PhD Dissertation Project (draft in progress)

Creating the Divided Metropolis:
How Newark came to be a poor city in a wealthy region

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Architecture

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Project Brief

“Wherever American cities are going, Newark will get there first” Mayor Kenneth Gibson declared in 1970, as the first black mayor of any major city in what is now the American Northeast and the Rust Belt. The history of Newark’s urban decline is specific to Newark and unique to the details of this city. And yet, Newark’s story is national in its implications, and mirrored in hundreds of other American cities large and small that also experienced decline.
From the 1950s through 1970s, Newark embarked on one of the most extensive programs of state-funded urban renewal in the nation, less costly only than those of New York City (20 times Newark’s population); Chicago (eight times larger); Philadelphia (five times larger), and Boston (twice as large). Newark’s program was certainly among the most ambitious: to clear out the areas called slums, to construct highways, to build public housing, to stimulate the urban economy, and – in the end – to stop urban decline. And yet for all the billions spent and an estimated 70,000 out of Newark’s 400,000 people displaced, the program failed to reverse urban economic and population decline. What mixture of actors and institutions – city planners, politicians, realtors, developers, and banks – caused Newark’s program to fail?
This project describes how two national programs impacted Newark: urban renewal (a program that invested in keeping the city stable) and redlining (a program that deprived investment to make the city unstable). The two programs – both initiated by local, regional, and federal governments and designed to profit real estate developers – coexisted and undermined each other in a decade of flaws and contradictions. Redlining usually refers to the practice when banks choose to not invest in a certain neighborhood or city because of the race of who lives there. Redlining is racial and economic discrimination. More importantly, although rarely framed in such terms, redlining describes the practice more broadly of choosing not to invest in a place because it is a city and considered a less profitable investment. Banks, developers, realtors, businesses, department stores, and the fabric of social institutions vital for urban life all migrated from the city to the suburbs. These other institutions all redlined Newark independently of the real estate lobby. More than anti-black, redlining is anti-urban.
This project frames Newark’s story in national terms. Each chapter examines one form of redlining in Newark, and then frames this form of localized redlining in the national picture of urban abandonment. There are five frames: transportation, finance, housing, welfare, and employment. This range of actors across areas – public and private, local and national – did not collaborate in a conspiracy to deprive Newark and the American city of wealth. But their actions overlapped and mutually reinforced each other to leave the American city behind and ensure that attempts to save the city through state-funded urban renewal would fail. Through anti-urban redlining practices in each of these five areas – transportation, finance, housing, welfare, and employment – urban decline was the inevitable result. The history of all places is told through one place, and the history of one place is told through all places.

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Drafts of Chapters in Progress

Interstate Highways in Newark

Public Housing in Newark

How an infrastructure project ruined a racially integrated neighborhood
How public housing was designed to fail black families

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Committee Members

Robert Fishman, planning history
Ana Morcillo Pallarés, built environment
Matthew Lassiter, urban/suburban history

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See all my urban history publications about this place

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See all my artwork about urban decline and urban decay

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The Last Two Miles (draft of dissertation chapter)

Published to my website privately, under consideration for publication in Journal of Urban History

Weequahic before the highway, 1960
Same view after the highway, 2023

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How an infrastructure project contributed to today’s urban-suburban racial wealth gap

City planners designed Interstate 78 to destroy a stable and racially integrated neighborhood of 7,500 middle-class homeowners

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Weequahic in 1955 before the highway
Weequahic in 2023 after the highway

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It did not have to be this way…

In 1958, the New Jersey State Transportation Department had a choice: Build Interstate 78 on a route that displaced some 43 families in the suburb of Hillside or build it on a path that displaced some 7,800 Jewish and black families in one of Newark’s only racially integrated neighborhoods. Engineers and planners chose the urban highway path through the Jewish and black neighborhood over the less destructive suburban route. It is a story local to Newark, but mirrored hundreds of times across the landscape of other American cities. The story of Interstate 78 is a microcosm that reveals much about the politics and inequalities of city planning in a suburban and auto age.
Highways slice through Newark on all sides. They cut the city into parts and divide neighborhoods from each other. The millions of cars and trucks that pass through Newark annually emit soot particles that give Newark air the highest concentration in the state of nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide. To the east of Downtown is the six-lane Route 22 built in the 1930s that divides the city from the Passaic River and restricts public access to the waterfront. To the north of Downtown is the six-lane Interstate 280 built in the 1940s. To the west of Downtown is the eight-lane Garden State Parkway built in the 1950s that divides Newark from commuter suburbs to the west. To the south of Newark is the ten-lane Interstate 78 built in the 1960s that divides Newark from historically and once majority-white suburbs like Hillside.
Collectively, these four roads box in Newark from four sides. New Jersey’s largest concentration of poverty, where the median family income is a mere $38,000, is separated from the rest of the state by a highway moat up to 400 feet wide in parts of Interstate 78. By contrast, the median family income in the Essex County suburbs that surround Newark is over $100,000. Pre-pandemic some 200,000 residents of these commuter suburbs drove into Newark on these highways, parked in Newark, made salaries on average above $50,000, and drove home at the end of each workday, leaving behind some 300 acres of surface parking lots.
It did not have to be this way.

