• This website includes dozens of videos, hundreds of essays, and thousands of drawings created over the past twenty years. Search to learn more about the history of buildings, places, prisons, Newark, New York City, and my PhD research on spatial inequality.

Category Archives: Newark Activism

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Historic preservation is a better business model.

  10 July 2024 , ,

The work stoppage at Halo tower construction site points to why we need a different model of economic development.

As also published by the local paper TAPinto

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Once completed, the Halo project will be Newark’s tallest building. Image courtesy of INOA Architecture.
Construction progress. Image courtesy of Hudson Meridian Construction Group.

Jersey Digs and TAPinto reported last week that amid lawsuits and protests, work had stopped on the 38-floor Halo skyscraper in Newark. The developers claimed that their lender was unable to make good on the $90 million construction loan. If the developer is unable to get their funds in order, that tower will become another rusting and unfinished shell like Harry Grant’s proposal to build the world’s tallest skyscraper in Newark. Until it was demolished to build Prudential Center, Grant’s unfinished Renaissance Mall abandoned mid-construction was a visual eyesore on Broad Street for decades.
At 38 floors with 297 units, the per unit cost of construction of Halo will be just over $300,000. This is one of the more expensive towers downtown. By comparison with another recently completed project, at 21 floors with 264 units, the per unit construction cost was $240,000 at Walker House. (source) Halo tower is all new construction. Walker House is adaptive reuse of an existing historic building. Based on industry data, adaptive reuse of old buildings costs 16 percent less than ground-up construction, and it reduces construction schedules by 18 percent. (source)
For many new projects, the cost of using all new materials, steel structural frames, and concrete floors will increase the cost of construction. Instead of building from scratch like at Halo, downtown Newark still has no shortage of vacant and century-old office skyscrapers that could have been converted to residential use. Newark has no shortage of vacancies: the 16-story Firemen’s Insurance Company Building, the 12-story Kinney Building, the 10-story Chamber of Commerce Building, the 20-story IDT building, the 15-story Griffith Building, as well as dozens of other smaller-scale vacant buildings near Broad and Market. The adaptive reuse of these older structures is also eligible for significant Historic Preservation Tax Credits that can cover up to 20 percent of all construction costs. This is a more sustainable business model.
In addition, the Downtown Newark BID reported that in 2023, about one sixth of all downtown office space was vacant (source). This figure does not include the above vacant office towers that have been off the market for decades and are not currently available to rent. At the intersection of Broad and Market, the ground floors of most buildings are occupied. But the upper floors are entirely vacant – many for decades. Factoring in all buildings in downtown Newark, the actual vacancy rate is a good deal higher and approaches thirty percent by my estimate.
To insist on all new construction when the vacancy rate is so high in older existing structures does not make good economic sense. The priority should be to solve the existing vacancy rate before embarking on ambitious new construction, particularly in our city’s historic districts.
Downtown Newark
Despite tax breaks and state subsidies for downtown Newark that total more than a billion dollars in the past thirty years (source), the downtown property market remains fragile. My concern is that putting up many new luxury towers in a time of soft market demand will not address either the vacancy problem or the need for long-term and permanent affordable housing.
Beyond high-rise skyscrapers, there is another (and more sustainable) development model we should be encouraging: the incremental construction of mid-rise infill buildings in existing neighborhoods. Instead of a skyscraper like Halo perched on a five-story car garage at street level, downtown developers need to focus on filling in the gaps in our urban fabric. Downtown Newark has at least 200 acres of surface parking. (source) The priority should be filling this land to create complete streetscapes and an uninterrupted row of occupied buildings on a walkable sidewalk.
The developers and lawyer behind Halo and copy-cat projects of near-identical design at 577 Broad Street say that we have a housing shortage, and building more luxury towers will solve that shortage. The historical record does not support this claim. Manhattan had a population 40 percent larger in the 1910s, and Newark had a population 40 percent larger in the 1950s. Both cities accomplished this feat of downtown population density entirely through mid-rise construction during a time before skyscrapers. The results were neighborhoods of small buildings, instead of a complex of super tall buildings – isolated from the street and cut off from the city like Newark Gateway Center. Today, as in history, the past provides examples of successful and unsuccessful urbanism. Let us learn from history.

