Newark,' the "Brick City," is a city located in Essex County, New Jersey. As of the 2000 census, the city had a total population of 273,546. It was founded in 1666, is an industrial city ten miles west of New York City, with convenient access to New York by road and rail.
Its location on the Atlantic coast, at the mouth of the Passaic River, has helped make it a major container shipping port. It is perhaps best known as the location of Newark Liberty International (formerly Newark Airport), which was the first airport serving the New York area.
History
Newark was founded in 1666 by Connecticut Puritans led by Robert Treat, making it the third oldest city in the United States, though not the third oldest settlement. "Newark," is the city's third name, its prior names being Pasaic Town, and New Milford.
Newark was a relatively large town in the colonial era, known for its good beers, ciders, and tanned leather goods. In religion, it stayed loyal to old Puritan ways longer than the communities of New England, and was very receptive to the Great Awakening. When the seminaries at Yale and Harvard showed their disdain for Great Awakening evangelicalism, several Newark ministers led by Aaron Burr founded in neighboring Elizabeth a school called the College of New Jersey, later to be known as Princeton. (the Aaron Burr mentioned was grandfather of the vice president who killed Hamilton)
Newark's rapid growth began in the early 1800s, much of it due to a transplanted Yankee named Seth Boyden. Boyden came to Newark in 1815, and immediately began a torrent of improvements to leather manufacture, culminating in the process for making patent leather. Boyden's genius would eventually allow Newark to manufacture almost 90% of the nation's leather by 1870, bringing in $8.6 million to the city in that year alone. Yet patent leather was not Boyden's only contribution to his adopted city. In 1824, Boyden bored with leather, found a way to produce malleable iron. It is no wonder that Thomas Edison, another Newark resident, ranked Boyden as the second greatest inventor in American history. Newark also prospered by the construction of the Morris Canal in 1831. The Morris canal connected Newark with the New Jersey hinterland, at that time a major iron and farm area. In 1826, Newark's population stood at 8,017, ten times the 1776 number.
The middle 19th century saw continued growth and diversification of Newark's industrial base. The first commercially successful plastic -- Celluloid -- was produced in a factory on Mechanic street by J.W. Hyatt. Hyatt's Celluloid found its way into Newark made carriages, billiard balls, and dentures. Edward Weston perfected in Newark a process for zinc electroplating, as well a superior arc-lamp. In fact, Newark’s Military Park had the first public electric lamps anywhere in the United States. Finally, Thomas Edison himself made Newark home before moving to Menlo Park, inventing the stock ticker in the Brick City.
Nor was Newark entirely industrial. In the middle 19th century Newark added insurance to its repertoire of businesses – with Mutual Benefit being founded in the city in 1845 and Prudential being founded in the city in 1873. Prudential, or “the Pru” as generations of Newarkers knew it, was founded by yet another transplanted New Englander, John Fairfield Dryden, and found an early niche catering to the middle and lower classes. Even today, Newark sells more insurance than any city but Hartford.
As the population soared past 400,000, Newark's potential seemed limitless. It was said in 1927
Great is Newark’s vitality. It is the red blood in its veins – this basic strength that is going to carry it over whatever hurdles it may encounter, enable it to recover from whatever losses it may suffer and battle its way to still higher achievement industrially and financially, making it eventually perhaps the greatest industrial center in the world. (quoted in Crabgrass Frontier, 275)
Newark was truly bustling in the early to mid 20th centuryIt had four flourishing department stores – Hahne & Company, L. Bamberger and Company, L.S. Plaut and Company, and Kresge's (later known as K-Mart). "Broad Street today is the Mecca of visitors as it has been through all its long history," Newark merchants boasted, "they come in hundreds of thousands now when once they came in hundreds.”
In 1922, Newark had 63 live theaters, 46 movie theaters, and an active nightlife. Dutch Schultz was killed at the local Palace Bar. By some measures, the intersection of Market and Broad Streets – known as the “Four Corners” - was the busiest intersection in the United States, in terms of cars using it. In 1915, Public Service counted over 280,000 pedestrian crossings in one thirteen hour period. Eleven years later, on October 26th 1926, a State Motor Vehicle Department check at the Four Corners counted 2,644 trolleys, 4,098 buses, 2657 taxis, 3474 commercial vehicles, 23,571 automobiles. Beautiful new skyscrapers going up every year, the two tallest being the forty storey Art Deco National Newark and the Lefcourt-Newark Buildings. In 1948, just after WWII, Newark hit its peak population, of just under 450,000.