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Based on archival records, planning documents from the Newark Public Library, and racial redlining records from the federal government, read the full report on how the Weequahic community fought and failed to block construction of Interstate 78.  →

9,000 words, 21 pages

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Belmont Avenue in 1962
Identical camera angle in 2023

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Two proposals for the path of Interstate 78
A destructive proposal from state planners vs. an alternative vision from Newark residents

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Proposal from State and City Planners Proposal from Weequahic Residents
Length in miles 4.52 About 4.7
People displaced 7,818 Fewer than 500
Demographics 10% black Fewer than 1% black
Homes demolished 2,247 homes 40 homes

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Johnson Avenue in 1961
Identical camera angle in 2023

 

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1. Further viewing and interactive mapping
Photo comparisons of Newark’s Weequahic neighborhood before vs. after highway construction, in 1962 vs. today
Related publication from my website Newark Changing
2. Further Reading
For a near parallel story, see Robert Caro’s chapter on how Robert Moses drove the Cross Bronx Expressway through the Jewish neighborhood of East Tremont. In a story both local and national, Moses could have routed the highway through an adjacent park on path that would have displaced only a few hundred people. He chose the path through East Tremont, resulting in what Caro claims was the destruction of 2,000 families from a stable working class tenement neighborhood. Read more at:
Robert Caro, “Chapter 37: One Mile,” in The Power Broker (New York: Vintage Books, 1974).
3. Acknowledgements
I am grateful to my parents for their unwavering support of my studies, as well as my dissertation adviser Robert Fishman. Newark still struggles with the legacies of redlining and ongoing air pollution from its highways, port, and airport. In this fight against environmental racism, the activists at the South Ward Environmental Alliance and Ironbound Community Corporation are key actors. This history essay is written for them.

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Jeliff Avenue in 1962
Identical camera angle in 2023

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Hillside Avenue in 1962
Identical camera angle in 2023

 

A home is half the promise. (draft of dissertation chapter)

Published to my website privately, under consideration for publication in Journal of American History

How market forces undermined the promise of public housing in Newark

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Building 7 at Newark’s Scudder Homes demolished in summer 1997

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To bring about integration, the first to do is to do it. [….] The change-over to a policy of nonsegregation is not so difficult and troublesome as one anticipates. [….] If a housing authority shows complete sincerity in the change and never retreat from their announced position with respect to non-segregation, the change will be successful. This, in any case, is what we have found to be true in Newark.

– Newark Housing Authority Executive Director Louis Danzig, 1952

 

In 1962, the future of racial integration in Newark looked promising. Newark’s newly elected Mayor Hugh Addonizio praised the movement toward racial integration before a meeting of the United States Commission on Civil Rights in Newark City Hall. He described the apparent success of urban renewal to build high-quality public housing projects in black neighborhoods. Thousands of families once lived in wood frame tenements without central heating, interior plumbing, and private bathrooms. They now lived in public housing where, for the first time in their lives, they had their own bedrooms, bathrooms, and year-round steam heating.
Newark’s program of urban renewal cost taxpayers at least 128 million in federal funds (1.4 billion in 2020 dollars) and 53 million in local funds (550 million in 2020 dollars). This program costing by 19677 two billion (adjusted for inflation) gave Newark the fifth most expensive urban renewal program in the nation after New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston. An estimated 55,000 more were displaced from their homes in the process, 45,000 for urban renewal and 10,000 for highway construction. By the end of this program, some 37 thousand people, representing about one in every ten Newark residents, lived in public housing.
Just eight years before in 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that separate was not equal and that racial segregation laws were not legally enforceable. In the few years before Brown, Newark had already moved to desegregate public housing and to assign residents to whichever of the city’s approximately fourteen public housing projects they preferred. Newark public schools also seemed to offer the promise of racial integration. The city’s population was 66 percent white in 1960 and 34 percent black. This would mean that every public school, if fully integrated city wide, would have two white children for every black child. The mixed incomes and races across Newark seemed to offer the possibility of a future egalitarian metropolis: schools and neighborhoods of both diverse races and diverse incomes.
For all its promises, this program of urban renewal failed spectacularly. By the 1980s, opponents and activists described urban renewal and public housing as “The Second Ghetto,” as high-rise slum housing as dangerous as the ghettoes they were supposed to replace. By 2010, most of Newark’s public housing from the urban renewal age had been demolished. Other lands cleared of homes to build urban renewal projects never found the financing to build and remain vacant lots. Among dozens of high-rise towers of public housing containing thousands of apartments, all but seven towers were demolished. The urban poor were expelled from public housing towers that had become concentrations of crime, drugs, poverty, and decay.
The program had fallen far from its hopeful origins when President Harry Truman signed urban renewal into law with the 1949 Housing Act. Truman announced at the program’s launch: “The private housing industry cannot in the foreseeable future provide decent housing for these families. Their incomes are far too low to cover the cost of new housing of any adequate standard. [….] We have a national responsibility to assure that decent housing is available to all our people.” By 1963 at the height of the civil rights movement, James Baldwin famously characterized urban renewal as something “most northern cities now are engaged; it is something called urban renewal, which means moving the Negroes out. Getting it means Negro removal; that is what it means. And the federal government is an accomplice to this fact.” In the span of these fourteen years, a program Truman described as the fight to create “decent housing” had evolved into what Baldwin characterized as “Negro removal.”
The reasons behind the failure of public housing are more complex than simple reasons like “Negro removal,” poorly designed architecture, or state hatred for black people. Urbanist thinker Jane Jacobs blamed the failure of public housing on architecture. High-rise towers of public housing, she claimed, were too tall and too modern an architecture for families used to living in old tenements, Victorian townhouses, and rural farms. But the failure of social housing in Newark was not caused by poor design choices, low-quality architecture, or the supposed prejudice of the people who built and directed the program of urban renewal. Nor was the failure of social housing caused by the poor families, and especially rural black families who lived in these houses and were – the legend claims – unprepared for urban life. Instead, the failure has more do with employment discrimination, urban abandonment, and market policies that chose to under-invest in Newark and its people. These private forces collectively ensured the public failure of the Newark Housing Authority’s two billion dollar program of urban renewal.
Fundamentally, public housing in Newark was a two-part promise. Good homes at affordable prices for poor families were one half the promise: a promise met and provided by the public section. Economic mobility and non-discrimination in employment for those living in public housing was the missing half of the promise. It was a promise that the private sector failed to meet in an age of de-industrialization and suburbanization.

