Newark Is The Canary In America's Coal Mine

Yesterday my wife and I cleaned out our old apartment in the Ironbound and handed our keys over, which means I'm no longer a resident of Newark.  While I am glad to have much more space in our Maplewood home, I already miss the old neighborhood.  I also feel a little guilty, because I feel like I am abandoning a city I love during its time of need.  The small improvements and positive changes that I had been perceiving since 2007 (when I started splitting my time there) appear to have been wiped out in 2013.

Crime is way up again, evidenced by a recent New York Times article showing that Brick City is again the car jacking epicenter of America.  The number of murders jumped to an alarming one hundred and eleven, the highest total since 1990 in midst of the crack wars.  Not only is that death toll atrocious, the murders themselves have been especially heartbreaking.  Last week on Christmas night a 13-year old girl was slain by stray bullet fired by another teenager in a revenge killing that also claimed a 15-year old boy.  Corey Booker, the city's former celebrity mayor, bailed on Newark for the Senate, leaving this mess to the unlucky winner of the next mayoral election, which could very well put the old machine back in power.  That outcome would mean graft and mismanagement on top of poverty and crime and will surely make things even worse.

Of course, few people outside of Newark and Essex County seem to give a damn about any of this.  The recent killing of a man in a car jacking at the ritzy Short Hills Mall just a few miles (but worlds away) has received as much media attention as all of the 111 murders in Newark put together.  As I have said before, some lives are cheap in this country, and none more so than poor people of color.

But others outside of Newark ought to pay heed, because Brick City's woes will be coming to them, too.  There are two larger forces at work behind all of this that have made themselves felt more immediately in a poorer city like Newark struggling to keep itself above water before the twin tsunamis of economic stagnation and government austerity came crashing down.  Not to mix metaphors, but Newark is the canary in the proverbial coal mine, and its fate ought to be seen as a harbinger for what's to come across the country.

Although the economy is no longer in free fall, as it was in 2008-2009, any recovery that has happened since then has been seen by the wealthy, not by the majority.  Low wages and high unemployment are leading more and more people to desperation.  On top of that, the response by government in the midst of such want has been to slash, rather than raise social spending.  That austerity was held off for awhile by the 2009 stimulus' aid to state governments, but since Christie's coming to power in 2010, the state has slashed money to poorer cities, which has meant cutbacks in police for Newark and Trenton.  Not surprisingly, crime and murder have jumped up in those places.  Of course, most of the state's suburban population could hardly care less about the fate of black and brown people in places like Newark and Trenton, and will happily take a tax break and ignore the sight of blood on streets they'd never drive down in a million years.

New Jersey's austerity mirrors that in the nation at large.  For three years now, since the Tea Party midterm of 2010, deficit reduction has trumped stimulus and relief.  Republicans in Congress have largely gotten their way, evidenced by the fact that many food stamp recipients and the long term unemployed are about to lose their benefits.  The bill for such negligence is finally coming due, and continued austerity will only make it worse.  As a nation, we have decided to respond to a hopeless economic situation by making things even worse for the poor.  For three years people have pretended that this won't have any consequences, they won't be able to pretend that much longer.  I just wonder if when the death tolls and misery start to skyrocket in poor communities, anyone outside of them will care.

Leaving The Ironbound

After four years of living in this neighborhood part time, and two and a half years full time, I am moving out of the Ironbound.  This is primarily because wife and I need more space, now that we have two kids.  I think over the last year our cramped living environment, complete with a needy cat and barky dog, has been making us a little crazy.  We are moving into a house in Maplewood this week, and are doing so with a mix of excitement and elegy.

On the latter point, the Ironbound is a special place, and hard to leave.  By leaving here, I feel that in a way, I am moving back to America.  In so many respects Newark is not America, but a place abandoned by America and left for dead.  While the Ironbound is less economically devastated than other parts of Newark, its immigrant population and culture make it a place truly apart.  Portuguese and Spanish are more commonly heard on the streets than English, and I stick out like a sore thumb.  However, knowing that there was no way I was going to fit in here took a lot of pressure off of me.  People are friendly in a genuine manner that still exists in Europe and South America but is absent in this country, where a dagger seems to sit behind so many smiles.  More than the custard pastries, salted cod, Brazilian barbecue, roast chicken, and cheap and tasty Portuguese table wines, it is the manner and way of being in this neighborhood that I will miss the most.

Posts on this blog might be fewer and shorter in coming days because of this move.  This may well be an opportunity to change the blog, because its title will no longer be applicable.  In any case, expect some more reflections on the Ironbound, Newark, and the importance of place.

