I was recently going through Dr. Samuel Berg’s collection of Newark photos from the early 1960s (and there are a lot to go through–all 2,788 of them!) It reminded me that these amateur black & white shots really capture a lost world. As it has been mentioned before on CC, most people did not take pictures of ordinary places and things, especially those that were not considered scenic or attractive. Stores and factories don’t look like this anymore, and were it not for Dr. Berg’s project of capturing streetscapes he knew were doomed, no record of these businesses would survive.
So I selected a few of the more interesting shots showing storefronts, factories, and industrial buildings with their unique signage–always beckoning customers to come in with such earnestness! If you go to the website, you can really “zoom in” and see all these little fine details! Plus we get to see quite a few classic cars (not gleaming, restored examples, but real “working” cars and trucks in their natural environment).
There are so many more–this is just a small sample. You really get a “time machine” effect when you look at all of these.
Photographer Myles Zhang upped the interest level even more by pairing historical photographs with modern views of the same locations in his 2016 “Then and Now” series (viewable [and zoomable] here.) True, Newark was a gritty industrial city, but there was a lot of beauty mixed in with the grittiness. And sadly so much of it has been lost:
But if you want the full color, live experience of what the city was really like in the old days, check out this YouTube video. It was filmed in the late 1940s from a train traveling southward on the Penn Central tracks along McCarter Highway from Lafayette Avenue to the foot of Broad Street by Newark Airport:
To me, the city looks like an HO scale model railroad layout par excellence! It’s all here: the billboards, the cars, the factories, stores, gas stations–the entire unfolding scene as it would be viewed from a moving train. Some people may call it ugly, but I think it has a charm all its own; an impression that is enhanced by the fact that things can never be this way again. A trip along the same route today is not nearly as satisfying–a scant few of these buildings remain, abandoned or badly altered. The robust economic vitality just isn’t there anymore.
As you can probably tell, I miss the Old Newark. In the late ’70s/early ’80s when I was much younger, it was a fascinating (if dangerous) place to explore–old, decrepit, quaint, but with its architectural wonders, so unlike my familiar suburban environment; with its brick and cobblestone streets, faded Victorian charm, well-kept beauty on one block, total disaster on the next, faded “ghost signs” over bombed-out storefronts and factories. All its layers of history.
A lot of “progress” has occurred since then, and many parts of Newark have been rebuilt in the modern way–cleaner, greener, largely government subsidized, and not very interesting. Except for the Forest Hill section with its lawns and old mansions, the rest of the city is a mixture of urban renewal, blight, vacant lots, surface parking, a few surviving landmarks, and building facades badly defaced by vinyl siding and other eyesores. Ah, well–we don’t have the glories of Atlantis, Greece, Rome, or pre-war Dresden anymore either. On Earth, everything but nature herself is temporary.
See also: Vintage Photography: Documenting Newark N.J. in the 1960s–Pre-Google Streetviews in B & W
(My very first Curbside Classic post)
The first few photos remind me of Magazine Street in NOLA. Up and coming hip neighborhood filled with coffee shops, boutiques, hip apartments, and people walking their dogs.
So much for the suburbs.
Newark is a fascinating city. Not a particularly uplifting story over the past nearly 70 years, but still a place rich in history. Despite being so relatively close for much of my life, I never got truly interested in the history of Newark until the early 90’s when I started working in Essex County. In my line of work I tend to do business with an older, wealthier clientele, and those were the days of the big kerfuffle over Maplewood trying to literally wall and gate itself off from its neighbor. I can recall some very uncomfortable conversations in some very well appointed living and dining rooms back then, with people who were quite vocally in favor of locking out the savages next door. It was eye-opening to me in my mid 20’s. One had to keep in mind that these folks, now in their later years had front row seats to the unrest of prior decades. The upside of those exchanges is that it sparked an interest in me to learn more about Newark and its environs.
Another memory spark for me is the Schenley’s liquor ad in the photo of Ricciardi Paints. My great grandfather was a liquor salesman for Schenley’s at one point in his long career in the field (which I’m pretty sure started during prohibition). Newark was his “beat” in his later years, after the family moved to NJ from Long Island. My mother still has a few pieces of Schenley’s “swag”, along with a good number of trinkets and ad-ware from Piel’s Beer, where he worked for his last stint until retirement. I haven’t come across a reference to Schenley’s since my grandparents passed years ago.
When my eyes aren’t drawn to the buildings, they’re drawn to the licence plates on the cars: ETB-314 on the ’59 Ford at Broome and Mercer, and ABC-257 on the ’59 Buick three spaces below it. Like Oregon, California, and Delaware, New Jersey is a state that never replaces its plates…so both of these COULD, conceivably, still be in use on a currently-registered vehicle today!
BUT…and that’s a large but: In New Jersey, plates are transferred with the owner, not the vehicle. In the short term, this results in a glut of older plates in use (I remember seeing plenty of buff-on-blues from the ’80s transferred to newer cars in the 2000s)…but in the long term, the maximum life of an NJ plate becomes curtailed by the maximum life of a human being. The only way a 1959-issued plate could still be in use would be IF it belonged to a resident who was of driving age in 1959, AND lived in the state continuously (and kept a car registered in their name) for 63 years. Anyone driving on plates this old nowadays is going to be in their eighties or nineties.
My dad had been driving around with his 1960 plate EYW-635 until last year when my parents got a “new” used car. He was going to transfer the old plates to the new car, but they were pretty cruddy looking, and Mom wanted shiny new ones.
