Category: Featured Memories

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#93-81 Clay St

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Dee Kirk writes:
“I grew up one block from here on Stone Street in the 1940s, in a building that looked just like the ones here. My Italian mother worked on a sewing machine in a sweatshop. We lived in a long and narrow tenement. The innermost rooms had no natural light. But there were so many other children like me on the street. On Sundays, the Catholic nuns from St. Lucy’s would walk down the street ringing bells and calling all of us children to Sunday school. In the 1950s, all of Little Italy and my childhood home in Newark was demolished.”

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Roseville Masonic Temple, #65-63 Roseville Ave, is now this location on I-280.

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Dan O’Flaherty writes:
“Yes, the Masonic Temple was across the street from my childhood home on the 3rd floor of 62 Roseville Avenue. It was beautiful (and huge, like everything else on Roseville Avenue to me). I remember looking out the 3rd floor window at the blue globes with the stars on them. I never saw anything going on there, though.”

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#62-64 Roseville Ave is now this location on I-280.

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Dan O’Flaherty writes:
“I grew up in this house. Wow. Thank you. It’s so small! Dr Samuel Fortunato owned the building and used the first floor for his practice. Very convenient for me. I don’t remember a sign, but I would imagine he did. This suggests that by 1962 he had stopped practicing there.”

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N side Watson looking NW from SE corner Badger is now this location on I-78.

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Jane Davis​ writes:
​”The beautiful ​Weequahic section I lived in was murdered by politicians and the real estate industry as their answer to the Black migration. (My parents came to Newark from Georgia in the late 1940s.) My family’s home — 141 Watson Ave. — was the last house torn down on that street to make way for the highway. Such a travesty. ​[….] It’s amazing how the Newark that was — and thus how/why it was dismantled — nowadays is unknown to… most people. And Blacks often get blamed for driving the city into the ground–for the historically ignorant, the myth/slander/libel of ‘there goes the neighborhood’ really took hold. In any case, Newark still means so much to me and is most certainly my ‘home.’​

​”In any case, I just wanted to say that the part of the website that has ‘before and after’ photos showing what had been in contrast to the emptiness of the highway is SO amazingly meaningful and essential — at last, I can SEE the houses, stores, etc., that made up my home but that have been erased for decades now. So, though there is much more to say about Newark, I just want to say a huge thank you from the bottom of my heart​.”

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N side Watson looking NW from SE corner Peshine

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Jane Davis writes:
“The second house in the 1962 photo labeled ‘N side Watson looking NW from SE corner Peshine’ is the house I grew up in!!!!! My father made those brick steps to replace the wooden ones that were there. I have not seen this house in many decades – the last house torn down on Watson Ave for the highway.”

The brick steps of Jane Davis house:

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S side Edison Place looking SE from NW corner Mulberry

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Robert Singer writes:
“My father owned a business around the corner from here on Market Street. I used to shop here on Mulberry Street when I was a teenager. As you rounded the corner from Market to Mulberry, the street was full of old industries, bargain shops, and the like. All of it is long since gone.”