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A Different Model for Urbanism

The Teachers Village on Halsey Street. Image courtesy of the RBH Group.
A better model is possible: The Vermella Project at Broad Street Station, the new construction next to the PATH train in Harrison, and the Teachers Village project across the street from Halo represent a different and more sustainable development model. They are each a series of smaller buildings with separate entrances around courtyards with public space. Had financing been interrupted midway through, the developers of each would have still had two or three completed and market-ready structures in a larger complex.
The famous architect and city planner Daniel Burnham is known to have remarked in the 1870s: “Make no little plans.” Following his belief, the problem in Newark is that we have made too many “big plans.” This hubris includes skyscrapers of the scale there are not funds to complete, like Halo and Harry Grant’s ego towers. This hubris includes structures so large they require either long-term construction loans or significant taxpayer subsidies, like Prudential Center that is unlikely to ever make good on the $200 million in public funds we gave them. This hubris includes the seven billion dollars we promised the Amazon Corporation in our attempt to bring their global headquarters to Newark.
In an unpredictable market with high interest rates, now is not the time for skyscrapers aiming to be the tallest in the region, metaphorical Towers of Babel. Now is the time for a human-scale urbanism of walk-up townhouses, infill buildings, and mid-rise structures of less than 10 stories on smaller lots. This makes more financial sense. This makes more urban sense. And this makes more sense for what Newark needs most: a human-scale urbanism of the kind we once had before mid-century urban renewal.
As the City of Newark considers continued upzoning the Ironbound and more megastructures, now is the time to learn from the best of history with the tools of historic preservation.

Harry Grant’s tower: A history of moonshot development in Newark

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Homeownership and the Racial Wealth Gap

  5 March 2024 , , ,
Presented March 5, 2024 at the Newark Public Library

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The world’s largest concentration of wealth is in the New York City metropolitan area, yet the region contains many under-resourced cities, including Newark. What historical factors created this division between low-income Newark and its wealthy neighbors along lines of race, housing, income and social class?
The agents of change are more complex and nuanced than a simple narrative of redlining and white flight following the 1967 uprising. From discriminatory actions by the Federal Housing Administration and highways that carved through the urban fabric, to suburbs that pulled middle-class families away from Newark and factories that relocated outside of the city, contemporary poverty in Newark was more than a century in the making.
Drawing from the archives of the Newark Public Library, this presentation examines the range of challenges Newark faces and how the city overcomes. This is a Newark History Society program, co-sponsored by NJPAC and the Newark Public Library. Light refreshments will be served.
The presenter is Myles Zhang, urban historian and doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
This presentation will evolve into my dissertation entitled:
“An island of poverty in a vast ocean of material prosperity”:
Homeownerhip and the Racial Wealth Gap in Newark

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1959 Blight Map

1959 Map of “Blighted” Areas by Newark Central Planning Board

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View event on NJPAC website

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Built on a Billion-Dollar Bed of Corporate Tax Breaks

  6 October 2023 , ,

What kinds of tax breaks are we giving to redevelop Downtown Newark?
Who is getting them?

An investigative report on public funds for private profit.

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“Free enterprise is a term that refers, in practice, to a system of public subsidy and private profit, with massive government intervention in the economy to maintain a welfare state for the rich.”
– Noam Chomsky

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Contents

[1] Who owns the land around Mulberry Commons?

[2] If past predicts future, what kind of past tax breaks have we given?

[3] The problem is not tax breaks. The problem is: Who gets them?

[4] How can we ensure equitable economic development in Newark?
Five policy recommendations.

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Artist’s rendering of Newark Penn Station expansion

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Introduction: A Case Study in Edison Parking

The City of Newark borrowed $110 million to pay for a pedestrian bridge over Route 21. This new link between Mulberry Commons and Penn Station will allow travelers, event goers, and sports fans to walk directly from the trains to the games at the arena. Newark City Hall and the media are describing this as Newark’s equivalent and response to New York City’s High Line. This project follows on the already $10 million spent on building Mulberry Commons.
As part of misguided car-centered 20th-century urban planning, thousands of highways were built in our nation through low-income communities of color, to divide the less privileged in hundreds of places like Newark. Through the tools of public investment in public space, now is a moment to make wrong historical injustices like Route 21, Route 22, Interstate 78, and Interstate 280. Now is a historic opportunity for the urban form as tool of reparations.
However, what parts of the public – divided across lines of race, income, and home address – will benefit the most from this project? Will the benefits of this investment disproportionately go to a few people or institutions, such as Prudential Center patrons and Edison Parking tenants?

