Interstate 280

The highway and automobile were two of the largest factors driving Newark’s 20th century decline in economic and political power.

For most of Newark history, the majority of population growth and economic energy were confined within the city limits. In 1910, Newark’s population of 347,000 was concentrated in Downtown and immediately adjacent neighborhoods. Within two miles of Downtown, large parts of the city remained farmland beyond the reach of commuter trolleys, pedestrians, and horse carriages. What is now Port Newark and Newark Airport were only salt marshes. Almost none of the South Ward and little of the North Ward were developed. The West Ward was a suburb most easily accessible to downtown by trolley.

Over a century, Newark – as well as just about every American town and city – witnessed massive population loss. At the same time, the city edge was developed from farmland into endless rows of suburbs. The automobile and highway made this transition from a high-density into a low-density city not only possible, but inevitable. No part of Newark is now untouched by urban sprawl. Newark’s population of 281,000 in 2020 represents fewer people spread out over a larger surface area than in 1910.

The Interstate Highway Act of 1956 offered funding to state and city governments for highway construction. This law changed the face of American cities. Federal funding covered up to 90% of land clearance and construction costs. In the web of highways that resulted, two major interstates sliced through Newark: Route 280 was carved through the Central and North Wards c.1960 while Route 78 was carved south through the Weequahic neighborhood c.1963. To clear the land for the path of both highways, at least 5,000 Newark residents were displaced, hundreds of small businesses were closed, and hundreds more homes were demolished.

For centuries, Blacks were locked out of owning their own land and homes. For the first time, migration to northern cities like Newark opened up the chance for them to own their own homes. While redlining practices from banks denied mortgages to many of them, growing numbers slipped through and bought their own homes. And yet, urban renewal and highway construction were erasing much of the progress these Black communities were making toward equal rights. For every one new Black resident to settle in Newark, two White residents left the city. Newark was losing population, at first slowly in the 1950s and then at an unstoppable pace by the 1970s.

Newly opened interstate highways displaced Black and non-White peoples from destroyed urban communities, while empowering White residents to flee the city for the suburbs. For the first time in Newark history, highways ensured that areas twenty or thirty miles distant from the city remained within commuting distance of White-collar jobs downtown. The result of highway construction was both population loss in the city center and a growing physical divide between Black and White communities. While the average Newark Black resident in 1960 was less than a mile distant from the nearest White neighborhood, by the 2000s Newark’s Blacks were separated from Whites by several miles. New Jersey remains racially and spatially divided. While highways were not the only factor responsible, their construction through Newark accelerated the already-present racial divisions.

With limited funding and competing special interests, the City of Newark had to choose between building more highways or building more affordable housing. The choice was made to build more highways instead of, and at the cost of, building more housing. City leaders and corporate interests argued that highways would clear away slums, would allow suburban residents to bypass slum areas, and then find easy parking downtown. It was more important to build highways and parking lots than housing and neighborhoods in downtown Newark. As Harold Kaplan described in his 1963 book Urban Renewal Politics:

In recent years, they had come to the conclusion that Newark’s future economic health depended upon a revitalization of its central business district. While sites should be cleared for new firms, the immediate emphasis should be on increased access for suburban shoppers to and from the business district. What Newark needed was a network of elevated highways emanating in radial spokes from the business district to carry the suburbanites quickly and safely over the slums. The City should clear sites for downtown parking lots, not for more tax-exempt public housing projects that use up good commercial real estate and seal off the central business district.

Samuel Berg documented almost every single building demolished for the path of Interstate 78 and 280. His photos show entire neighborhoods in the years 1959 to 1961, just months before they were declared “blighted” and cleared of all residents. And yet, his photos encourage us to be critical of when developers and governments call a neighborhood “blighted” and a “slum.” Not one abandoned building appears in his hundreds of photos of these neighborhoods. At the same time, the pedestrians and residents who appear in Berg’s photos are almost all Black. It was not the condition of these homes and the quality of their construction that led the state to call these areas “blighted.” It was the color of their skin coupled with the convenience of building a highway through neighborhoods where residents were too powerless and too poor to resist.

Highways destroyed more than homes along their paths. They also lowered the quality of life in nearby neighborhoods. Weequahic is now cut off from the rest of the city by Interstate 78’s fourteen lanes of asphalt. Newark residents suffer from elevated levels of asthma and air pollution from vehicles, elevated temperatures from higher amounts of paved surfaces, and elevated noise pollution from congestion.

The built environment must be a tool for social equity. Any program of reparations must consider how to erase the decades of damage – environmental, economic, and social – that these highways have caused to generations of Newark residents.