Will Newark Benefit from all the Philip Roth Birthday Hoopla?

I love Newark, and I love one of its most famous sons, Philip Roth.  With his 80th birthday next week, there will be some events here in Brick City drawing in Roth fans from all over the world, giving my town one of its few positive moments to shine.  These include a bus tour of local spots mentioned in his books, a photo display on Roth's life at the public library, an academic conference, and an event at the Newark Museum where Roth himself will speak.  The latter event is invite-only, and the conference will be closed to the public.

While I am sure that Mr. Roth wants to guard his privacy, and that the assembled scholars are only following the usual academic conference protocol, something doesn't feel right.  I can't help but to wonder whether the participants are keeping modern day Newark, not the thriving industrial city of the 1940s described in Roth's novels, at arm's length.  Will those who take the bus tour simply gawk at the urban decay they are bound to see, and not consider how deindustrialization and institutionalized racism have harmed this place?  Will they get out of their buses and interact with the people who live here today?  Will they stop into one of the city's many fine local eateries for a bite to eat, and perhaps some conversation?  Somehow I think not.

Those coming to downtown Newark for the big events probably won't be venturing much into the surrounding neighborhoods at all.  Despite the new construction and growing affluence of Newark's downtown, there are clues aplenty that the city still struggles.  For instance, those who go to the beautiful public library to see the photo exhibit will see signs notifying patrons that the library does not have sufficient funds to acquire new books.  Worse yet, the main library now must close on Sunday, and the branch libraries are not open at all on the weekends.  Newark has nurtured more than its share of prominent writers; Amiri Baraka was also raised here.  How many more great authors can this city produce if its children don't have access to books?

I only hope that the Roth fans who come here learn something about the city as it is, not as it was. I also hope that if they truly do love books and want to honor the city of Roth's birth, that they make some donations to the local libraries.

Thoughts on Sandy, Now that My Internet is Back

I should start by saying that I've been incredibly lucky and fortunate so far.  Here on Ferry Street, we only lost power for a day, and today I got internet and phone back.  Our local grocery stores are not running out of food, our water is still potable, and we spent the weekend before the storm stocking up on food, bottled water, gas, baby formula, and rum, grenadine, and limes (for making hurricanes, natch.)  I have yet to go back to work, but I am dreading what it will mean to get across the Hudson without train service.  I have a feeling that a two hour bus ride awaits me tomorrow or Monday.  That said, it beats what people on the Gulf Coast went through after Katrina, and the devastation that's been wrought on the on the Jersey shore.

Of course, it's easy to feel lucky today.  When shit was going down, I was pretty damn scared.  Our oven started making this strange popping noise from the fearsome gusts of wind shooting air up the vent.  The wind was messing with our building's fire alarm, which started going off for short bursts every ten minutes or so.  The thought of having to evacuate the apartment and go outside in the midst of winds so strong that our nineteenth century brick monolith of a building was actually shaking at the time filled me with more dread than I may have ever felt in my life.  Luckily the power went out at that point, so we figured we would just wait to smell smoke to tell if our building was burning down.  Needless to say, I didn't sleep much that night.  Our dog started bugging us at 3AM with the sound of howling wind outside, apparently in need of some comfort from us.

The next morning I took her out for a walk, and saw some of the more surreal images of my life.  Tree branches lay all over the place, those trees standing were stripped of leaves now clogging the storm sewer drains and covering the sidewalks.  Torn cables and wires twisted in the breeze, and the sky was the sick-gray color of a dead tube television, pregnant with danger.  No one was on the streets in a neighborhood that is usually bursting with activity at that hour.  As I was getting close to home, I noticed some strange-looking things on the sidewalk, and suddenly realized they were tiles torn from a nearby roof.  Coming home to an apartment without power, phone, or cell service, I felt immeasurable worry.

For our day without power we were lucky enough to have a camping lantern with a built-in radio.  It doesn't even need batteries, we hand-cranked it when we ran out of AAs.  We pretty much kept WNYC (New York public radio) on all day and night, and I think that for people without power, radio has been their lifeline.  I will be contributing during the next pledge drive, for sure.  For three days I wasn't able to see any pictures of the devastation, but could listen to residents describe it.  Seeing the images today has been a horrifying experience; a lot of those little towns on the shore aren't going to make it, I'm afraid.