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The City as Carceral State

  5 September 2023 , , ,
Context: The following personal essay accompanied my application for the Gupta Values Scholarship from the University of Michigan. I am sharing it here because it speaks more broadly to my background, education, activism, and research interests.

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Jail entrance gate

Entrance gate to the Old Essex County Jail

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One out of every one hundred black men in my neighborhood of Newark, NJ is currently in prison. At least half have a permanent criminal record as formerly incarcerated people. Most charges are for drug use and possession, often marijuana records from when marijuana was illegal. My earliest memories of Newark are of the homeless walking down our street to the nearby food pantry and young men carrying boom boxes on their shoulders (this was before the iPod). I will always remember observing one woman as she passed our house each day. The first time I saw her, she had been recently evicted and dragged two suitcases behind her. With each passing week, the suitcases gradually grew lighter until – after several weeks – all she had left was a grocery bag of belongings, her dignity gradually stripped away. Up our street was the public housing project of Baxter Terrace – three-story red brick barracks where the urban poor lived under constant police surveillance. Most were unemployed and all were on public welfare.
I remember taking the train to school in the suburbs. In the span of only five miles, vacant lots and abandoned buildings in one of the nation’s poorest cities gave way to large homes on tree-lined streets in one of the nation’s wealthiest suburbs. The distance of five miles – or in some cases a single city street – was all that separated the poverty of my city from the wealth of its suburbs. At the city limits of Newark, a system of one-way roads, streets without sidewalks, and aggressive “neighborhood watch” signs separated the city from the suburb. On one block, apartment buildings, treeless streets, and bodegas that accepted food stamps. Just one block over, there were century-old trees and four-bedroom homes selling for up to a million dollars. Here in these suburbs, homeowners commuted to Downtown Newark each day and returned home each night, bringing home with them the wealth they made in the city. So little and yet so much separated these two worlds.
Martin Luther King described America in a 1968 speech he gave in Detroit: “There are literally two Americas.  Every city in our country has this kind of dualism, this schizophrenia, split at so many parts, and so every city ends up being two cities rather than one. There are two Americas. One America is beautiful for situation. [….] But there is another America. In this other America, thousands and thousands of people, men in particular walk the streets in search for jobs that do not exist.” So much and yet so little has changed since 1968. The racial wealth gap is almost the same today as it was in 1970. In Newark, median black family income is less than $30,000. In Newark suburbs, median family incomes are over $100,000.

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Who Owns Newark? A Case Study of One Building

  1 November 2022 , ,

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“Between 2017 and 2020, 2,500 homes – more than 47 percent of the city’s one-to-four unit buildings – were sold to institutional buyers. In Newark, many of the properties were bought by completely anonymous investors, prompting the title of a report from Rutgers University law school, Who Owns Newark? Transferring Wealth from Newark Homeowners to Corporate Buyers.”
As documented in this 73-page report, anonymous shell companies are now purchasing majorities of Newark homes and commercial spaces. Properties that Newark’s Black and Hispanic residents would otherwise own are now going to absentee landlords and invisible owners. The higher rate of absentee ownership is directly linked to rent increases and higher rates of eviction, particularly of poor and middle-class Black families. (source)
Just two of these several thousand properties are located at 569 and 571-577 Broad Street. Their ambiguous and hidden ownership mirrors the larger transfer of inter-generational wealth out of Newark. A case study of just these two properties parallels one for one concerns identified in the report Who Owns Newark? (source)

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Newark Changing: Mapping neighborhood demolition, 1950s to today

  29 June 2022 , , , , ,


Click to launch interactive mapping experience.