But, underneath the industrial hum, problems existed. In 1930, a City Commissioner had told a local booster club, the Optimists,
Newark is not like the city of old. The old, quiet residential community is a thing of the past, and in its place has come a city teeming with activity. With the change has come something unfortunate – the large number of outstanding citizens who used to live within the community’s boundaries has dwindled. Many of them have moved to the suburbs and their home interests are there.
Most New Jerseyans attribute Newark’s demise to post-WWII phenomena - the 1967 riots, the construction of the Garden State Parkway and I-280, decentralization of manufacturing, the GI Bill, and the general pro-suburban fiscal order, but Newark’s relative decline actually began long before that. In 1909, Newark had 20% of all jobs in NJ, by 1939 only 11%. The city budget fell from $58 million in 1938, to only $45 million in 1944, despite the wartime boom and an increase in the tax rate from $4.61 to $5.30. Even in 1944, before anyone predicted the rise of the Sunbelt or the GI Bill, planners saw problems on Newark’s horizon.
Some attribute Newark’s downfall to building so many housing projects, but Newark always had bad housing. The 1944 city-commissioned study showed that 31% of all Newark dwelling units were below standards of health, and only 17% of Newark’s units were owner-occupied. Vast sections of Newark were just wooden tenements, and at least 5,000 units failed to meet any thresholds of being a decent place to live, almost all being occupied by African-Americans. Clearly, bad housing predated government intervention in the housing market.
On theory, postulated by Kenneth Jackson and others, was that Newark, and other northern cities, had always had a situation where a poor center was surrounded by middle-class outlying areas. Newark only did well when it was able to annex middle-class suburbs. When municipal annexation broke down, urban problems developed, since now the middle-class edge was divorced from the poor center. In 1900, Newark’s mayor had had confidently thought out loud, “East Orange, Vailsburg, Harrison, Kearny, and Belleville would be desirable acquisitions. By an exercise of discretion we can enlarge the city from decade to decade without unnecessarily taxing the property within our limits, which has already paid the cost of public improvements.” Of those towns, only Vailsburg would be added.
Although numerous problems predated WWII, Newark was hamstrung by a number of trends in the post-WWII era. The FHA (Federal Housing Administration) redlined virtually all of Newark, preferring to back up mortgages in the safer suburbs. Manufacturers set up in lower wage environments and could receive bigger tax deductions for building an entirely new factory in the country than for rehabilitating and old factory in a city. Billed as transportation improvements, pure and simple, I-280 and the Garden State Parkway harmed Newark as well. They directly hurt the city by tearing the fabric of the neighborhoods they went though, and indirectly hurt the city by allowing middle class people to live elsewhere.
Despite its problems, Newark did try in the post-War era. Prudential and Mutual Benefit were successfully enticed to stay and build new offices, and Rutgers-Newark and Seton Hall expanded their Newark campuses, with the former building a brand-new campus on a 23 acre urban renewal site. The Port of New York Authority (Port Authority of New York – New Jersey made Newark the first container port in the nation and turned swamps in the south of the city into one of the ten busiest airports in the nation.
As pesticides and mechanization reduced the need for cheap labor in the South, 5 million of blacks migrated to northern cities between 1940 and 1970s, Newark being no exception. From 1950 to 1960, while Newark saw its population drop from 438,000 to 408,000, it lost 100,000 white residents, but gained 65,000 non-whites. By 1966, Newark was majority non-white, a faster turnover than most other northern cities saw.
