(first posted 2/1/2018) New at Newark Street, Newark NJ – Fall, 1980
New at Newark Street, Newark NJ – Spring, 1986
New at Newark Street, Newark NJ – Fall, 1986
New at Newark Street, Newark NJ – Winter, 1987
New at Newark Street, Newark NJ – Summer, 1987
All photos by Camilo J. Vergara at the US Library of Congress.
WEell,, theres always an impala or caprice right to the very end.
Fascinating progression. Of course I couldn’t help but look up New & Newark Sts. on Google StreetView. I don’t pretend to know anything about the neighborhood, but the changes are certainly interesting:
Actually, I was doing some digging on historic aerials and it appears this building is actually across the street. The brick building on the left in all these pictures is still there, so is the telephone pole.
I don’t know — I’m still thinking that the new building is the site. It’s hard to really tell for sure with the flat topography and the square street blocks, but what I oriented myself with was the building circled below. That same building still appears to be standing on Newark St. just northeast of the site — and that would put it in the correct place with that new building as our site.
Looking the other way, there doesn’t seem to be an equivalent building. But then again, the aerials gives a whole different perspective.
Either way, it’s quite an interesting progression.
Ahh good eye!
During my tenure in Newark at engineering school (NJIT) from 1981 to 1986, this was pretty much the progression. There were two men who owned several lots with homes on Summit and would offer parking. As they tore down each home, the lots would quickly fill up. 100 cars daily at $5 cash = big bucks for them
Interesting how quickly that building changed “shape”.
I moved into my current home in 86-87, then was transferred out of state for 22-23 years, yet when I came back to this area little had changed. No new buildings, tho some had changed hands, no torn down buildings. However, in the last 2 years, 3-4 houses have gone up on empty lots near my house.
Moved to Central New Jersey 1979, (Keyport, Matawan) up from rural Florida, and raised in rural Pa. Soooo the hustle and bustle of the NJ / NYC metro area took some adjustment. But I quickly adapted. For instance. The proper NJ lane change is “turn on your turn signal, count to 3, and change lanes. Someone will let you in…probably” NJT trains to the City stopped at Newark. As I recall Newark at that time 1979/1980 was a pretty scary looking place, especially by the train station. I felt safer in Manhattan! I would not venture much further than the Newark Cop that was always on the platform.I’m sure 30 years on it has improved.
The ability to tear down a single house in the middle of a row of rowhouses has always fascinated me, and these pictures had me staring for longer than normal.
I don’t profess to know anything about that section of Newark but always think it is a shame when one of the old houses goes away because they cannot really be duplicated today.
It is remarkable that other than a couple of foreign cars, this was GM-Land without a single Ford or Mopar around.
I’m not sure how much brand loyalty folks in these big urban areas felt, but Newark is pretty close to Linden, NJ, where GM had a factory for many decades. I know in smaller cities, that would translate to a great deal of loyalty for GM, since many people would have known someone who worked for GM… the same could have held true in Newark.
It makes me sad when old houses go away to. It certainly takes away from the character of the neighborhood. But on the other hand these buildings appear so neglected they look to be just barely habitable, if even that. And probably full of code violations, not to mention asbestos and other bad stuff. I’m sure from the landlord’s perspective they didn’t make sense to renovate. If only he could have foreseen the gentrification trend that would come along a few decades later.
Looking at these pictures just makes me think of a plot line from The Sopranos, actually (which of course was set in Newark, coincidentally). I don’t quite remember the details of Tony’s scam, but it seems like it involved collecting grant money from HUD intended to renovate places like this, but not doing the work or doing really shoddy work. I just remember one scene where some of Tony’s goons went to “salvage” all the nice architectural pieces from one of the houses he was supposed to be renovating in odder to resell them.
This photo sequence soooo reminds me of a particular area in New Orleans.
A certain neighborhood that fell into disrepair in the ’70’s thru the 90’s has been swept away to make way for two new hospitals in a 5 block area to replace a VA and a state hospital damaged by Katrina.
These’s new construction and massive renovations to accommodate the staff, interns, and support personnel associated with the new campus.
Curious about the use of the lot, one suggestion is that it’s used for parking, but looking at the cars in it it almost seems to be a prep area for the salvage yard in the lot behind it to the left. Most of the cars would have been at the ends of their typical life cycles for the era, and I suspect the two men in the 1986 working on the 74 Trans Am are prepping for dismantling.
I don’t know why but there’s something I find fascinating about the urban decay that happened in earnest during the 70s and early 80s like this. I remember still seeing places like this along the way when my parents would travel to the city when I was a child in the 90s, they seemed so hopeless and scary. They are all but gone now, some majorly redeveloped, others simply empty spaces in waiting, and for whatever warped reason I find myself more attracted to the decayed aesthetic than the manicured grass and modernistic goofy building now occupying this lot today. I guess that’s what makes me like old cars with a certain level of patina as well.