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Based on archival records, planning documents from the Newark Housing Authority, and old newspaper articles, read the full report on how public housing in Newark was designed to fail.  →

9,300 words, 23 pages

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Acknowledgements
I thank the archivists of the Newark Public Library and City of Newark Archives for granting me access to the primary sources that make my work possible. I also thank Newark-native Brendan O’Flaherty. His textbook on urban economics framed my understanding of Newark. His unpublished text chapter “How did Newark get to be a city where people aren’t rich?” also provided me a framework to understand the contemporary landscape of poverty in Newark. I am grateful to Zemin Zhang for his research on Louis Danzig and the history of the Newark Housing Authority. Last of all, I am grateful to the residents of Newark public housing, for their struggle and their perseverance to live in a system rigged against them.

The City as Carceral State

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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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.
If not for these early experiences, I would not be studying architecture and urban planning. My current work and dissertation research examine the carceral state as metaphor and asks: What actions in urban history produced the polarized, divided, and unequal urban landscape? Much blame lies with architects and urban planners, who worked with banks, realtors, and powerful institutions to profit from inequality. The Federal Housing Administration’s 1930s maps of Newark and hundreds of other cities singled out urban areas to deny investment and suburban areas to invest. Institutions require enablers, the realtors to assess the racial composition of neighborhoods, city planners to collect data, and mapmakers to visualize all this information that justified segregation in history.
However, my interest in redlining is more than academic. The implications of this research feel real. The audience for this work includes people I meet and see every day: neighbors down the street who were denied home mortgages because of their race; my own parents who would have been denied a mortgage (if not for the personal intervention of the bank’s CEO); Newark public school children learning about the history of their city; first generation college students at the local Rutgers University; and people like me who grew up with asthma and elevated blood-lead levels due to environmental conditions. Work in the urban humanities and digital humanities must be accessible to people outside the ivory tower of Ann Arbor, people who will live every day with the consequences of decisions handed down from urban planners and architects.
One of my current projects examines Newark’s old Essex County Jail, and the possible transformation of this site from abandoned prison into memorial park. Built 1836, it is the oldest public building in the city, a national monument within walking distance of my home, and a historic site abandoned since 1971. The history of this site challenges us to think of carceral spaces as something that stretches back hundreds of years. Incarceration is an evolving institution from slavery to Jim Crow to the present that has taken different forms at different times, in a constant act of reproducing itself. As Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in 1850 in the opening lines of The Scarlet Letter: “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.” As authors also write in The 1619 Project, slavery and incarceration were fundamental to the American project and to the origins of a city like Newark. The city was founded 1666 by Puritan settlers looking to build a utopian “city on a hill.” Upon Newark’s incorporation as a city, the jail was their first act as new city. Advocating for the preservation of this jail widens the stories we can tell and voices we can include in history. All buildings tell stories, and the built environments we preserve or destroy reflect the communities we think are worthy of preservation or destruction. Demolishing a building and neighborhood erases the stories these places can tell about the people who lived and struggled there. In my mind, architecture can and must be an activist practice.
When I started this project in 2018, I was excited to make this history visible. The site is entirely overgrown with trees and largely invisible from the street. To visit it and understand its importance required trespassing on public land and bringing people inside. With the rigorous tools of architectural documentation, I photographed in secret every corner of the site and drew up detailed site plans that will assist in its preservation. All these resources are shared online at the website I designed: OldEssexCountyJail.org. Based on this work, the local architecture school has conducted several studios that examine this site, as well as the first ever concrete plan and cost estimate of how much preservation will cost. Based on this website, my historical documentation, and on-site interviews with me and former inmates of this jail, Discovery Channel will be syndicating this fall a fifteen-minute documentary about this site to national and international audiences with translation into twenty languages for several million viewers.
Beyond incarceration, my larger challenge is to make scholarship accessible to the public. The boundaries around scholarship are intellectual (writing too complex for general audiences to understand), financial (academic writing locked behind pay walls), and spatial (academic spaces that do not feel physically welcoming to outsiders). My other projects from films, to videos, building construction sequences, interactive models, urban history maps, and my several websites all attempt – through research methods identical to the Essex County Jail – to reach audiences historically excluded from elite spaces. For instance, my ongoing collaboration with Rutgers University in Newark will result in a recurring history of Newark course, open for free for anyone outside the university to join. Students will be expected to produce works of public scholarship and narrative histories that examine the legacies of redlining and incarceration. Teaching students from the immediate community at their local university, and including in the classroom the physical presence of community activists, breaks down traditional barriers around scholarship. The course will be taught the first time in summer 2024 and will be funded by the Mellon Foundation, Clement Price Institute, and Chancellor’s office. Up to $150,000 is possibly forthcoming from a National Endowment for the Humanities grant I wrote for Rutgers as co-PI. Collectively, my work – none of which is published in traditional academic journals – has had over seven million viewers in the past four years and about one hundred thousand monthly readers. Visit: MylesZhang.org.
Every year, a few dozen high school students from Newark go on to attend Ivy League universities; occasionally, one or two become Rhodes Scholars. But it is rare for any of them to return to Newark. The city is a space to escape from, in search of wealthier spaces where home ownership is easier and schools are better. Social mobility means leaving behind the city and its ghettos to enter the American mainstream. But for me, the American city – in all its inequality, injustice, and poverty – is the foundation to reexamine our history and to rebuild a more equitable society. The evidence of inequality and the justification for reparations is all around me, from the city archives I visit, to the city street I live on, and to the people I speak with every day. I am proud of where I came from because Newark provides me a foundation and framework to challenge institutions. After completing my PhD at the University of Michigan, Newark is the place I will return to and call home.