We took a trip out to my in-laws in the 'burbs yesterday, and I was stunned to see the number of downed lines and uprooted trees.  The leafy streets were full of the sound of power generators, which seems to have driven the demand for gas to dangerous levels.  Today I went out with my family to a local grocery store, and we passed by a gas station along the way, which was frightening.  An acrid mood of angry tension and violence hung in the air, I don't know how long it will be until we start hearing of beatings and shootings over gas.  The storm is in many ways in illustration of the perils of the suburban way of life.  Here in my neighborhood stores are easy to walk to, we don't need gas to get around.  When power went out in the building, some neighbors came by to make sure we were okay; it's harder to fall through the cracks.  With fewer trees, it was a lot easier to restore electricity.  I only mention this because a lot of folks in suburban NJ think Newark is some kind of benighted hell-hole.

Last, I'd like to offer some perspective on Chris Christie's performance.  He's been highly competent, I will admit, and at least this time he is using his savy and confidence to help people in need, rather than to vilify teachers and pass budgets that give to the rich and take from the poor.  His competence, as opposed to the disorganized crackpot stupidity of the Tea Party crowd, is what makes him so dangerous when he sets his mind to putting his Reaganite policies into action.  He can actually get these things accomplished in a state that will be voting overwhelmingly for Barack Obama.  However, his actions have also revealed, yet again, his bullying nature and overriding desire for power.  I have the misfortune to have known many bullies in my life, and they tend to attack and humiliate people lower than them, and talk shit about those above them in their absence, but kiss their asses when they actually come around.  Christie fits the bill, with his public humiliation of the mayor of Atlantic City, and craven sycophancy towards the president, a man whom he has spent months publicly lambasting.  Christie also knows this is his biggest opportunity to increase his national profile, which is why he has not thrown a bone to Romney, a man who will block his route to the White House in 2016.  (That also helps explain his convention speech, which barely mentioned Mitt, and this after he was rumored to have rejected the vice-presidential nomination, predicting that Romney was a losing cause.)  Christie also has to run for governor next year, and needs to do a lot to convince people in this state that he is not a wacko conservative, which does not sit well in these parts.  I think he has actually intentionally thrown Romney under the bus.  You heard it here first.

The Highlight of My Commute Home to Newark

I may complain about having to endure Penn Station's grimy claustrophobia on a daily basis, but there are parts of my daily commute that I truly cherish.  Apart from finally arriving home to my family, I look forward to the view I get when I look north out of the window as the train crosses the Passaic River into Newark.  Now that fall is here, the sun sits lower in the sky as I arrive back home in Brick City, the sunlight bathing the downtown buildings in golden light and glittering on the river's surface.

On the left side of the mighty Passaic are the shiny downtown office buildings and civic structures like the New Jersey Performing Arts Center.  On the other bank are long rows of low-slung brown brick buildings that once housed the factories that built this country, stretching as far as the eye can see.  I look at this scene, which flashes by ever so briefly, and see a city that has endured worse than just about any other in this nation, but has managed to survive and hold its head up proudly.  I see such beauty in a town that so many still stereotype as a hellacious example of urban squalor run amok, a place whose reputation is such that when people in these parts ask where I live and I tell them Newark their eyes widen and their mouths go silent.

I have a similar bodily reaction as I cross the bridge each day, but my wide eyes and quiet tongue are the result of awe in the face of true beauty.  I see it in a city that the rest of this state and this nation had stabbed in the back, thrown in the gutter, and left for dead.*  I think of my own luck as a broken-down professor defeated by his profession who was plucked off the reject pile by a wonderful high school.  One man's trash is another man's treasure, I guess, and just as I am happy to have been saved from the refuse pile, I appreciate the rough splendor of a place that so many others wish to demean.

*Little known fact: a great deal of the mayhem during the events of 1967 was perpetrated by National Guard troops, not Newarkers.

Why I Like Living in the Ironbound

Editor's Note: Although my neighborhood gives its name to this blog, I really haven't written about it that much.  I figure it's time to talk about why I live here and why I think it suits me.

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The fact that I live and love the Ironbound and want to stay here would seem pretty unlikely on the surface.  This is a crowded urban neighborhood in Newark where a majority of its residents are native speakers of Spanish or Portuguese, with immigrants hailing from Brazil, Portugal, Ecuador, Spain, Uruguay (I've seen them celebrating in the streets after big soccer victories), Mexico, Peru, and elsewhere.  I am a very tall, pale, red-haired guy from a small town in Nebraska.  Needless to say, I stick out a little bit.

I came to settle here because of my wife, who has been living in this neighborhood for over a decade, although she was born and grew up in other New Jersey towns.  We keep talking about places where we want to buy a home, but I just can't see myself living in another place.  This is a unique place, and one where I think we both feel at home because it is so unlike the mainstream of American life, where my wife and I feel very uncomfortable.  There's also the added bonus that since I am so unlike the vast majority of my neighbors, I never have to worry about "fitting in," because there's no way that will ever happen.  As someone who tried and failed miserably at fitting in growing up, it's wonderful to be relieved of that pressure.

