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Tag Archives: historic preservation

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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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Civil Rights Rebellion in the Essex County Jail

  11 June 2024 , , ,

Season 13, Episode 6 of the series Abandoned Engineering
Streamed June 2024 in Britain, July 2024 in America

A film crew visits and explores the decaying remains of old Essex County Jail in New Jersey, a facility that became a powder keg of injustice that was set to explode in the 1960s Newark rebellions. Learn more about this historic building in our digital exhibit and the oral history video project to remember the hundreds who suffered in this space.
In every episode since 2016, the channel features three abandoned buildings. Each building is selected for its international significance, for important events that took place there, for its aesthetics, for its cultural importance, or the way this site motivates us to rethink and remember otherwise invisible histories of tragedy and pain. For this year’s season, the old Essex County Jail was one of just 24 sites selected from around the world. Other featured sites in past seasons include: parts of the Berlin Wall and Chernobyl, forts built for the Allied landing at D-Day, as well as dozens of equally important but less visited historic buildings and ruins.
Content and inspiration for this documentary grew from my Columbia University undergraduate senior thesis project about this jail, as well as my Cambridge University’s Master’s thesis about the American architecture of solitary confinement. Based on seeing my senior thesis project and reading master’s thesis online, the film crew contacted me about adapting this research for television. I was happy to provide them an interview, all my primary sources from the Newark Public Library, as well as suggested interviews with community leaders Ras Baraka and Fredrica Bey about the carceral state.
For British audiences, view the full series here on SkyTV.
For U.S. audiences, view the full series here on AppleTV. The series is also being syndicated and translated into 20+ languages for international audiences.

 

Launch digital exhibit about the carceral state in Newark.

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Envisioning Seneca Village

  11 June 2024 , ,

A project by Gergely Baics, Meredith Linn, Leah Meisterlin, Myles Zhang

In collaboration with the Central Park Conservancy and the Institute for the Exploration of Seneca Village History

 

Email project authors here if you have questions.

 

Envisioning Seneca Village is a project depicting what this significant nineteenth-century village might have looked like in the summer of 1855, about two years before it was destroyed by the City of New York to build Central Park. It features an interactive 3D model, a non-interactive tour through the 3D model (A Tour through Seneca Village), and supplementary materials. The project is anchored in extensive scholarship and aims to make the village’s history visible to a wide audience. The project is also a work in progress with updates, additions, and new features planned soon.
Seneca Village was a community established by African Americans in 1825, two years before emancipation was completed in New York State. By the mid-nineteenth century, the village was the home of at least 50 families—about ⅔ Black and ⅓ white, mostly Irish. It was situated on an approximately four-block area east of present-day Central Park West between 82nd and 86th Streets, which was then a few miles north of the city’s urban core and between the villages of Bloomingdale to the west and Yorkville to the east. This location offered a safer, freer environment to live than downtown. Villagers built a thriving, complex, and heterogeneous community with core institutions including three churches and a school. Seneca Village’s destruction by the City in 1857 abruptly ended 30 years of successful efforts to nurture families, sustain livelihoods, and create community. It was also the first instance in a long history of the City’s abuse of eminent domain to sacrifice Black neighborhoods for urban development projects—in this case, to build a world-famous park.

 

3D Model References and Methodology. See also: Tips for Navigating the Model.

As residents scattered to different parts of New York and the Northeast, the Park construction crew buried building debris, covering it with landscaped lawns, hills, and paths. The community’s memory faded for a century and a half. Yet the lives the villagers made there left both an archival paper trail and extensive material traces underground. Since the 1990s historians, archeologists, educators, descendants, and artists have mined the fragmentary sources, excavated the site, and sought new ways to recover the village’s history and memory.
Despite all of the information that researchers have unearthed, there is a lot that is still unknown about the village and its community members. It is hard to imagine what it was like to live there. No photos or drawings survive, the present-day Central Park site is devoid of above-ground traces of Seneca Village’s built environment, and this region of New York City was quite different in the nineteenth century than today. Envisioning Seneca Village addresses these blindspots by creating a visual interpretation of the village that integrates social historical, archival, and archeological evidence into digital cartographic and architectural reconstruction. Through this model we seek to amplify existing scholarship, help visitors to learn more about the village’s history, catalyze new research with the questions the model raises, and above all, keep the memory and spirit of this past community alive in the present.
Further Reading on Seneca Village
Envisioning Seneca Village is a collaborative project between Gergely Baics, Meredith Linn, Leah Meisterlin, and Myles Zhang that integrates our expertise in archaeology, social history, historical geographic information systems (GIS), and digital architectural reconstruction. The project has been aided by research assistants, additional support from the Central Park Conservancy, and generous guidance from a diverse group of Seneca Village advisors and stakeholders. Learn more about the project and team.
Project Table of Contents (site map)

