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Decay Came in a Few Sharp Years in Newark's Central Ward. The Repair Took Five Institutions and Five Decades.
By the time Newark's Central Ward exploded in July 1967, two separate government projects had already spent years demolishing it. A highway had razed hundreds of homes and businesses to clear a path through the neighborhood. A mayor's plan for a new medical school was set to take 150 more acres and displace up to 20,000 residents. The uprising itself started over a police beating -- but the ground under it had already been cleared, piece by piece, for years. Real repair came too, in pieces of its own, starting as early as 1988 and still building today.
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Where this connects
One Billionaire's $7.5 Billion Bet Helped Pull Detroit Out of the Largest Municipal Bankruptcy in US History.
Detroit filed the largest municipal bankruptcy in American history in July 2013, carrying roughly $18 billion in debt. It exited in eight...
Chicago Drew an Invisible Line in a Lake in 1919. By 1962 It Was Concrete. Today It's 30 Years of Life.
In 1919, a Black teenager drowned in Lake Michigan after crossing an invisible segregation line, and the riot that followed killed 38 peo...
Lived places displaced by power
A university expands, a highway gets built, a reservoir gets filled -- and a real, lived community disappears from underneath it, sometim...
Richmond Keeps Rebuilding the Same Two Blocks: A Bank in 1903, a Highway That Erased It, a Tech Cluster Today.
Richmond's Shockoe Bottom sold an estimated 350,000 people into slavery between 1830 and 1865 -- the country's second-largest domestic sl...
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