The places where a person of my background is "supposed" to live have never felt right to me. I find the suburbs to be boring, culturally dead, and full of the kind of people I spent my adolescence hoping I would never have to talk to again once I left home.  On the other hand, the type of urban neighborhoods where a lot of educated folks like ourselves settle don't suit me, whether it be their ridiculous prices, unbearable pretentiousness, or gentrified artificiality.  The Ironbound has become more prosperous in the last few years, and I fear the onset of gentrification, both for the livelihoods of my neighbors, but also for my own petty tastes.  (Not very important in the grand scheme of things, I know.)

The Ironbound just suits my sensibilities more; I suspect because I grew up lower-middle class and prefer high-quality lowbrow pleasures over bourgeois luxuries.  The Ironbound compares very favorably to much trendier places.  I don't want to get pastries at a cupcake shop, I want to go to the corner Portuguese bakery.  I don't want a liquor store that has all kinds of overpriced single malt scotches, I want a place that sells inexpensive yet delectable bottles of Spanish table wine.  I don't want to eat froo-froo "fusion" food served by cooler-than-thou waiters, I want giant skewers of meat barbecued Brazilian style.  I don't want chain fast food, I want tacos wrapped in corn tortillas where you can taste the lard.  The Ironbound feels like a totally different place than either suburbia, or the many Portlandias and bobo havens sprouting in America's big cities.

The Ironbound has always been a place apart, and remains so today.  It has long been a neighborhood of immigrants, first Germans, then Italians, then Portuguese, and now from all over Latin America.  In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Newark grew and flourished as a city of factories, foundries, tanneries, and breweries, and the Ironbound (named for the railroad tracks that form its borders) was where many of them were located.  That's a romantic way of saying it.  Philip Roth, born and raised in the more residential Weequiac section of Newark, referred to it as an "industrial slum" in his novel Nemesis, set in his home city in the 1940s.  Located on the far side of downtown, it often seems cut off from the rest of the city, and even the world since the river, railroad tracks, and the New Jersey Turnpike all form walls like those of medieval cities of yore. The Ironbound sits on low ground next to the winding Passaic River, and still floods with regularity during rainstorms.  For that reason, Mayor Cory Booker had his headquarters at a diner down the street from me during Hurricane Irene to be closer to the worst-hit areas.

The Ironbound's isolation and industrial nature might very well have protected it, however, from the misguided urban policies of the postwar period.  It is maybe the only part of Newark to not have been subjected to the upsetting process of urban renewal.  No neighborhoods and tenements were razed to build freeways and housing projects here, and it was left pretty much as is.  In fact, the Ironbound represents everything that postwar urban planners detested.  They wanted to separate residential, commercial, and industrial parts of cities into different spaces.  Here in the Ironbound I live above a bakery and a large iron goods warehouse sits less than a block away on a residential street. The buildings are defiantly old and above the streets you see massive tangles of wires because they were never put below ground.  None of it is laid out how the experts advised, but it is so much more vibrant and alive than many urban areas in the rest of America because the streets are the people's front yards, not just something to be driven on.  My neighborhood pretty much proves the Corbusier-inspired destroyers of traditional neighborhoods wrong, just one of many reasons why I like living here.

Neighborhoods are more than masonry and asphalt, they're really a collective of people.  Since so many people here come from outside of the United States, there's less of the crass stupidity of American life on display.  Without fail, when I've been hassled by someone in the streets, it's been by a suburban soccer fan in the neighborhood before going to a game at Red Bulls Stadium across the river.  There's a real friendliness, too.  Often, when I am walking our dog, little kids will run up to pet her and ask me questions about her.  Two winters ago, after a major blizzard hit, I was trying to dig my wife's car out of a snow drift with a piddly garden shovel, since that was the only kind I could find at the corner store.  Seeing my problem, the guy who was shoveling the walk of the cafe across from where the car was parked pitched in with his snow shovel, and then let me borrow it once he was done with the walk.  That kindness reflects the true spirit of this place, a spirit I wish more of this increasingly self-centered, vulgar, and materialistic nation possessed.

In Praise of Urban Neighborhoods

Years of experience and living in a variety of places, states, and countries has taught me that no matter what region or place I live in, I will be happy as long as I live in a distinct neighborhood. Living in a real neighborhood, like I do now, allows me to walk to go grocery shopping, to be a regular at local establishments, and to feel like I am a human being amongst other human beings.