I ended up living in the area of the city my mother is from and that I saw all the time as a kid in the the early 80s. I will say that while how it is now is much better, there is another quality that has been lost. It’s hard to say quite what that is, because objectively everything is better and nicer, but subjectively there’s some sort of soul or something that now only exists in our memories.
That being said, I’ll take this rather than seeing used needles in the gutter. There’s only so much romanticizing the past gets you.
Wow, are they still that down and out in Newark? Geez that even sounds like a reality show – “Tonight on “Down and Out In Newark. . . ” Would be nice to see some pics of how that neighbourhood looks today.
A detailed look at the 2nd and 3rd picture indicates the townhouses had been added on to in the rear one or more times. As told to me by my Dad, many houses were subdivided to bring in additional revenue during the Depression.
I’m not familiar with the Newark landscape, but I’m sure these houses were full to the brim with workers from the country supporting factories and shipyards during WWII. Housing was very scarce because of the drought of construction during the 30’s.
A lot of history here. But, as the saying goes, “Don’t like the neighborhood, just wait 30 years and things will change!”
I absolutely love the chronology captured here (and thanks, Eric703, for posting that current-day street view).
I found it interesting that there were just two (indentifiable) imports in these shots (I can’t ID the light blue car in the upper left of the third frame).
Camilo J. Vergara also taken some photos of Harlem taken during the same era.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qU1z5SGMdQE
And here another video showing some before/after areas of Harlem.
Oh, I’m glad you mentioned Camilo Jose Vergara. He published a book of photographs called The New American Ghetto – which often showed a progression of how buildings or homes deterioritated and were razed. Seeing the row houses in Newark made me instantly recall a photo sequence of a few houses in Newark being torn down and made into vacant lots.
Like Tom C, I attended NJIT from 1986-89. While there, I took several photos of the surrounding neighborhood.
Driving through Newark pre-early 80s was a Dante’s Inferno-like journey through a hell of dilapidated buildings, graffiti, and abandoned cars–but oh-so-fascinating! You could still see the Victorian beauty through all the decay. Now, most of the Central Ward has been demolished, and any opportunity for historic preservation is mostly gone. It’s just not that interesting anymore.
Just around the corner, Warren and Newark Streets, 1988.
Warren and Newark Streets, 1988:
I remember the pavement on Warren Street was so bad, you could see the trolley cracks beginning to emerge through the pavement. The older railroad ties had rotted away leaving cavities and the soft asphalt caved into the gaps leaving Long rolls of corrugated pavement with the shiny rails peeking every other couple of feet. You could also see trolley tracks curving around the corner of Norfolk Street and Warren Street. The intersection of 1st Street and Central Avenue also had trolley tracks curving around the corners.
High St. (now M.L. King Blvd.) near Sussex Ave., 1988:
Springfield Avenue and Howard Street, 1988:
Wrong picture; can’t delete it.
Quinby Buiiding, former carriage and automobile manufacturer, 1988:
My mom was at architecture school 87-91 at NJIT. I remember this area very well from days I’d drive in with her.
Westinghouse Factory, Orange Street, 1987:
Gotta love that butterscotch Volvo in the first shot of Newark!
Almost looks good enough to eat.
I had a white one at the end of the ’80s and drove it to my job at Steven’s Pass ski area on Highway 2, in Washington state. Once had a really scary spin-out going uphill, but was able to get out of the way of the oncoming log truck just in time…
Ah, the folly of youth.
Come to think of it, I had also had a butterscotch Rabbit like the one in photo #3. My wife would probably call it “latte” but that’s OK too.
Thanx for all the great photos, the slide show and appreciation of what was lost and what was saved .
-Nate
This is a good one. Any pictures from the North Ward? It was still an Italian-American stronghold into the 80s.
Interestingly Newark has no new car dealerships despite a 300k plus population. And its been this way since the 90s. Neighboring but higher income Jersey City has a plethora of dealers around Route 440. My dealer is in Newark’s affluent western suburbs. We sell a lot of preowned to Newarkers but very little new outside of the more Portuguese/Brazilian Ironbound section.
Is there a stat anywhere that shows new vs used buying by area? I would love to see how different parts of NJ buy.
The piecemeal demolition over time of one otherwise single structure has long fascinated me, and it seems to be a thing of the northeast.
Actually I was just reading about a building in Chicago where they did this. It was on Western Ave near Touhy and they were using the building as a sex and drug den. The police shut it down, and the building was declared “structurally unfit” and was torn down. It was in a row of buildings connected to each other.
An evocative sequence of photographs. Those kind of buildings (East Coast Carpenter Georgian? :-), their fall into disrepair, and their ultimate demolition, is also sadly reminiscent of some streets in Halifax Nova Scotia during the same period.
In hindsight it seems possible that if they could have just hung on for another decade or two, many might not have been demolished at all. There’s an honesty and clarity (not to mention functionality) of design that makes their disappearance rather sad.
PS. In the third shot, the cars almost look like the pack of predators that brought them down. 🙂