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Interior of the abandoned old Essex County Jail

Goodbye Baxter Terrace

Written by my father Zemin Zhang on December 2, 2007

 

“I love you darling’
“Baby, you know I do
“But I’ve got to see this Book of Love
“Find out why it’s true”
Every day in 1955, Charles Patrick, 17, and a group of teenagers came together to sing in the Baxter Terrace’s recreation hall.  By 1958, they had sung their heart out and their song, “Who Wrote the Book of Love?” hit the country and even spread as far as Europe and Australia.  “Oh, I wonder, wonder ohm ba doo who….. who wrote the book of love?”  Charles never found the answer and two members of the Monotones, the Ryanes Brothers, died in their 30’s.  Now that Baxter Terrance has been scheduled for demolition, I wonder if people could find some old and broken pages of the Book of Love from the rubble of this 66 year-old project.

 

Immediately after the establishment of the Newark Housing Authority (NHA) in 1938, word spread out that one of  four “low-cost “ projects, a complex of 21 apartment buildings, would be in an area surrounded by Orange, Nesbitt, James, and Boyden Streets.  Among 1,363 buildings in the vicinity, 45 percent residents were black, living in substandard condition, many even without bath tubs and toilets.  (Only 10 percent of the city population was black.)  To construct the largest public housing in the state, the Orange-Nesbitt project needed to clear a few hundred buildings, while the other three (Pennington Court, Seth Boyden Court, and Stephen Crane Village)  would be built on mostly vacant land.  All land negotiations with lucrative commissions were assigned to three white agents, despite of the protest of Harold Lett, the only black NHA member.
By June 1939, 21 white land owners still held out their properties.  After condemnation procedures, a lone grocer-butcher Mr. Romano took the case of his four properties to the state court.  He put up placards against the NHA, “This Is a Free Country….”  One afternoon, his plump wife, in a gingham dress, apron and cap, waved her meat clever to chase out the government agent who had come to serve the condemnation notice.  “This is no dictatorship, Hitlerism or Soviet government where they chain you and send you to Siberia,” cried Mrs. Romano.  However, the couple were subsequently sent to jail and fined.  Next March, the court rejected the couple’s constitutionality challenge and settled the case with an offer of $25,000, far from the $75,000 they asked for.  Meanwhile, all surrounding streets were widened, in consideration of the traffic during the project’s estimated life of 60 years.  After $2,269,088 were awarded to contractors, the construction moved quickly towards completion in 18 months.
On June 7, 1941, the project was officially opened, named after James Baxter, who died in 1909 after serving 45 years in the city’s school.  Ironically, although the old Baxter fought all his life for a desegregated school system, his name was chosen only to settle the housing dispute to make the project for black residents only.  At the time, among 44,000 black residents, 18,900 were on “relief load,” 41 percent of the total poor in the city.  Those blacks, who were removed from the area but failed to get back in, had to settle in far worse housing because of the limited rental availability for blacks.  Among the 621 lucky black families, the income limit (i.e., $17 weekly for two and $22 for six) was intentionally set very low with constant strong pressure from the Newark Real Estate Board, among other “real estate lobbies.”  The nationwide racial as well as the economic segregation were designed to doom the future of public housing from its very beginning.  By 1951 when Louis Danzig, the talented and dedicated NHA director for 21 years, pushed for housing desegregation, the city’s white population had been in its rapid decline.  As a result, political support for public housing further eroded.
The Baxter Terrace area was always in one of the most notorious locations.  In September 1939 before the project’s construction, the city had to pump 30,000,000 cubic feet of odorless and colorless cyanide gas into the whole block, leading to 500,000 rodent casualties.  The problem, however, never ended.  For instance, in a February 1970 Newark Evening News report, residents complained that rats were running wildly.  “They are so big that kids are not aware of what they are, but play with them in the court yard,” observed one resident.   The hallways of the buildings were filled with “foul” odors because of dead rats.
From the beginning, various crimes were reported.  For instance, in July 1945, Rochai Sanders, a girl of five and half who had just enrolled in the Burnet Street School, was raped and killed.  Her charred body was found in a waste paper incinerator in the basement.  The case was never solved.  Two years later, the battered body of Mrs. Evelyn Eltoohey (24) was found under walls splattered with blood, while her two year old daughter was sleeping in the room during the day.  In February 1954, four armed bandits locked three housing employees in a closet and ran away with $1,500 rent money.  In April 1957, a 13-year-old girl was raped by six boys from ages 14 to 16 in the basement.  In the 1960’s, robberies became more often and purse snatchings happened repeatedly near Summit Street.  By the 1990’s, after the Federal government declared its “War against Drugs,” the area along Orange Street and Interstate 280 became one of the nation’s busiest drug traffic centers.  The 1940’s and 1950’s were by then the “good old days.”  The police helicopter’s search light and gun shots disturbing the quiet night were a regular feature for Baxter Terrace residents.  Even the news media lost interest in the daily violence.  During the last a few years under Sharpe James, the area was constantly sealed by police cars and mobile stations to create a concentration camp for those whose only crime was to be born poor.
The innocent residents of generations were hostages to the moralist drug “war” and casualties of various policy failures.  While millions of African-American men were pushed in and out of jails, women and children often suffered as well.  Two years ago, Cynthia McFadden of ABC News reported a case of 8-year-old Armani Stevenson.  When she was only 10 months old, Armani was left on the doorstep of her 85-year-old great-great-grandmother’s home at the Baxter Terrace.  The old lady, Okella Foster, was raising five boys and girls at the time.  Over the past five decades, she raised a dozen of her family’s abandoned children.  When Armani first arrived, raw and open sores were all over her lower body.  By eight, she had willed herself to silence, hardly speaking a word outside her home.  Psychologists name the condition selective mutism, as an extreme form of control for a traumatized child who cannot control any other things in her life.
My first encounter with the project was in the early 1990’s after finding my home on James Street.  Together with some neighbors, I attended a City Council meeting to protest a plan to open an auto junk yard on Orange Street within the James Street Historic District.  Happily, I found a large group of mostly women, three times more than my “progressive” neighbors, had already been in the room to protest the same ill-planned business.  Some more experienced neighbors, however, were disturbed, “Don’t approach them,” they told me.  “Why?” I was puzzled.  “They are from the Baxter Terrace.”  “What is the Baxter Terrace? Don’t we share the same goal of defeating the junkyard?” I asked.  For years, I hardly stepped foot in the dangerous area while getting to know a few decent people there.
Last year, my children’s two bicycles were stolen in front of Intrinsic Café on Sussex Street.  My homeless friend Joe volunteered to take me to the Baxter Terrace to look for the loss.  In the middle of the courtyard, a child was happily riding my daughter’s bike while a group of men were watching from the doorsteps.  “Hey, Joe, f**k you.  What are you up to, with that man?”  “Hey, f**k YOU,” Joe replied.  I left without my bicycles, but with a burdened conscience for my arrogance and indifference.  However, my “recklessness” of breaking the taboo for entering the war zone had deeply bothered some neighbors on my own street.  Even in this largest city of the most segregated state in the nation, life has been further segregated, creating visible and invisible prisons for everybody.
In my 17 years in the city, I have witnessed a number of ”triumphant” implosions of public housing buildings, including Columbus Homes,  Scudder Homes, and Hayes Homes.  After next summer, the city will again schedule another demolition, this time for the Baxter Terrace.  Kaderia Boykin, a 26-year-old Baxter Terrace mother reportedly said, “Tear it down today.  Move me now.”  This time, the enduring people of Newark have to go through the experience very differently and mindfully.  This is our city, our city planning, our lives, and our souls.  Flying all flags at half-mast, ringing the bells of Saint Patrick and Sacred Heart Cathedrals, and playing taps along Orange Street, we will mourn the loss of 67years and generations of lives.  Good-bye, Baxter Terrace, birthplace of the Book of Love, but having seen little of it itself.

