From the youngest age that I can remember hearing the name, I was one of the few people that had a positive opinion of Newark. For a time — before she naturalized and moved to New Brunswick — our family made an annual half-hour pilgrimage from our half-awake suburb to the Liberty International Airport to greet my mother’s mother. She, in contrast, had been sitting on a 16 hour flight from Russia, and couldn’t be more excited to see her grandchildren again.
What followed was a week or two where she had: stayed with us, played with us, cooked with us, taught us Russian (which we’d reciprocate with English lessons), and told us stories. These stories more-often-than-not fell into two categories: they were horror stories about her time as a public defender in Soviet Armenia — always geared towards disciplining or scaring us when we yelled or misbehaved — or they were about her childhood, growing up by the Volga in cloistered Nizhny Novgorod (forever to her, its Soviet name Gorky!).
In her youth, the city was a center for military research, production, and a shining zvezda of the nation’s economic might. It was also home to GAZ, the largest Soviet manufacturer of automobiles, buses, and trucks. Today, after a period of malaise and decline and excess mortality following the end of the USSR, Nizhny Nov-Gorky-rod is the foremost IT center in Russia, with a distinct historical district and robust public transportation. The city even hosted the World Cup in 2018.
And so, I associated Newark with my grandmother and all the fun that would follow the airport visit. I associated Newark with my grandmother, the oh-so-long-for-a-five-year-old car ride there, and choosing which new toy I was going to show her when the plane landed. However, we stopped going to Newark once it no longer became a necessity, and I didn’t hear much of it after.
I was surprised that, however little I did hear of it at 8 or 9, people had a lot of bad things to say about Newark! How could they? Wasn’t it, like, a big city with a lot of people? New York is like, right there… right? Didn’t they know I gave my Webkinz tours of the airport? What about my grandma? How can a city with an airport where Webkinz could roam freely be so unsafe?
Anyways, I learned what “crime” was. Apparently, Newark was full of it at some point. From the '70s through the '90s, the city was poor, dangerous, and riddled with drugs and violence. It had lead in the water. It was termed the “Camden of North Jersey”. It was supposed to be a violent shithole. In high school, kids would joke about Newark the same way kids would joke about Baltimore or Detroit or Memphis. And since I didn’t really keep in touch with my beloved Newark, I shed any associations I had with it.
Last spring, I slept in and missed my first driving exam. I had to reschedule with the Newark DMV, since clean and nearby Lodi was overbooked. “Yo, Newark? You’re so gonna get like, robbed or something,” or “Don’t get, like, carjacked during the exam. Haha, that would be so crazy…” were some of the more original comments I would hear when I told people. Regardless, I did need a driver’s license. And so, irresponsibly unarmored and unarmed, to Newark I went.
The city is defined by its relationship with logistics. The I-95, which spans the length of the entire East Coast, cuts right through its industrial sector and in between two of the busiest
hubs in the country: the airport, and the Port Elizabeth-Newark Marine Terminal, which is the busiest port in the United States after Los Angeles. If you’re in the Northeast and order something from abroad, chances are it’ll be coming through Newark at some point, either by land, sea, or air.
Newark is part of the northern end of what New Jersey-ans term the Chemical Coast. A thirty-mile stretch of coastline from Jersey City down to Perth Amboy (across the southern tip of Staten Island), and home to some of the finest and most prime, pristine petrochemical industrial manufacturing plants in the country. The Chemical Coast is responsible for a lot of the air pollution in the region that gets blown over to Staten Island, elevating the cancer rate for Travis’ residents since about 1872. Nonetheless, it’s one of the busiest industrial regions in the country, providing diesel, plastic, gasoline, jet fuel, ethanol, and electricity for upwards of 150 years — with a brief interruption to make pistols during WWII and, in the 1960s, a short detour to produce Agent Orange.
The area wasn’t much to look at during my drive down. Steam-stacks and storage tanks, barges and shipping containers made up a skyline dotted by rusty cranes and the occasional ground-floor industrial park or warehouse. I personally didn’t find it ugly. A more sustainability-minded individual probably would, and justifiably so. What was unmistakably ugly however were the towering and dilapidated highways, dotted with litter, contorting themselves over each other, each imposing its own grimy, sooty lifelessness over the green marsh below.
It was about noon when I entered local streets and I was a few hours early for the exam. Moving into South Newark’s Ironbound District, adjacent to the DMV, I took it upon myself to ostensibly practice my driving skills, but in actuality to explore somewhere I’d probably never be again.
The Ironbound District is a multi-ethnic working class neighborhood that was once bustling with different industrial developments and vibrant community life. It was not untouched by the seminal event of Newark’s decline, the 1967 race riots.
As part of a series of riots across the United States, the July of 1967 in Newark saw a week's worth of activity that could only be described as short of civil war. On the 12th, police beat a Black man unconscious for driving a taxi with a revoked license. Onlookers in a housing project saw a catatonic Black man being dragged into the nearby police precint, and rumor broke out that the man was dead. Outside, a crowd gathered. Police too gathered as a response, and as tensions rose, rocks and bottles flew. Five police officers were injured, and the crowd was dispersed. What followed was outrage.
