Hi, this is an announcement for Newarkology’s first walking tour since last October.
On Sunday, August 10th, join us for a walking tour of MLK Blvd (formerly High Street) with a bonus walk back through Lincoln Park and Downtown. High Street is one of Newark’s most historic streets. Come and learn about the fascinating [...]
The New Urbanism and the Communitarian Trap (PDF)
Great piece from the Harvard Design Magazine, Winter/Spring 1997, Number 1. New Urbanism is the model that many US cities are attempting to adopt to make sense of their post-industrial communities.
While dipping a toe into the ocean of material about urban design, I was surprised at [...]
The New Jersey School of Architecture is requesting artist submissions for an upcoming exhibition of the Newark Westinghouse building. The Westinghouse building, which once housed the early industrial work of Thomas Edison, is being razed to make way for the city’s plans to build a transit village in Downtown Newark, across from Broad Street [...]
If you saw in this week’s Ledger that the Forest Hill Walking Tour was going on today, well, you’ve still got another chance.
The Ledger announcement was a misprint—the tour will actually take place Saturday, May 31.
The Daily Newarker, on the other hand, got it right the first time.
Evidently, Newark had the most centralized downtown in the nation, making it extremely fragile and debilitating. The businesses, however, held a firm belief that people would always bring prosperity to Downtown, no matter where they lived, as long as accessibility was provided. In the above short period of ten years, as the figures indicate, American people’s understanding of “accessibility” shifted drastically from mass transit (e.g., trolley cars) to their beloved private motor cars. This meant not only could they drive to Downtown Newark, but also they had to find a place to park. As Miller McClintock of Harvard told the National Association of Building Owners in 1926, it would not profit a central business district with even the most convenient arteries of travel if there was not sufficient parking. After Raymond Boulevard was created above the old Morris Cannel in 1930, the corner near Military Park turned into the most congested spot and, a few years later, came the corner of Broad, Orange, and Bridge Streets. After the 1970s, the deadly congestion moved to Penn Station.
Upon those who step into the same rivers, different and again different waters flow.
—Heraclitus
Last Sunday, I went to the Grove Street Cemetery to look for the resting place of Louis Danzig. With a cemetery administrator’s instructions, I found only five, perhaps unrelated, Danzig’s. However, I was captured by the aura of hundreds of [...]
Revolution ‘67, the award-winning documentary about Newark’s 1967 “summer of discontent” is now available on DVD for sale for $26.96 at www.Revolution67.com. See the trailer below.
TDN regulars may recall how this film brought clarity and stirred controversy about the events of July 1967. Marylou and Jerome Bongiorno, native Newarkers, are fantastic people whose [...]
The demolition of the Westinghouse building is moving eastward slowly along Orange Street towards the former site of WJZ, a landmark in the American broadcasting history. According to Tommy Cowan, the radio station’s first announcer, “My Little Gypsy Sweet Heart” was the first show aired in 1921.
Memories are roses in the rain.
Days [...]
Walking back from the Broad Street Train Station this morning, I saw a Rutgers student unroll her car window, toss out a pile of banana peels, Burger King wrappings, and school catalogs and testing schedules, and fall back to her before-class nap in her parked car on University Avenue. I picked up all her [...]
NJ Voices: Pulling plug on a city’s past
Mark DiIonno provides an obituary for one of Newark’s oldest—and most infamous—downtown buildings, the Westinghouse factory.
“This area of Essex County was a triangle of American electrical component factories,” said John T. Cunningham, whose book “Made in New Jersey” documents the state’s industrial growth. “Westinghouse had a number [...]