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

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.
The city leaders looked around and settled on English-born architect John Haviland. Since immigrating to Philadelphia in 1815, Haviland designed many of the civic institutions for that city: the Franklin Institute for science, Old City Hall, churches, townhouses, and even parts of Independence Hall, where the U.S. Declaration of Independence was signed. His most famous building, however, was Eastern State Penitentiary completed in 1829. At a cost of about $450,000, Eastern State was the largest and more expensive public works project yet built in America. Over half of Eastern State’s budget was spent on the decorative fortress appearance and perimeter wall, even though visitor Alexis de Tocqueville noted that this frightening appearance served no other purpose than to frighten passersby. Newarkers thought that Haviland – later known as the “jailor to the world” – was best equipped for their project.
Haviland’s Newark commission consisted of two parts. At the top of Market Street, where Gutzon Borglum’s Seated Lincoln statue now stands, he built a symmetrical courthouse out of local brownstone. Heavy columns modeled after Egyptian papyrus leaves buttressed either side of the entrance. Carved on the cornices were the stylized motifs of eagles with outstretched arms, a reference to Horus, the Egyptian god of pharaohs. The walls tapered inward as they went up, a subtle reference to the architecture of Egyptian tombs and temples. The irony of using architecture associated with polytheism and monarchy for a courthouse was probably lost on Newark’s Christian elected leaders.
The second part of Haviland’s commission was for the Essex County Jail at what is now 271-85 New Street. Located at the city edge, along the path of the newly built Morris Canal, the jail was soon wedged between farmland on one side and leather tanning industries on the other. Also built of locally quarried stone, the jail was surrounded by an eight-foot perimeter wall. The main façade facing the city displayed an image of comfortable gardens and domestic life. The two-story Warden’s House with a wood cupola above offered hilltop views of Newark and the distant meadowlands. Generations of jail wardens lived here with their wives and children. Passing through the garden, one entered the front parlor of the Warden’s House. The stairs up led to the family bedrooms. The back door led via a short hallway to the rows of brick cell blocks and dungeons.