For five days following, rioters and police officers engaged in clashes throughout the city. Storefronts, businesses, and police stations saw bricks, Molotov cocktails, and looting. Protestors saw their own blood. Snipers killed detectives. National Guardsmen shot protestors. A 12-year-old boy bled to death in the street after an officer shot into a crowd with a shotgun. The entire city burned as 8,000 members of law enforcement beat and gunned Newark’s citizens into submission. And for the years following, Newark saw disinvestment and decline. Crime was high and constant for the rest of the century. Many plots of land remain charred to this day, probably never to see use again. The city would not grow in population until 2020. Poorer neighborhoods like the South Ironbound District saw some of the worst declines in the entire city. And last spring as I drove through it?
It was a shithole. But it wasn’t violent. Everything was dead. A graveyard of old pre-war and midcentury hope tempered with powerlines and busted vinyl siding, littered with weathered "FOR LEASE" signs as headstones. Making my way around corners I hoped to see some life at all, vainly. People shuffled through the streets, through their dilapidated 1930s brick apartments, or in and out of restaurants and stores that had been in decay for dozens of years. I remember thinking to myself, If I was growing up here, I’d probably carjack me.
An imposing, heavy weight hung over everything. Everyone I did see looked tired. The few people who weren’t exhausted were asleep, either laying down and homeless or upright and on opiates. It was depressing to see the city that I once thought to be a signifier of good times to, in reality, be a constant source of much worse things for so many others. Phone numbers for companies that would collect diabetes test strips or scrap your car for cash were stapled to power poles and trees, perhaps the most active things I saw as they beat about in the wind. Someone in a van in front of me poured a beer out their window.
To me, this was not an indictment of Newark, but an indictment of flight. Newark was, and is, undeniably an important city, abound with potential. Its reputation as a criminal wasteland — which statistically has not been true for the last two decades — had warded off anyone from actually caring about fixing Newark. It certainly was not its inhabitants, many of whom I talked with at the DMV. Young folks were resigned; old folks were dispirited. The atmosphere amongst residents was one of a resounding sigh, followed with a defeated “Well, what can we do?”
Well, what can we do? Or rather, what is being done? Well, as I mentioned earlier, Newark did grow in 2020. And despite southernmost Newark’s dejection, the city as a whole is waking up and drawing in a new breath of air unbreathed for some sixty or so years. The pandemic may have bruised many cities and some of them irreparably. That very same pandemic was a defibrillator-shock for new investment across the Newark metro.
Newark’s importance as a logistical hub is mirrored by its importance as a telecommunications and data exchange center for New York and the surrounding areas. At the beginning of the 2000s, the Dot-Com bubble popped and left Newark with an overwhelming amount of left-over fiber-optic cables, which the government then used to turn Newark’s internet services into some of the fastest in the country.
Also within the city limits lie the New Jersey Institute of Technology and the Newark Campus of Rutgers University, both of which are heavily geared towards computer science and engineering education. These institutions, much like hundreds of others across the country, are seeing record levels of applications and admissions.
Once the pandemic hit, work-from-home and stimulus money led to some of Newark’s most productive years in history in regards to the tech sector, which sourced much of its labor from the students studying within. It is also the home of burgeoning technology-centric venture capital firms and related companies (WebMD, Broadridge, HAX, etc.). Prudential is headquartered in the city, and is responsible for a good amount of the new investment in reviving the cultural scene.
Yes, coinciding with this growth is the resurrection of Newark’s cultural scene. The New Jersey Performing Arts Center, home to the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra and Opera, released new plans to redevelop its own buildings and the surrounding waterfront. New mixed-use construction and public spaces are being built in an effort to create a distinct cultural district. The NJPAC and surrounding six acres will include a new studio for Lionsgate, a new theater as a part of a mixed-use high-rise, and a new creative arts education center. These plans were published in the NJ AIA magazine for 2021. That article was where I learned of this all, and the rest of Newark’s upturn, which spurred my last visit to the city.
North Newark is a nice place. It is not a shithole. It’s where most of what I’ve just told you about is happening. It's where I drove through to see it all. The NJPAC is a lively place with lively performances, and is personally my favorite thing about the whole city. But why should any part of Newark be a shithole? South Newark is supposed to rot because a cop beat a Black man in the ‘60s? We have to be scared of Newark’s poor and working class because of a riot that almost no one remembers? How different was Newark from Nizhny Novgorod?
We can call this a tale of two cities, of sorts. One city was a beacon of middle-class living with intense strategic significance. It manufactured and researched not only things important to civilian living but also military operations. It saw a period of stark decline, and afterwards, is at the forefront of information technology in its country. The other city is exactly the same. In fact, I would argue Nizhny Novgorod saw a worse decline than Newark should have! The country it was a part of disappeared overnight, and was riddled with drug addiction and violence and suicide for the decade following, and in 2019 it was ranked the best city in Russia to live in. And while I'm glad to see flowers beginning to bud where they can in Newark, how many more can be planted that aren't being planted because of unwarranted racism or classism? How much longer should South Newark wait?
I'm sure Newark is going to be where Nizhny Novgorod is at some point in the not-too-distant future. The issue still remains though, of the time wasted and life deprived from Ironbound's residents and other poorer parts of the city. Despite it all, I would still proudly say that I remain one of the few people with a positive opinion of Newark, and as time goes on and things continue to get better for it, that opinion will only improve in tandem.