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Newark Changing is a first-of-its-kind visual encyclopedia of 2,400 photo comparisons of almost every street corner​​​, home, and building ​​demolished by urban renewal and the social forces behind urban decay.​ Through an interactive and text-searchable historic map, any visitor can travel in time to explore their street and their building as it appeared in the period 1959-68 vs. today. Thousands of old street photos are brought to life with contemporary 360-degree panoramic photos of the same street scenes today, taken from identical camera angles to the old photos. This is the most extensive collection of photo comparisons past and present ever assembled for any American city.
Newark Changing reveals the scale and devastation of urban renewal, not from the aerial perspective of the city planner’s map but from the human perspective of the street corner and neighborhood. Tens of thousands of individual streets, homes, apartments, churches, and Jewish, Black, and Italian-owned businesses in Newark were “redlined” in the 1930s and deprived of investment. Most of these neighborhoods today have been bulldozed for interstate highways, universities, hospitals, and corporate investments in real estate. Billions in taxpayer money (adjusted for today’s value with inflation) was spent in the period 1945 to 1967 to demolish at least 10,000 buildings, displacing 50,000 people, 65-77% of whom were Black. At the same time, the migration of people and jobs away from urban centers deprived cities like Newark of the industrial employment base they once had. Decades after the 1967 rebellion, Newark still struggles to confront and overcome decades of harm inflicted on the city by de-industrialization and population loss to the suburbs.
Street scenes can be browsed by interactive map, by neighborhood, by subject, by street, or by the public institution responsible for demolition. Visitors can thus travel in time to explore today’s empty fields, parking lots, and desolate streetscapes for the vibrant neighborhoods they were before the automobile age.

Launch interactive mapping experience >

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A park without trees creates a city without history.

  4 June 2022 ,
Harriet Tubman Square has the largest and most impressive collection of old-growth trees in Downtown Newark. The oldest trees are over 100 feet high, four-feet diameter at the trunk, and up to 150 years old. The City of Newark’s current proposal is to cut every single tree in our park. The only historical precedent for this is the 1960s project that killed every tree in Military Park to build the parking garage now buried beneath. Based on details and architectural plans revealed through an Open Public Records Act request, this animation shows what is planned for our park:

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Read the plans for the park.

Read our analysis of these plans.

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We cheer for the historic Harriet Tubman Park for a new, prosperous, and most of all just Newark.
However, nobody should even imagine cutting down these 66 century-old trees, oaks, elms, sycamores, all of which represent our history and particularly African-American experience. In America, trees symbolize both freedom and brutal oppression, should any sensible person forget. Unlike any historic treasures – architectural remnants, shriveled old maps, aged documents, or battled artifacts – these trees are among our most valuable historic icons, standing tall for our children.
Tubman embodied the notion of reclaiming the symbolism of trees and woods as tools of freedom in the black tradition. In the antebellum America, abolitionists always voiced lyrics about glorious trees that bore the fruit of freedom. Dr. Martin Luther King famously said, “Even if I knew tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plan my apple tree.” Tubman was famous for knowing the terrain of trees, woods, and swamps along her journey to freedom. In Tubman’s biography by Sarah Bradford, the black Moses said, “When I found I had crossed that line, I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over everything; the sun came like gold though the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in Heaven.”
On the other hand, Billie Holiday sang about fruits produced by these trees: “Southern trees bear strange fruit/Blood on the leaves and blood at the root/Black bodies swing in the southern breeze/Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees/ …Here is a strange and bitter crop.” The blood of black men, women, and children who refused to remain silent, and who deserve justice, life, liberty, and love, over the hate that surround them.
Last year, Rutgers Newark restored the history and voices of Frederick Douglass in the Historic James Street Commons. Let us not forget, Douglas also said, “If Americans wished to partake of the tree of knowledge, they would find its fruit bitter as well as sweet.” It is unimaginable that Tubman will allow these venerable trees of knowledge to be annihilated.
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Bulldozer Urbanism

  14 May 2021 , , ,

As featured in:

1. Preservation New Jersey: Ten Most Endangered Historic Places  May 18, 2021
2. After Warren Street School Demolished, James Street Named ‘Most Endangered’  May 18
3. Newark Historic District Designated as Endangered  May 18, 2021
4. James Street Community Rushes to Stall NJIT’s Demolition of Historic School  May 6, 2021
5. Nothing Lasts Forever, Not even at NJIT   February 1, 2021
6. SHPO Delays NJIT’s Plan to Raze 4 Historic Buildings    January 8, 2021
7. NJIT’s Plans to Demolish Buildings in Historic District Temporarily Derailed   January 7, 2021
8. Old Jail Could Inspire Youth to Stay Out of Prison – But Only If It Survives   July 4, 2020
9. NJIT’s Plans to Modernize Its Campus Could Cost Newark Some History   March 12, 2020

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James Street Commons Demolitions Completed and Planned

James Street Commons demolitions completed and proposed as of April 2021

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Note: Visiting NJIT’s architecture school at age six and seeing students working there was what initially inspired my desire to study architecture. NJIT is an asset to Newark, and the school deserves the quality of campus architecture to match. I wrote and circulated this essay about NJIT’s under-performing campus design to members of NJIT and the Newark community. I am sharing it online, too, in the hope that future leaders of NJIT will collaborate with the community to create campus architecture that is culturally and historically sensitive to Newark.