Project Map Launch

Juneteenth 2024 in Central Park, at the site that was once Seneca Village
Envisioning Seneca Village 1
Envisioning Seneca Village 2
Envisioning Seneca Village 3
Envisioning Seneca Village 4
Envisioning Seneca Village 5
Envisioning Seneca Village 6
Envisioning Seneca Village 7
Envisioning Seneca Village 8
Envisioning Seneca Village 9
Envisioning Seneca Village 10
Envisioning Seneca Village 11

 

Project Workflow

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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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Eastern State Penitentiary Construction Sequence

  31 October 2023 , , ,

Time-lapse animation of the prison’s entire design – building by building virtual model – from the 1820s to present.

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“The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness, allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, 1850

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Based on:
– Historic architectural plans (1837 report in French, pp. 124-38)
– Primary sources (1830 description)
– Reports on the historic preservation of this prison (1994 Historic Structures Report, Volume II)
Music by Philip Glass from the 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi, starting at minute 37:30
Link to text of audio narration

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Computer Model

Shows prison as it appeared in the period 1836 to 1877 before later construction obstructed the original buildings.

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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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“Where Evil Dwells” at Newark’s Old Essex County Jail

  18 June 2023 , , ,
As originally published in The Newarker, December 2020

 

Photo by Madeline Berry

“The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.”
– Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, 1850
When citizens convened in 1836 to incorporate Newark as a city, one of their first orders of business was to discuss the construction of a new jail. Four years earlier, they had set aside land for the new cemetery. The previous year, the old county courthouse and jail had burned down in one of the fires that periodically swept through early American towns of wood-frame homes. All traces of this old courthouse are now gone, except for the building’s basement dungeon where convicts were kept awaiting trial. Remnants of this dungeon are still visible in the dark crawlspace beneath the sanctuary of Grace Church on Broad Street.
This quiet village was already approaching 170 years old. Newark’s population numbered only 10,542 free white Americans, 6,000 Irish, 1,000 English and Scotch, 300 Germans and 358 free colored people in 1835. Within the span of a few months, in 1836, the town’s first two railroads linked Newark to points west and south; oil streetlights illuminated the town center; the first school system for poor children opened; and another fire swept through downtown. In the next few decades, the population would grow almost ten percent every year. Newark was fast becoming a city.
However, Newark remained in many ways a farming hamlet with Puritan roots. Since 1666, the annual town meetings had been held in the courthouse, the “Court Room at Moses Roff’s Taven,” or inside one of the lecture rooms of Old First Presbyterian Church near the corner of Broad and Market Streets. The sexton of Old First was, in fact, paid three dollars per year by the Town Committee “for cleaning the Lecture room of said Church.” The names of attending officials read like a list of street names from a modern Newark address book: Treat, Baldwin, Bruen, Pennington, Doremus, Halsey, Harrison, Frelinghuysen, etc. The lands they farmed and passed down through generations span much of present-day Essex County.
In the expanding town, it was no longer possible “to Farm let” the city’s debtors and poor to the lowest bidder, who in the years before the American Revolution paid £159 for the privilege. Nor was it possible to use fines as punishment for the most common public nuisances, which included escaped hogs and cattle roaming Newark’s dirt streets due to poorly maintained fences. The town records had noted few serious crimes like rape or murder in more than a century. Nonetheless, with waves of “rowdy” German and Irish immigrants soon to come, Newark needed a jail.

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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.