Old Essex County Jail Warden’s House 1967 and 2018. Photos by National Parks Service (left) and Myles Zhang (right)

In an agrarian republic, cities and urban life were seen as somehow dirty, alienating, and morally corrupt. Andrew Jackson, U.S. President when the Essex County Jail was being built, emphasized the frontier yeoman farmer and his family as the bedrock of American values and democracy. Newark’s older generation of Puritan founders and farmers observed the Sabbath, closed down businesses on this holy day, and chastised those found working. But in a city with immigrant groups who drank on the Sabbath and businesses that needed to remain open, Newark emphasized the need for the new civic institutions of schools, libraries, courthouses, public works projects, and jails to maintain tradition and social order. Indeed, in the Essex County Jail’s earliest decades, drunkenness and wife beating were among the two most common reasons men were held there. The State Temperance Society reported in 1836 that, of 517 people sent to jail, a little over twenty percent were charged with “beating and abusing their wives and children.” As part of their re-education, the better behaved of these inmates were invited to tend the warden’s garden and assist with food preparation in his kitchen. As the Newark Call reported as late as 1930: “The Essex County Jail reportedly has ‘one of the prettiest flower gardens in Newark,’ a hobby for Mr. and Mrs. Steadman, the warden and matron. A few ‘trusties’ among prisoners are rewarded for good behavior to work in the garden as recreation. Large flower beds and an extensive lawn form a bright spot outside the Warden’s House.” Warden Charles A. Steadman had the following to say to Essex County Jail inmates in a passage that reveals as much about him as it does about older attitudes toward crime and punishment:

My Friends: You and I are living under the same roof for a while.

You did not intend to come here. I did not invite you.

All of us make mistakes and at times do wrong. Perhaps you have. I know I have.

While we are together let us play fair with each other.

During your stay, your treatment will depend on your behavior. This must be remembered.

Let us both while together to live each other’s life. I’ll try to understand your position. You try to understand mine.

If we do this, we won’t have any misunderstanding.

My hope is that I will be a better man for having known you and that you will be none the worse for knowing me.

Few written records survive in the city archives or Newark Public Library from the jail’s early days. However, from what we do know, attitudes toward crime were evolving over the course of the nineteenth century. Some of America’s earliest colonial settlers were convicts deported from Britain. And in the tight-knit religious communities that dotted New England, lifetime banishment was a punishment for more severe crimes. But as America’s western frontier gradually filled out, nineteenth-century political leaders realized that if the guilty could not be banished, society would need to find means to re-educate and prepare them for eventual return to society. Prisons were built; courts were opened; inmates were set to labor in prison factories; and laws were updated to increase the number of crimes punishable with prison time. The Essex County Jail was no warehouse for the urban poor or ethnic minorities. The average length of confinement was only between 11 and 22 days during the entire 135 years the jail was in operation. This is in contrast to the backlog of cases in modern courts that can cause jail sentences to last months, even years. It was not until 1867 that troubled children were sent to the Jamesburg reformatory instead of the Essex County Jail, and it was not until 1873 that inmates with longer-term sentences were shipped to the purpose-built Essex County Penitentiary in Caldwell. Nonetheless, inmates ages eight to fifteen were locked up in the Essex County Jail until 1910 at the latest. Dozens of hangings also took place in the backyard of the Warden’s House until 1902 when executions were moved to Trenton State Prison, also built by Haviland. The practices of confinement in the Essex County Jail were changing alongside the larger city.
Two big changes came to the American prison system. The first was Prohibition. The second was the War on Drugs. The Essex County Jail’s operations responded to both. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, founder of the women’s rights movement, announced at the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention: “The tide of vice is swelling, and threatens the destruction of everything, and the battlements of righteousness are weak against the raging elements of sin and death.” For much of the nineteenth century, and into the twentieth, suffragists demanded the right to vote and the prohibition of alcohol. The two demands were intertwined in a perception that “demon rum” corrupted men, destabilized their families, and threatened the safety of their wives. Thus, in almost the same stroke of the legal pen in 1919, the federal government gave women the right to vote while barring men the right to drink. In the Prohibition age, the Essex County Jail’s average daily population shot up above 200 for the first time in history. The US might have ended Prohibition in 1933 with political lobbying from Newark brewers like Ballantine and Krueger. But the legal and institutional apparatuses to enforce prohibition remained in place. The Federal Bureau of Narcotics and the Federal Bureau of Prisons were both founded in 1930, and their mission expanded in years after. At the same time, African-Americans, subject to lynching and white supremacy in the south, migrated north to cities like Newark. While the Essex County Jail detained 432 “colored” people per year in 1920, ten years later the number of “colored” people confined here annually was 3,258. In the century after Prohibition, the numbers of African-Americans confined in Newark never returned to pre-1920 levels.
Originally built for a city of less than 20,000, the Essex County Jail once employed the latest technology. The jail benefitted from radiator heating, electricity, internal plumbing, and even its own hospital and substation powered by Newark-built steam engines – all in an era before most Newark homes were equipped with these conveniences. As the growing bureaucracy of government found new and more efficient ways to keep people in cages, the jail remained a source of civic pride. Haviland’s Eastern State Penitentiary, in fact, became an attraction for thousands of annual tourists. The Essex County Jail never achieved this level of notoriety, but was part of the same era when prisons were often a source of civic pride. However, by 1926, Newark’s population and inmate numbers were beginning to outstrip what the old jail could handle. Once countryside, the site was now hemmed in on all sides by factories and tenements. From a simple plan for a Warden’s House and a single cellblock, the jail had expanded to at least fifteen buildings of various size, material, function, and design.
When Richard Nixon launched the War on Drugs in 1971, the old Essex County Jail – originally designed for fewer than 100 inmates – held 432 on an average day. In a prophetic twist, as if foreshadowing future events, the jail closed the same year that the War on Drugs began. In almost every year after Nixon, the U.S. prison population has expanded. In some ways, Prohibition did not start in 1919, and nor did it end in 1933. The War on Drugs very much springs from the same place of moral righteousness that drove the War on Alcohol and before that, the various wars on vice that nineteenth-century puritanical Americans waged against socialists, anarchists, and immigrants.
Like Newark’s Puritan founding fathers, we are still a country that prefers rural and suburban living to urban life, chooses to decentralize power to the state and local level, and therefore requires a robust system of “law and order” to maintain power over increasingly diverse and immigrant urban areas. We are also a country that frames political issues like abortion and welfare with the coded language of “family values.” For conservative America and Fox News, the problem with our cities comes from a decline in Christianity, an increase in divorce, and welfare dependence that erodes work ethic. While Newark founders responded to fears of urban disorder through the old Essex County Jail, political leaders today have responded with the Essex County Correctional Facility on Doremus Avenue. This new facility’s razor wire perimeter fences and searchlight towers project an image of fear on the surrounding environment of sewer treatments plants, recycling centers, and heavy industry. It is now uncommon for prison administrators to live in the same place as their inmates.
Since 1971, the old Essex County Jail has sat abandoned and decaying. It has briefly been used as a holding facility for drug offenders, as a stage set for a film about Malcolm X, and as the occasional home for people who prefer the jail’s secluded privacy to the invasive rules of local homeless shelters. Occasional fire and structural decay threaten the buildings that remain. Old inmate records scatter the floor. The decaying architecture is not picturesque or romantic in the way that Alcatraz surveys the bay of San Francisco. And the caved-in roof of the Warden’s House today offers more an image of horror than of comfortable domestic life and pretty gardens. The cells confined few famous people we know of; this was a place for untold stories of immigrants and the urban poor. Walking through these abandoned cellblocks raises questions about who lived here, and the stories these walls would tell if they could speak.
The ability to erect monuments reflects a larger ability to create a historical consensus about the meaning of the place, person, or event that is being remembered. Yet we as a country have not recognized the full human impact of generations of incarceration on minority and immigrant communities. There is no consensus on how best to make amends or reparations for past injustices. In the meantime, the decaying hulk of the old Essex County Jail has waited fifty years in a state of limbo for the day when Newark and this country are ready to confront the legacies of oppression. As a public health, governance, economic, and policing crisis whip this country into turmoil, and as the neighboring New Jersey Institute of Technology continues demolishing dozens of old buildings nearby, time for this old jail is running out.