The unfortunate thing was, Southern Blacks and Puerto Ricans were moving to Newark to be industrial workers, just as the industrial jobs were drying up, Newark blacks left poverty in the South to find poverty in the North. Political power lagged behind numbers for Newark’s black community too. In 1967, when 70% of Newark’s students were black, Mayor Hugh Addonizio refused to appoint a black secretary to the Board of Education. More importantly, Mayor Addonizio offered, without consulting any residents of the neighborhood to be affected, to condemn and raise for the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey 150 acres of a densely populated black neighborhood in the central ward. (UMDNJ had wanted to settle in suburban Madison)
Across administrations, the city leaders of Newark saw the federal government's offer to pay for 100% of the costs of housing projects as a blessing. While other cities were skeptical about putting so many poor and socially dysfunctional individuals together and thus were cautious in building housing projects, Newark avidly pursued federal dollars. Eventually, Newark would have a higher percentage of its residents in public housing than any other American city.
In any case, the poverty and lack of political power contributed to a growing radicalization of Newark's black population. On July 12, 1967 there were scuffles between blacks and Police in the fourth ward. Damage for the night was only $2,500 and it was believed the violence had been contained. However, on the evening news of July 13, the TV media completely overplayed the situation and new, larger riots took place. Twenty-six persons were killed, 1,500 wounded, 1,600 arrested, and $10 million in property destroyed. Over thousand stores and businesses were torched or looted, including 167 groceries, most never to reopen. Perhaps worst of all, Newark's reputation went to hell. Tens of thousands of whites moved out. Middle class areas like Weequaic went from middle class white to black poor overnight. It was said “wherever American cities are going, Newark will get there first.”
Culture
Downtown Newark is not laid out on a grid and is a true pleasure to walk around. Fans of Beaux-Arts can look at the Veterans’ Administration building, the Newark Museum, the Newark Public Library, and the Cass Gilbert designed Essex County Courthouse. Fans of Art-Deco can visit one of several 20s era skyscrapers, like 1180 Raymond Boulevard or the intact Newark Penn Station. Fans of gothic architecture can visit the Cathedral-Basilica of the Sacred Heart by Branch Brook Park, one of the largest gothic cathedrals in the United States, and supposedly having stained glass to equal that of Chartres. For public sculpture, Newark has two works by Gutzon Borglum, Wars of America in Military Park and Seated Lincoln in front of the Essex County Courthouse.
The Newark Museum is overshadowed by museums in New York City, but if it were in any other part of the nation, would be well respected and well visited. The Newark Museum is a fine general museum, its American collection is first class, and its Tibetan collection is considered one of the best in the world.
Newark is the location of one of the three campuses of Rutgers University; the New Jersey Institute of Technology; Seton Hall University's School of Law; and one campus of University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.
Geography
Newark is located at 40°44'7" North, 74°11'6" West (40.735201, -74.184938)1.
According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 67.2 km² (26.0 mi²). 61.6 km² (23.8 mi²) of it is land and 5.6 km² (2.2 mi²) of it is water. The total area is 8.36% water.
Demographics
As of the census of 2000, there are 273,546 people, 91,382 households, and 61,956 families residing in the city. The population density is 4,437.7/km² (11,495.0/mi²). There are 100,141 housing units at an average density of 1,624.6/km² (4,208.1/mi²). The racial makeup of the city is 26.52% White, 53.46% African American, 0.37% Native American, 1.19% Asian, 0.05% Pacific Islander, 14.05% from other races, and 4.36% from two or more races. 29.47% of the population are Hispanic or Latino of any race.
There are 91,382 households out of which 35.2% have children under the age of 18 living with them, 31.0% are married couples living together, 29.3% have a female householder with no husband present, and 32.2% are non-families. 26.6% of all households are made up of individuals and 8.8% have someone living alone who is 65 years of age or older. The average household size is 2.85 and the average family size is 3.43.
In the city the population is spread out with 27.9% under the age of 18, 12.1% from 18 to 24, 32.0% from 25 to 44, 18.7% from 45 to 64, and 9.3% who are 65 years of age or older. The median age is 31 years. For every 100 females there are 94.2 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there are 91.1 males.
The median income for a household in the city is $26,913, and the median income for a family is $30,781. Males have a median income of $29,748 versus $25,734 for females. The per capita income for the city is $13,009. 28.4% of the population and 25.5% of families are below the poverty line. Out of the total people living in poverty, 36.6% are under the age of 18 and 24.1% are 65 or older.