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A Pedestrian’s Observations

Experiencing NJIT’s campus from the street

In publicity materials and in meetings with Newark residents and historians, the New Jersey Institute of Technology emphasizes the quality of its campus architecture and its track record of historic preservation. The school highlights its Central King Building (formerly Central High School) and Eberhardt Hall (formerly Newark Orphan Asylum) as trophies of historic preservation.
However, beyond its fortified campus carved out during the 1960s era of “urban renewal,” the university is now escalating its demolitions in the neighboring James Street Commons Historic District. Listed since 1978 on the National Register of Historic Places, this neighborhood is the city’s first historic district and contains some of Newark’s most significant historic assets. The spending of millions of dollars on building demolitions is odd when NJIT faced a 35 million dollar budget deficit in the first half of 2021,[1] and when other Newark institutions and developers are following an opposite path of historic preservation.
As NJIT expands into the James Street Commons Historic District, there is concern that new construction will not improve the built environment. For instance, NJIT’s proposal for 240 MLK included few to no windows at pedestrian eye level. The entrance to the parking garage and trash collection was from the side of the building that faced toward the residential neighborhood. Several other structures in the neighborhood are also at risk or have already been demolished by NJIT, such as Mueller’s Florist, which was a former corset and tin toy factory built in the 1880s to 1890s. Similarly, NJIT acquired the c.1890 brownstone at 317 MLK for ~$450,000 in livable condition. In following weeks and months before NJIT received demolition approvals, windows were left open and removed, thereby accelerating decay and water damage. The current demolitions follow a longer pattern among hundreds of other buildings demolished in my neighborhood. This would all be okay if only there was better quality architecture to replace what is being lost.
I write this essay as a series of architecture observations followed by recommendations. Firstly, I provide examples of how NJIT’s current campus design is detrimental to neighborhood street life. Secondly, I document the neighborhood’s appearance before and after NJIT’s interventions through my photo comparisons of past and present. Thirdly, I provide examples of more sensitive models for alternative neighborhood redevelopment.

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Completed in 2017, NJIT’s athletic facility is the newest building on campus.
The pedestrian view along the sidewalk has no windows.

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Demolition of the 140-year-old Bowers corset factory in progress (aka Mueller’s)

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Campus Map
Map of NJIT campus. Buildings that face toward the street with no windows at or near eye level are indicated with red lines. Surface parking lots and parking structures for commuter students and faculty are indicated with red squares.

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Exhibition Design for the Old Essex County Jail

  16 May 2019 , , , ,
Developed in collaboration with Newark Landmarks
and the master’s program in historic preservation at Columbia University

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Postcard with Details
Warden's House c.1967
Warden’s House c.1967
Warden's House in 2019
Warden’s House in 2019
Jail entrance gate
Jail entrance gate

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Since 1971, the old Essex County Jail has sat abandoned and decaying in Newark’s University Heights neighborhood. Expanded in stages since 1837, this jail is among the oldest government structures in Newark and is on the National Register of Historic Places. The building needs investment and a vision for transforming decay into a symbol of urban regeneration. As a youth in Newark, I explored and painted this jail, and therefore feel a personal investment in the history of this place. Few structures in this city reflect the history of racial segregation, immigration, and demographic change as well as this jail.
In spring 2018, a graduate studio at Columbia University’s master’s in historic preservation program documented this structure. Eleven students and two architects recorded the jail’s condition, context, and history. Each student developed a reuse proposal for a museum, public park, housing, or prisoner re-entry and education center. By proposing eleven alternatives, the project transformed a narrative of confinement into a story of regeneration.
Inspired by this academic project and seeking to share it with a larger audience, I and Zemin Zhang proposed to transform the results of this studio into a larger dialogue about the purpose of incarceration. With $15,000 funding from Newark Landmarks, I translated Columbia’s work into an exhibition. I am grateful to Anne Englot and Liz Del Tufo for their help securing space and funding. Over spring 2019, I collaborated with Ellen Quinn and a team at New Jersey City University to design the exhibit panels and to create the corresponding texts and graphics. The opening was held in May 2019, and is recorded here.