 

Graffiti on the jail entrance gate, photo by Myles Zhang

Newark Changing: Mapping neighborhood demolition, 1950s to today


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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.

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A park without trees creates a city without history.

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.

Lorch Column at the University of Michigan

As featured by Taubman College

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Lorch Column at Taubman College

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As a new Ph.D. student, the massive Lorch Column welcomed me to Taubman College. On spotting the tall column from a distance, I knew I had arrived at my new home. I later learned this column was architectural salvage from the demolished Mutual Benefit Life Insurance building in my childhood neighborhood of Newark, New Jersey. To my surprise, an important lost landmark in my own city had become an important landmark to the University of Michigan. The column’s ancient stone base and ancient stone top, linked by a modern steel skeleton, is a fitting metaphor for the synthesis of past and present, the old and the new. In another way, its unusual history of transplantation and loss is a fitting metaphor for architecture’s own fraught relationship with capitalism.
Like many 19th-century insurance companies, Mutual Benefit saw its Newark headquarters as an advertisement to customers. Grand palaces to commerce modeled after the civic structures of ancient Rome would have symbolized to customers that this was a safe and permanent place to park their money. The logic followed that the taller and more imposing the monument, the more powerful and wealthy the company that built it. And a monument it was: eight stories of white Dover marble, copper-framed windows, and ornament copied from the temples of ancient Rome. The first floor was a banking hall lined with Vermont marble, while the floors above contained offices. Richly decorated cornice crowned the building. Behind this windowless cornice was an entire fireproof floor of life insurance records for the company’s thousands of policyholders. In other words, in its original form, the powerful and weighty Lorch Column supported the weight of nothing more substantial than the paperwork of bureaucracy.
Architect George B. Post modeled the four Corinthian columns and temple portico after the New York Stock Exchange he had completed a few years earlier. Comparing the details of the Lorch Column to the New York Stock Exchange, you will see they are almost identical in height, material, and ornament. The New York Stock Exchange was, in turn, modeled after the Roman Pantheon. A Roman temple to the gods had become an American temple to capitalism.
When erecting the structure that would eventually become the Lorch Column, Post faced stiff competition. His building was on Broad Street, Newark’s main commercial street, which was lined with dozens of other insurance companies and banks. After Hartford, Connecticut, Newark had the country’s second largest concentration of insurance companies. Across the street, there was the even larger home of the Prudential Insurance Company, built in stages by Post and Cass Gilbert. To the thousands of downtown commuters and life insurance policy shoppers, Mutual Benefit needed to one-up the competition. As The New York Architect wrote in 1909: “The problem was to design a building as different as possible from the Prudential Building and at the same time make it indicative of the strength and greatness of an important insurance company.” After some thought, Post concluded that since Prudential’s building was a granite castle in the Gothic style, his building for Mutual Benefit should be a marble palace in the Neoclassical style. In this way, the two structures and two companies would play off of each other: the industrial laborers and proletariat who purchased from Prudential’s Gothic castle vs. the upper-class and bourgeois clients who purchased from Mutual Benefit. For thousands of downtown shoppers and commuters, the two buildings stood on opposite sides of Broad Street, framing the entrance to downtown. The giant columns, Post reasoned, would be a fitting advertisement to the upper-class life insurance policy holders Mutual Benefit needed. So ironically, before what is now known as the Lorch Column met its own untimely death, it was an advertisement for others to insure against their own deaths.