Photo: 1960 Thunderbird I spotted a while back with late ’59/early ’60 straw plate still in use, legal and binding. I still see an occasional car with the early ’80s blue plates.
Thanks for putting this together. This strikes a chord with me. My dad grew up in Newark in the Central Ward in the 30s and 40s but was gone by the 50s. He and my uncles grew up on Treacy Avenue and went to school at Avon Avenue Elementary, a few blocks from the picture taken at Avon and Badger. It sounds like it was a great place to grow up and it is great to see what it looked like around the time that he left (also my grandmother still lived there in to the 1960s). Sad to see so many beautiful buildings gone, but having driven through Newark in recent years, there is still a lot of life in the city!
Third image down. The small car across the street under “Hollywood”. Can anyone identify it? Unusual looking. My rough guess is a Simca.
I blew it up big so we can see it better:
NSU Prinz
Thank you both. That’s a rare one and well before the Simcas were sold in the US.
More info here if anyone is interested.
The majority of NSU’s production remained in Germany and other European countries; only 29 Prinz four-passenger sedans were sold in the United States for the 1958 model year, followed in 1959 with 3,247 and 2,493 in 1960. Not many more came after that, which clearly explains why these well-built German cars are rarely seen on American soil.
About 3 or 4 thousand Simcas were sold in the United States each year, 1969, 1970 and 1971. In 1969, the 1204 was sold alongside the rear-engined 1118. The Simca and Sunbeam cars were sold as part of the Simca/Sunbeam division of Chrysler Corporation until 1971, when they became part of the Plymouth / Import division.
Plymouth offered Hydrive only in 1954, didn’t it? So that would date the Coster’s Auto School sign.
For decades, Flit was the best known bug spray on the market and I’ve always been puzzled about why it was allowed to wither away.
The loss of the old Prudential HQ building is a tragedy.
Spent 25 years in Essex County mid-90’s onward, raising my kids a couple of towns west of Newark. It was a fascinating and yet sometimes scary place to visit, great food in the Ironbound section. Had clients in the old Ballantine brewery; the three rings were still in the doorway threshold.
The ’60’s were not kind to it and succession of mayors never got it fixed, despite best intentions. Tempus fugit.
It reminds me very much of Baltimore when we moved there in 1965. I used to hook school and ride the #8 bus from Towson to downtown Baltimore, and there were lots of scenes like this along the way down York Rd./Greenmount Ave.
Wow, the film brings back so many memories, not all good .
IIRC ‘FLIT’ was banned because it was carcinogenic….
-Nate
Every time I try to reckon out what a fishotorium might be, my brain refuses and goes “Nope!”. I think I’ll leave that question as a question.
Thanks Stephen Pelligrino. When my parents immigrated to the USA, they lived in Newark for about thirty years. Attached is a photo of one of the houses they owned.
My my dad grew up there in the 1920s and 30s. In the 1950s and 1960s, my mom took me shopping there, down town. And in the 1970s and early 1980s, I went to college there. I have memories of that city.
Most of the structures outside the downtown area were built of wood between 1850 and 1920, so they were old and often in disrepair by the 1950s. Houses and factories were often situated side-by-side, so there wasn’t much visual appeal. So many burned down and the lots laid empty. The 1967 riots have been the topic of so many articles and documentaries – we all know the story.
But here and there, there are some hidden gems. Many old churches remain and they are wonderful. The Newark Public Library is a landmark where I spent much time in the stacks in my college days. And there’s always McGovern’s!
Neil, the main character in Philip Roth’s first novel/novella works at the Newark Public Library. Of course Roth grew up in Newark and went to Weequahic High School.
That reminds me of some threads I saw on Skyscraperpage forums about landscape change we see in Google Streetview https://skyscraperpage.com/forum/showthread.php?t=249429 along with this one showing photos of Harlem from the 1980s and 1990s and 2007. https://skyscraperpage.com/forum/showthread.php?t=149448
A former coworker/friend grew up in Newark. Never had a good thing to say about it when I knew him in California where he’d been for 25+ years then. He did have a good NJ line though, he said the state greeting was, hey, f*** you. To which the standard reply was, yeah, f*** you too.
Photos. Digital has of course changed things dramatically, but pictures were expensive back in the film days. I try to get in some of the local flavor on vacation, but only catch a little, but back when you were trying to keep it down to a roll or two you were careful about what you took a picture of, it had to be special, not some “someplace”. I say that with now pushing 40K digital pics on my computer here.
Hi,
My great grandparents and grandparents came from Eastern Europe to Newark back in the early 1900’s. It was a safe city and had a lot to offer, parks, restaurants, entertainment, shopping, etc. After WWII there was an exodus to the suburbs in Essex County and other counties nearby. The suburbs were quite a change from city life, but equally interesting with nature in your backyard.
It was a fine city, with a good downtown where my father had his office. We’d go to Newark and shop at Bamburger’s and Klein’s Dept. Stores, go to a nearby luncheonette and travel home with our father. Going to the Jersey Shore was great fun in the summer, as well as taking rides to visit some of the sights around NJ. Thanks for the memories.
I’m searching for a photo of the street or storefronts across from the Newark Hall of Records in the 1950s or ’60s. My grandparents owned Phil’s Record Luncheonette, which was located there.
I would like a photo of 89 Magazine st in the 1930s. My grandparents had a bakery there from 1891 to 1940. I’ve been trying to find the name of it, no one in the family knows and records for that time just list it as a bakery