1. Introduction:
In 1910, Newark had a Black population of 9,475 in a city of of 340,000. The Black community was just 3% of the city’s total. By contrast in 2020, at least 50% of Newark residents are Black, and about 30% are in some way Hispanic. This represents a massive demographic shift and population replacement rarely seen in cities outside the United States. Not just Newark, Baltimore, New Haven, Oakland, and Detroit were all cities whose Black populations were no more than 5% of the cities’ totals in the 1900s. Harlem, known as the Black capital of America, was for most of its history undeveloped farmland and then a Jewish and ethnic White neighborhood of comfortable, middle-class brownstones. It was through the Great Migration from the 1920s to the 1960s that Harlem became the center of Afro-American culture.
This replacement of Blacks in old White neighborhoods has consequences for Newark history and for those who study it. Newark is now a Black city, but it is a Black city with comparably invisible Black history. The large majority of its old buildings, street names, parks, monuments, and historic built environments have more to do with the European immigrants and colonial powers who built this city than with the Blacks and Hispanics who now inhabit it. One result is the feeling among Newark residents today that this city’s history is not their history.
In this interview, Samuel Berg is no historian, although he reflects on a Newark that no longer exists. His connection with history is ruptured through some combination of population change, racial shift, and so-called “slum” clearance. As much as this is a website about urban renewal, this is also a document of vanishing memories. This interview hints at how Dr. Berg felt and experienced lost Newark while assembling the photos displayed on this website:
2. Interview:
Interview from the archives of the Newark Public Library
3. Who was Samuel Berg?
A brief biography by Beth Zak-Cohen from the Newark Public Library:
Born in 1898, Dr. Samuel Berg of Newark, N.J. led the Atom Bomb Medical Research Commission into Nagasaki after the second atomic bomb was dropped there in World War II. Dr. Berg had a private practice in Newark from 1924 to 1984, ans was elected to the Board of Trustees of the New Jersey Historical Society in 1959. Samuel Berg was the son of Ukrainian-Jewish immigrants Rose Tashker Berg (1874-1957) and Bernard Berg (1870-1942). Rose Tashker and Bernard Berg were married in 1897 in Newark, at the home of Elias and Anna Reich, 136 Prince Street. Anna Reich was Bernard Berg’s aunt, the sister of his mother. After their marriage Rose and Bernard Berg opened a laundry at 86 Ludlow Street in New York City and lived behind the shop; it was here that Samuel Berg, the oldest of three siblings, was born. Bernard Berg studied pharmacology at night, became a registered pharmacist, and worked in several pharmacies in New York. In 1906 Bernard Berg opened his own drugstore at the corner of 2nd and Warren St. (now West Market Street) and moved the family to Newark. In 1910 he bought a building at 92 South 13th Street in the Roseville section of Newark and re-located his business there; the family, by then including Ethel and Morris (“Moe”), lived above the store.
Samuel Berg attended South 8th Street School and Barringer High School in Newark. He received his BS degree from New York University and his MD from Bellevue Medical College (1921). Berg did his internship at Newark City Hospital and maintained a private practice (except during his years in the military) from 1924 to 1984 in Newark. He also worked as Assistant Pathologist (1934-1968) at Newark Hospital, first under Harrison S. Martland, MD and later under Edwin Albano, MD. During World War II Samuel Berg joined the U. S. Army, where he served as a pathologist and set up blood banks in the Pacific Theater. At the end of the War II he served as Director of Laboratory Studies, Nagasaki Unit of the Commission for the Investigation of Effects of the Atom Bomb. Berg was elected to the Board of Trustees of the New Jersey Historical Society in 1959, the first Jewish member of the Board, and was the author of “Harrison S. Martland, M.D.: The Story of a Physician, a Hospital, an Era” (NY: Advantage, 1978).
Ethel Berg (1900-1986) was a teacher, and later principal, at 1st Avenue School in Newark. She wrote a book about her brother, Morris. She was also actively involved in charities for children. When the family homestead at 92 South 13th Street was sold, Ethel bought the “old Pingry School House” at 88 North 6th Street in Belleville and moved there.
Morris “Moe” Berg (1902-1972) was a graduate of Barringer High School, Princeton University (1923), and Columbia University Law School; he was a talented linguist who spoke many languages and a professional baseball player. Although Berg’s position in college had been shortstop, he played professionally as a catcher for clubs in Chicago and Cleveland, before joining the Washington Nationals in 1932. In 1934 Berg accompanied an American all-star baseball team to Japan, purportedly as a translator. His real mission, however, was spying for the U.S. government by taking photographs of Tokyo and other strategic locations in Japan. In 1943 Berg joined the newly established Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA, for which he worked until the end of the World War II. After the war he returned to Newark, worked intermittently as a lawyer, and lived first with his brother, Samuel Berg, MD, and for the last years of his life with his sister, Ethel.