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The Mutual Benefit Life Insurance Company building (left) and the Art Deco skyscraper that replaced it (right)

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Prudential Headquarters (across the street from Mutual Benefit, also demolished)

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Why was Mutual Benefit’s home demolished, despite its at-the-time cost of $1 million, its grand columns, and its important architect? The calculated logic of capitalism dispenses with history whenever the next and newest building can deliver its owner more profit in the name of progress. By 1925, Mutual Benefit moved shop to a larger building two miles away and sold its old home to the National Newark and Essex Bank. Looking to turn a profit in the overheated 1920s real estate market and to build a suitable monument to their own corporate power, the new owner demolished the six-floor Corinthian palace to erect a 35-floor tower of its own. Opened 1929, the National Newark Building was the tallest tower in New Jersey with its ornate temple roof modeled after the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, one of the lost seven wonders of the ancient world.
In another twist of fate, William Starrett, who attended the University of Michigan and whose company built the Empire State Building, gifted the column to U-M. While the National Newark Building was inspired by a wonder of the ancient world, the Empire State Building is listed as one of the seven wonders of the modern world. Like the 102-floor Empire State Building, the 35-floor National Newark Building was finished just as the stock market crashed. Both entered the Great Depression as largely empty buildings that were urban monuments to corporate ego — hence, the Empire State’s early nickname the “Empty State Building.”
Ironically, the Lorch Column built, in the image of Roman columns that survived 2,000 years, barely survived 20 years. In the end, it was not time or nature or war that brought down the column; instead, the same calculated logic of profit and real estate that built this column demolished it shortly after.
As the American writer Kurt Vonnegut would say: “So it goes.” One monument to commerce replaces another. If not for the foresight of Emil Lorch, the first dean of Michigan’s architecture school, to accept the gift of this column, it likely would have ended in the landfill. As demolition crews hacked away at the monumental old New York Penn Station and carted its carcass to the landfill, architectural critic Ada Louise Huxtable condemned its demolition. Her 1963 New York Times article about old New York Penn Station speaks to the fate of that train station as much as to the fate of the Lorch Column:

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It’s not easy to knock down nine acres of travertine and granite, 84 Doric columns, a vaulted concourse of extravagant, weighty grandeur, classical splendor modeled after royal Roman baths, rich detail in solid stone, architectural quality in precious materials that set the stamp of excellence on a city. But it can be done. It can be done if the motivation is great enough, and it has been demonstrated that the profit motive in this instance was great enough.
Like the column that once advertised corporate strength but fell when the financial winds changed, Mutual Benefit Life Insurance itself fell apart in 1991. One of several reasons: investments in Florida real estate that never paid off and left the company bankrupt. By the 1950s, Mutual Benefit had become entangled in financing real estate; their largest projects included Mies van der Rohe’s Lake Shore Drive Apartments in Chicago. Mutual Benefit’s fall was, to date, the largest bankruptcy of a life insurance company in American history. The company’s assets were sold off, and the Newark buildings it still owned were sold to the Kushner family, who is now better known for their relationship with Donald Trump than for their real estate speculation.
In its afterlife as the Lorch Column at Taubman College, fate still follows the old column. It was capital and a desire to attract customers that motivated Mutual Benefit to build such a large column. It was capital and a desire to make more money that motivated the National Newark and Essex Bank to tear down this column. And it was success in real estate development that enabled Al Taubman to make a substantial donation to the architecture school that now bears his name. In a fitting metaphor for the power of capital to make or break architecture, the architecture school’s old home on the Central Campus, where the Lorch Column was first displayed, is now U-M’s Department of Economics. Where this column goes next in its journey across space and time is anyone’s guess. One thing is for certain though, even something carved in stone can change meaning depending on time and place and fate. “So it goes.”

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Related: Essay on the Demolition of Old New York Penn Station

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Branch Brook Park Interactive History Map

As featured by the Branch Brook Park Alliance as the official park map

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Navigate this interactive history map of Newark’s Branch Brook Park. Click on map features to learn about park amenities, recreational spaces, and historic features. Map annotations are paired with explanatory texts and comparative photos of past and present. Beneath each annotation is the Google Maps link that will display directions to that point in the park from wherever you are standing.
All historic images are from the archives of the Essex County Parks Department and Newark Public Library. Browse their digital collections or contact the agency to visit their archives. All descriptions are sourced from the Cultural Landscape Report that documented the park’s history and renovation.
Map created by Myles Zhang
Map texts by Linda Morgan, Curtis Kline, Myles Zhang, Maeher Khosla, and Jack Barron
Contemporary photos by Curtis Kline with Mouli Luo

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Scenes of Branch Brook Park Past and Present

The park’s change over time becomes visible in this series of past vs. present photo comparisons. The once meticulously landscaped gardens and flowerbeds of the old park mature into the large trees and dense foliage of today. At the same time, many architectural follies and ornamental buildings have decayed to the point that no traces remain of their former existence. Old postcard views date from c.1900, while contemporary views were taken by Curtis Kline in summer 2021.

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Southern Division Buildings

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Boat House

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Boat House

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Lover’s Lane Bridge

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Ornamental Arch

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Sand Court

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Bandstand

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Southern Division Landscapes

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Cyprus Tree Promenade

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Reservoir

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Flower Garden

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Flower Garden

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Wisteria Walk

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Wisteria Walk

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Branch Brook Lake

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Middle and Northern Division

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Police Boats

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Wading Pool

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Rustic Footbridge

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Field House

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Tiffany Falls

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