersection of Broad and Market Street. The map below from planner Harland Bartholomew illustrates that as late as 1934, up to 300 buses and trolleys each morning rush hour delivered passengers to downtown offices and department stories. Notice on the below map that the width of colored lines indicates the intensity of traffic, and that all traffic converges on downtown. Both local commuter traffic, trolleys, buses, and long-distance truck traffic shared the same roads.
1937 map by Harland Bartholomew
Suburban sprawl and interstate highways changed all this. By 1910, one out of ten New Jersey residents lived in Newark, and about one half of all New Jersey residents lived within a 45-minute commuting distance of downtown Newark by public transit. One quarter of all jobs were in Newark, and one half of all department store purchases were in Newark. the 1940s and 1950s, all this began to change. The map below from a later master plan shows the majority of traffic bypassing downtown along the interstate highways.
1937 map by Harland Bartholomew
At the same time suburban sprawl and White flight pulled people away from Newark. Newark’s population fell, both in real numbers and as percentage of New Jersey’s population. In 1910, 14% of all New Jersey residents lived in Newark. By 2010, only 3% of New Jersey residents lived in Newark. The table below compares population growth in Newark vs. New Jersey. While the state of New Jersey and Newark suburbs kept on growing, the population of Newark stagnated and declined.
The quality of downtown life and the quality of the urban form suffered. As downtown lost population, it evolved from a mixed-use residential, industrial, and commercial neighborhood. By the 1970s and 1980s when Gateway Center was completed, downtown had completed its transformation to become a commercial neighborhood, active during the workday but inactive and dead at night. In lock step with downtown’s loss of population, the old fabric of downtown’s homes and businesses were demolished and replaced by upwards of 300 acres of surface parking and hundreds more acres of urban renewal projects.
A city that was 97% White in 1910 had become over 50% Black by the 1960s. As Blacks grew as a percentage of Newark’s population, downtown businesses continued shifting their investments away from the Black inner city. Newark’s Prudential insurance company rebuilt its downtown offices in the 1960s but opened branch headquarters in the suburbs. Newark’s Bamberger’s department store expanded to branch locations in suburban shopping malls. Newark’s Howard Savings Bank opened branch banks, first on the highways that cut through Newark and later in the suburbs themselves. While businesses moved away, factories simply closed up shop in the 1980s onwards and moved abroad for cheaper foreign labor.
In the essay In the essay Voices of Newark, journalist Jervis Anderson described downtown in October 1967, just weeks after the July 1967 rebellion:
The stranger from Manhattan enters and leaves at downtown Newark. The impression, on leaving, is what it was on entering: sterility, a dingy collection of commercial buildings with a stunted air over them, spreading away in a monotonously flat expanse. Nowhere is there to be seen that leap skyward that nourishes and releases the imagination. The Cultural Center on Broad Street, probably the place where the fashionable used to repair for a leisurely musical evening, now stands in jaded baroque among a row of modest storefronts, looking like an early affluent mistake. There are many Negro faces mixed in the crowds downtown, but they all seem like visitors’ faces, wearing a look of connection to some other turf. A cop roars off from a traffic intersection on a powerful motorbike; his eyes are hidden behind broad, metal-rimmed dark glasses, and his blue shortsleeves are rolled up above his biceps. He leaves behind a fleeting hint of what one has heard and read of Southern small-town terror.
Nor does it help that one’s first look at the city comes on a hot midsummer’s day: in this stifling and oppressive embrace, one imagines that Newark could easily be a place where nothing grows, where tender shoots sprout and then wilt. It makes one wonder a little about what will become of all the tender black dreams, both those that are radically new and those old ones that keep sprouting over and over again through the dead ground.
As you view these photos of downtown, reflect on how the city has changed over time and how the visually unpleasant parts of Downtown were not always this way. Consider: What kinds of buildings and living spaces could bring back people to live downtown, within walking distance of the places they work? What kinds of government policies could reverse the suburban sprawl and bring back business investment to Downtown? The history of where Downtown was in 1910 must be the inspiration for how the Downtown will be rebuilt. The city must be rebuilt not with skyscrapers and superblocks but with the kinds of human scale and walkable streets of multi-use small buildings that the city once had.
