Category: Featured Memories

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Amiri Baraka’s House at 33# Stirling Street was demolished to build a parking garage. Photographed on April 22, 1962.

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The entirety of Stirling Street, along with all its dozens of brownstones, was cleared for the parking garage and parking lot of the Essex County Courts complex. Stirling street today runs through the middle of this super block.

#33 Stirling Street on left, #25-23 on right behind tree

“I came back to Newark the last day of 1965. Home, a few days, then I found a house on Stirling street, just above downtown Newark, where the interior neighborhoods began to unfold. It was an old three story building, now long gone. I moved in and had it painted light green, with details of red and green, like the flag of a Black nationalist movement. It was to be a site for poetry readings, a theater, a place to hold discussions formal and otherwise and a general gathering site . It soon became all those things.”

Read poet and activist’s Amiri Baraka full-length reflection about his life at Spirit House, written in 2013 >

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E side Hillside looking SE from SW corner Hawthorne on April 21, 1962

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Veronica Battle writes:
“Thank you for the old pictures from Newark Changing 1950s to today. I grew up in Newark. Mainly in the Clinton Hill & Weequahic Sections. I remember when they were demolishing some parts of these areas. Did you take any photos of the areas of Wainwright, Leslie, Hobson, Dewey, Bragraw, Schley Fabyan and surounding streets. These streets, homes and people were displaced because of I-78. They didn’t completely finish I-78 until the early 1980s.”

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N side Watson looking NW from SE corner Peshine on April 21, 1962

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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 that Jane Davis’s father built:

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W side Hunterdon looking SW from NE corner Lawton on April 21, 1962

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Jane Davis writes:
“I must have been age eight or nine. I walked down the stairs of our family home at 161 Watson Avenue late at night. And I remember overhearing my parents arguing in whispered tones talking about what to do. They had just received the government notice, evicting them from their home to build the highway. They argued: ‘Should we sell right away and get away? Or should we stay and fight to get a fair price for the value of our home?’ In the end, we left. I remember their conversation all these decades later.”

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E side Hillside looking NE from Watson on April 21, 1962

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Carolyn Peggy Smith writes:
“I was renting an apartment at 29 Watson Avenue in fall 1965. I was living here with my dad Samuel Q Cody, my mother Shirley Cody, and my one-year-old son Anthony Smith. I don’t remember much about the other businesses on Watson Avenue. But I do remember that down the street at the bottom of the hill was White Castle, where we went for hamburgers and fast food on special days. That was a real treat!

“It was a racially integrated neighborhood. On the ground floor was C Nesmith’s grocery story, where I used to buy candy, sodas, and other daily goods for our home. All told, there were probably a dozen family-owned grocery stores and hundreds of small businesses in the area. And now there are almost none.

“I went to school just up the street at the Peshine Avenue Elementary School. Those were the days when we did not have a car. We had to walk everywhere. It was more work to get around. But it was easier to stay physically in shape when almost everything we needed to buy was nearby.

“After having my son Anthony, the highway came through our neighborhood and took us from our home.”

Note: Interstate 78 was built in the 1960s and displaced about 8,000 Newark residents in the Weequahic neighborhood, as well as at least 500 family-owned businesses. A few of these businesses were on Watson Avenue, which used to be a commercial street before the highway came through. The winter 1965 city directory records the names of a few of these Jewish-owned and black-owned family businesses, just months before they were demolished:
– McCall’s Hair Fashions
– Fisher Bros Cleaners
– Hillco Frozen Meats
– Les Femmes Beauty Shop
– Norman’s Beauty Shop
– C Fong Laundry
– Leola’s Variety Shop / Neighborhood Barber Shop
– Norman’s Prescription Pharmacy
– Holy Trinity Pentecostal Church of the Living God.

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Gethsemane Baptist Church, NE corner 15th & Morris Ave on April 2, 1967

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Fredrica Bey writes:
“I grew up here on Morris Avenue. We lived in a cold water tenement flat, with my mother from the Carolinas, my five siblings, and my adoptive father Mr. Chow from China. That tenement was demolished years ago. I was baptized at Gethsemane and remember the classic cars on our street. Later, I discovered the Nation of Islam and father Elijah Mohammed. I haven’t turned back since.”

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Looking SE at S side 12th Ave from Wallace St, #2-14

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Haarith Alston-Taalib writes:

“Back in the 60s, at the time of the riots, my family lived at the corner of Wallace Street and 12th Ave. There’s a little triangular shaped park that’s still there today. We lived above John M. Riccio’s grocery store. The little park sat in the center of West Market, 12th Ave. and Wallace Street. When I visit Newark, I drive past there sometimes; it brings back Wallace Street memories. Thanks for providing these photos of Newark. It warms the heart to see those old streets, stores, buildings, parks, uses, trucks, cars, etc.

“I lived at the intersection of Wallace Street and 12th Ave. There was a hospital across the street from where I lived and a triangular shaped park across the street from me (the park is still there today). I lived in the block between 12th and 13th avenues; 32 Wallace street was right at the corner. I still have a photo of me as a kid standing at this street corner posing for a photo on Easter. The fire hydrant is still there at the corner today; there’s a new building there now where my house was. I lived at 32 Wallace street.”

Riccio’s bodega advertised the following products and prices in April 1967:
– Spaghetti sauce for 19¢
– Liquid starch for 35¢
– Maine sardines for $2.25
– Fancy peaches for 29¢
– Pineapple juice for 25¢
– Dog food for $3.25
– Print lard for $2.35
– Canned sodas for $1.99

A kid returns home after shopping at Riccio’s in April 1967:

The identical street scene and view in December 2024:

All that survives today from history is this fire hydrant and the broken carcass of a rental scooter:

Haarith Alston-Taalib standing in front of Riccio’s on or around 1967.
The same fire hydrant is in background:

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Looking NE at E side Wallace St (stable – 34-36-38-set back)

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Haarith Alston-Taalib writes:

“Yes, at the corner in this photo is where my family lived until June of 1968. We lived in the apartment just above the sign for John M. Riccio’s grocery store; I have a photo of me at that intersection. I also have a photo of my brother Richard and I on Easter standing at that wall next to the door by the car under the billboard. That fence before the garage was our backyard. The garage was where Mr. Riccio’s food supply was stored. Next to our house, on the right, was a house where Nuns lived (it has that gate around it). I’m going to send the photo of me. We moved from there the year after the riots in Newark.”

Haarith Alston-Taalib’s home was the second-floor window on the left. He writes:
“One of those cars near the corner was my dad’s car in 1967-68.”

Photo of the identical location in June 2012, now the campus of UMDNJ:

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Looking SE at E side Newton St from 12th Ave (old lab of Newark Memorial Hospital in center)

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Haarith Alston-Taalib writes:
“I remember that red brick building; it was covered with vines. After the hospital closed, the kids would climb the tall mansion gate on the Newton Street side of the hospital and try to go inside the old buildings; we were never successful.”

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Newark Garden’s Convalescent Home, old Clara Maas, SE corner 12th Ave & Newton St

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The Newark Memorial Hospital in 1916 vs. 2016:

Haarith Alston-Taalib writes:

That one block was my world, my playground; I can visualize just about every house and the neighbors who lived on that block. All of my friends were from the middle to the end of the block. There were no houses across the street from me, just that hospital. I can still see the patients sitting outside in wheelchairs with nursing staff; the trucks making deliveries at the ramp across the street from my house. You don’t know what it did for me to see the photos of where I lived; it brought back a simpler time.