The beauty and meaning of urban neighborhoods was brought home to me in two very different ways this weekend. I drove to Pittsburgh to visit some old friends, and was astounded by the city's beauty and livability. It was a city on a human scale. Built on valleys and steep hillsides of three rivers, the city naturally divides itself into unique neighborhoods. Its daunting geography may very well have saved Pittsburgh from the horrors of "urban renewal." While I was gone in Pittsburgh, I got the sad and shocking news that a building in my neighborhood burned down in a massive four alarm blaze. (Luckily, nobody died, and only a few were hurt.) The fire left fifty-eight people homeless, and in a testament to the bonds of community, money is being raised locally to help the victims. Two local businesses were consumed by the blaze, and as sad as that is, it is worth noting that people feel a loss. The same would probably not be said if it were a McDonald's that met the same fate.

The American Way of Life over the last seventy years or so has been one big massive assault on neighborhoods. The new cities that have sprung up in that time are built around the automobile, and those cities that came into maturity before the auto age have been gutted and dismembered by the mad zeal to accommodate the internal combustion engine. In the process, countless neighborhoods were demolished, and the roads helped spur the seemingly endless process of suburban sprawl. Only the recent housing collapse could stop the metastisization of the subdivisions.

Suburbanization allows for tight-knit neighborhoods only in rare cases. Usually it creates a world of people segmented into their own private little boxes, and where there aren't even sidewalks to walk on. I know from my experiences and those of others that travelling by foot or bike in America's sprawl zones isn't just difficult, it often means being heckled by assholes driving by in their cars. Increasingly, Americans are tied down to their homes and do little outside of them. To cite one striking example, kids don't play outside with other kids in their neighborhood like they used to, but are more likely to stay indoors or participate in structured activities. I will admit that there are suburban neighborhoods out there with real community, but the very geography and culture of suburbia work very hard to prevent them from blossoming.

Believe it or not, the prophets of the current American Way of Life had high ideals, rather than visions of shopping malls in their heads when they pushed the freeways and "urban renewal." One of the first advocates of the "radiant city," the Swiss modernist architect and city planner Le Corbusier, even proposed demolishing central Paris and replacing it with modern high-rises surrounded by parks and highways. (This was the so-called Voison Plan, one of the greatest assaults on humanity from where I stand.) Plans such as this were intended to liberate city-dwellers from the noise, confusion, disorganization, lack of air, and overcrowding that often accompany urban life. Who wouldn't want modern convenience in the midst of beautiful park space?

As is usually the case, it was the poor who got to be the guinea pigs in the experiment practiced via postwar public housing high rises. The people who were warehoused in these structures lost access to neighborhood living, with the inevitable alienating effects. A few patches of green were not going to make up for that. The white middle class, on the other hand, sprawled out in the ever-expanding suburban hinterlands. That phenomenon too had been predicted in advance with much fanfare and optimism. At the New York World's Fair in 1939, the most popular exhibit was Futurama, sponsored by General Motors. It predicted a future of megahighways and integration of urban and rural space. It was hardly surprising, of course, that GM portrayed the automobile as key to a liberated future. In a related fashion, the central exhibit of the entire fair was a diorama called Democracity that imagined a modern "radiant city" full of parks and bereft of neighborhoods. The imagined everyday "man" of the script worked in the center among the high rises and drove through landscaped parkways to his house at the edge. In these visions the neighborhood was absent. Like traffic, noise, and crowding, it was just another annoying and messy facet of urban life to be liberated from. I am sure that I am not alone in thinking that our current American Way of Life has not brought what it promised at its birth.

I actually feel strangely liberated living in a place where I can't help walking the streets as part of my daily routine. It's much more fun walking the dog when other people are taking their children out on their post-work/pre-dinner errands and the little ones light up with delight and yell out "bow wow!" when they see my dog. (She likes kids, and sometimes allows groups of kids to pet her while she sits still for them.) If I need to grab a little something at the grocery store, there is no ordeal of driving someplace else just to get a carton of milk, I simply walk three blocks to the local supermarket.

I also get plenty of free entertainment. Due to the cosmopolitan nature of where I live, international soccer tournaments bring a lot of fun. Right after Uruguay won the Copa America, a bunch of people wearing blue and white and carrying the Uruguayan flag converged on my corner, had a little party and sang their national anthem, and quietly went home. What struck me most was that practically everyone, from the revelers to the police who showed up to the bemused bystanders, was smiling. How can you beat a totally spontaneous moment of happiness on a Sunday afternoon? I'll take that over ready access to an Appleby's every time.