Of the approximately 40,000 people living in Belmont in 1960, over 90% were Black. Most survived on annual incomes less than $3,000 ($30,000 inflation adjusted) per year in comparison to a nationwide average of $5,600 per year ($56,000 inflation adjusted). Over 90% of residents were renters, and few of them were homeowners. Its poverty, its high Black population, and the longer history of denying investment and loans to people living here made this neighborhood particularly vulnerable.
This neighborhood was the most affected and almost entirely erased by urban renewal for public housing projects and the campus of UMDNJ. In the period 1950 to 1990, over 95% of all homes and buildings in Belmont were demolished. In the resulting photo comparisons, almost nothing survives of the communities that once were: dozens of Baptist churches, hundreds of corner stores, and thousands of largely Jewish-owned small businesses.
For most of its history, Newark was a majority-White city, where Blacks represented no more than 10% of the population. Upwards of 30% of Newark’s population was foreign born in the early 20th century, 40% worked in manufacturing, and most were immigrants from Europe. Belmont’s flat land for development, thousands of tenements, and proximity to factories downtown made it ideal for immigrant enclaves of Jews, Italians, Germans, and Poles.
By the 1950s, two major shifts were happening in Belmont, as well as dozens of other old immigrant neighborhoods in northeastern American cities. As Newark immigrants and their children found better paying jobs and integrated into American society, they moved out of crowded Belmont and into more comfortable and mass-produced homes in the low-density suburbs. These new suburban communities were for Whites only, if not by law then by practice. In the 1959 novel Goodbye Columbus, Newark-born author Philip Roth described the journey by car up Springfield Avenue. The drive from working-class Belmont to the upper-class suburb of Short Hills was a journey toward heaven for him:
Once I’d driven out of Newark, past Irvington and the packed-in tangle of railroad crossings, switchmen shacks, lumberyards, Dairy Queens, and used-car lots, the night grew cooler. It was, in fact, as though the hundred and eighty feet that the suburbs rose in altitude above Newark brought one closer to heaven, for the sun itself became bigger, lower, and rounder, and soon I was driving past long lawns which seemed to be twirling water on themselves, and past houses where no one sat on stoops, where lights were on but no windows open, for those inside, refusing to share the very texture of life with those of us outside.
The second major shift was the Great Migration. At least six million Blacks fled from poverty, unemployment, and racial tensions in the south to northern cities they hoped would be better. As internal immigrants within America and as a people at the bottom of the class system, these Blacks settled in the same Newark neighborhoods as earlier generations of White immigrants. Many of Belmont’s Jewish synagogues and Catholic churches were soon sold off and given new life as Black Baptist congregations. But, unlike earlier generations of White immigrants who used Belmont as a stepping-stone to climb the social ladder, Blacks in Newark were locked out of home financing and were only given low-paying manual labor jobs with few chances for promotion.
At the same time, urban renewal projects were eating away at Belmont’s Black homes. This was ground zero for slum clearance and for the violence that resulted. In the name of slum clearance, all of this area was swept clean from map, along with the histories these buildings contained of multi-generational and multi-racial immigrant struggle. Residents had little choice but to move yet again or to stand their ground and resist, as thousands did in the July 1967 rebellion. Newark’s civil unrest started in and was centered on Belmont and its main street of Springfield Avenue.
Samuel Berg’s collection shows Belmont at a historical turning point in the years 1958 to 1962. The Great Migration of Blacks to northern cities was slowing down, while urban renewal projects were picking up pace. These photos document almost every home, building, and business in Belmont near its height as a Black community. Notice in these photos the multi-story tenements and corner stores, for which there is no longer the population or the foot traffic to sustain. The walkable and human-scale fabric of the old city that required generations to organically develop was lost forever, replaced by vacant land, parking lots, strip malls, and endless rows of low-cost prefabricated housing.
In the two maps below, Belmont is the Black neighborhood at center. Compare the extent of Black population growth and neighborhoods in 1970 vs. 2020.
All photos were manually referenced to their contemporary locations. Contemporary street views correspond to camera angles of former photos, even though address naming conventions and house numbers may have changed.
If a photo is misplaced, contact mylesz@umich.edu with a link to the photo and description of the error.