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My curator work required translating an academic project into an exhibit with language, graphics, and content accessible to the public. Columbia examined the jail’s architecture and produced numerous measured drawings of the site, but they did not examine social history. As the curator, I shifted the exhibit’s focus from architecture to the jail’s social history – to use the jail as a tool through which to examine Newark’s history of incarceration. As a result, much of my work required supplementing Columbia’s content with additional primary sources – newspaper clippings, prison records, and an oral history project – that tell the human story behind these bars. I worked with local journalist Guy Sterling to interview former jail guards and Newark Mayor Ras Baraka about his father’s experience incarcerated here during the 1967 civil unrest. The exhibit allowed viewers to hear first-hand accounts of prison life and to view what the Essex County Jail looked like in its heyday from the 1920s to 1960s. Rutgers-Newark organized seminars connected to the jail exhibit on the topic of incarceration in America, and what practical steps can be taken to change the effects of the growth of incarceration.
The finished exhibit was on display from May 15 through September 27, 2019. The exhibit makes the case for preserving the buildings and integrating them into the redevelopment of the surrounding area. The hope is that, by presenting this jail’s history in a public space where several thousand people viewed it per week, historians can build support for the jail’s reuse. Over the next year, an architecture studio at the New Jersey Institute of Technology’s College of Architecture and Design is conducting further site studies. Before any work begins, the next immediate step is to remove all debris, trim destructive foliage, and secure the site from trespassers. These actions will buy time while the city government and the other stakeholders determine the logistics of a full-scale redevelopment effort.
My interest in prisons drew me to this project. This jail’s architect was John Haviland, who was a disciple of prison reformers John Howard and Jeremy Bentham. In my MPhil thesis research about Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary, I developed my exhibit research by looking at the social and historical context of John Haviland and early prisons. As I describe, Eastern State began as a semi-utopian project in the 1830s but devolved by the 1960s into a tool of control social and a symbol of urban unrest.

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Launch Virtual Exhibit Website

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Exhibit-Installation-12q1m3v
Myles Zhang
Myles Zhang
Exhibit Opening
Gabriela Figuereo (left) Liz Del Tufo Right (center) and Rob Kesack (right)
Sergio Rodriguez (left) with Zemin Zhang, Newark Preservation & Landmarks Committee director
Introductory Panel
Introductory Panel with Myles Zhang
Introductory Panel
Exhibit Installation
Origins of the Jail
Origins of the Jail
Materials and Technology
Social History Panel
Social History Panel
Social History Panel with Video
Introductory Text from Newark Preservation and Landmarks Committee
Current Site Photos with Installers CJ and Will
Current Site Photos with Zemin and CJ
Left to Right: Myles Zhang, Zemin Zhang, Renée Steinhagen, Ellen Quinn
Current Site Photos with Maureen Beitler Photography Exhibit
Maureen Beitler's Photos
Maureen Beitler's Photos
Maureen Beitler's Photos

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Related content

  1. Read my January 2021 article in The Newarker magazine.
  2. Read this July 2020 article from Jersey Digs
    about my exhibit and the New Jersey Institute of Technology’s proposal to reuse this jail site.
  3. Hear my September 2019 interview about this jail and exhibit from Pod & Market.
  4. Explore this jail as an interactive exhibit online.
  5. View this artwork as part of my short film from 2016 called Pictures of Newark.
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Interactive surface parking map of central Newark

  12 August 2018 ,
Explore an interactive map of the 300+ acres of parking in Downtown Newark. This map is part of PLANewark’s ongoing fight against the expansion of surface parking in Newark. Click the rectangle icon on upper right hand corner of map to view full screen. Click on individual, color-coded lots to view information on the property owner and acreage.

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Interactive map of Newark’s blight of parking

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Destruction of the James Street Commons: 1975-2020

This map (accurate as of April 2021) illustrates buildings demolished in one Newark neighborhood, the James Street Commons. When historians first considered this neighborhood for landmark status in 1975, there were 425 historic buildings. Even after earning landmark status in 1978, demolitions and urban decay continued. Rutgers, Edison Parking, St. Michael’s Hospital, and the New Jersey Institute of Technology have demolished dozens of old buildings, mostly to construct surface parking lots as an “interim” land use. It is time that the local and state governments be more proactive in preserving the city’s history.

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