Newark in the Early 20th Century:
Sweet Success Turns Sour
Honors Section
Professor Barr
Review of Major Themes: Urban
Changes in the Early 20th c.
 Migration: Cities swelled with internal and external migrants in search
of work.
 Transportation Changes:
– Car and truck allowed for new mobility
– Wealthy begin leaving inner city.
 Zoning:
– Rationalized econ. activity [nuisance zoning]
– Allowed wealthy in suburbs to keep out poor [fiscal zoning] and factories
and other businesses that might lower property values [nuisance zoning].
– Effect: rich paid less for more land and more services in suburbs.
 Annexation
– Allowed population to expand in city.
– Rationalized inter-urban competition.
– Allowed rich to stay and maintain property taxes.
Newark’s Problems at Turn of
Century: Themes
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Massive housing shortage.
Little annexation of suburbs.
Flight of business class.
Rising Expenditures due to:
– Population influx.
– Increased need for city services: education, police, fire, etc.
 Rising tax rates on land:
– Less income from rich.
– Higher tax rates cause more flight.
 Mixed-use zoning in Central Ward.
 Lax pollution controls.
Newark’s Housing Shortage
 Newark experienced a terrible housing shortage
between 1890 and 1920.
 Population growth far outstripped developable
land (much land was marshland).
 City did not expand to keep up with pop. growth.
 By 1915 “Residential possibilities of Newark has
nearly been exhausted.”
 1919: b/c large pop. influx, City Commission
allocated funds to erect a tent colony.
Newark’s Housing Shortage
 Newark was lower middle class due to industrial base.
 No wealthy nds, mostly working class housing (flight of
wealthy to suburbs).
 Poor could not afford to move to suburbs, while rich moved
out of city.
 Lax pollution controls allowed housing to be side by side
polluting factories.
 Made rich more likely to flee and poor had to live next to
pollution.
 In 1880s there were 10,000 cesspools in Newark: each a
breeder of disease, sickness and death.
Jackson (2000)
Pollution
 Newark historically allowed polluting industries to coexist
in proximity to residential neighborhoods.
 Leather goods and tanning, paint and varnish
manufacturing, and brewing caused enormous pollution
problems.
 Industrial pollution increased in the 20th century due to
the complexity and size of chemical plants.
 The Passaic River eventually made it to the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency's list of the most
endangered waterways in the nation, owing to cancercausing dioxins produced as a by-product of the
pesticide plants which released these wastes directly
into the river.
Source: http://njreporter.org/NJR200204/njr_revitalization2.html
Pollution and Sewage
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By 1870, there were only 12 miles of sewers.
Following the Civil War, sewers were built on the outskirts of the city as real
estate promoters acquired cheap land in the hope of attracting new residents to
the area.
Public improvements “ran mad...Streets were laid out in pasture lands where
they would not be needed for years to come...Sewers were built in streets that
were not graded, and while all this was going on, the center of the city was
neglected.”
For a city with the largest and densest population in the state, a city attracting
more and more factories and warehouses, a city building outward every year,
the pace of sewer construction was woefully inadequate.
Newark’s Common Council pursued a policy to keep taxes low and avoid
public debt in an effort to attract capital and labor to the city. While this policy
did have the desired effect of promoting industrial growth, it bankrupt the city
with regard to all public improvements.
As a result, sewers were financed by assessing all property owners to be
connected. Consequently, private sewers accounted for almost 12% of all
sewer miles by 1910. While private financing allowed for new sewer
construction, it precluded the possibility of designing an integrated system. It
also ensured that sewers were built in only the more affluent areas, leaving the
poorest and most overcrowded areas without means of sanitation.
By 1919 Newark had sewered over 95%of its improved area, and its mortality rate had
dropped nearly 60%.
Source: http://www.ci.newark.nj.us/Water/sewerhistory.htm
Newark’s Changing Economy
 Depression era Newark was already slowly losing factories
and industrial jobs in the 1920s with a shift to a white-collar
economy.
 Banking, insurance, county government,
communications, and transportation became the
dominant corporate employers (Public Service,
New Jersey Bell Telephone, and Prudential for
example).
 Rapid expansion of mass transit and the frenzied
construction of new highways, the modern pattern of
suburban residency (in restricted white communities) and
commutation was already a fixture by the mid-1920s as
tens of thousands of white, suburban commuters streamed
in and out daily.
Source: Schwartz: “Roth, Race and Newark” and Stellhorn (1982)
Newark’s Changing Economy cont.
 No longer did workers, owners, and financiers live together
in the city: the ruling elite and wealthy professionals
vacated the city almost completely -- moving to upscale
Essex county bedroom suburbs or down the Jersey shore
to Spring Lake (Irish) or Deal (Jewish).
 In 1925, the Chamber of Commerce magazine, The
Newarker, for example, could review this pattern and claim
'No one lives in Newark.'
 By 1925 more than 40% of attorney’s who worked in
Newark lived in suburbs. By 1947 it was 63%: 1963, 78%
 By 1932 >86% of officers and board member of Newark
Chamber of Commerce lived outside Newark.
 In general due to automobile: which segregated people
and neighborhoods by income, race and lifestyle.
Zoning and Newark
 In the Central Ward where almost all of the landlords, store
owners, and tavern owners were white, the area continued
to be zoned as industrial allowing for the highest population
densities, the worst city services, the highest crime, and
the jumble of tenements, stores, factories, and stables that
created the ghetto in the first place.
 Newark's population grew from 250,000 in 1900 to 450,000
by the 1930 census. With its city boundaries rigidly fixed
and with almost 20 percent of its land uninhabitable, the
eighteenth largest city in the country was the third most
densely populated, and nowhere more so than the central
ward.
Source: Schwartz: “Roth, Race and Newark”
Newark and Zoning
 By contrast, the newer residential districts were
developed within residential zoning restrictions
and thoughtful urban planning that kept
businesses on the main streets, single to fourfamily houses on the side streets.
 In a 1927 front-page article on real estate
developer Morris Rachlin, The Jewish Chronicle
included background on his development in 1906
of Clinton Hill (some 45 acres and the construction
of 152 houses) and said how it was a model of
residential planning.
Source: Schwartz: “Roth, Race and Newark”
Annexation in Newark
 Mayor of Newark in 1900 “East Orange, Vailsburg,
Harrison, Kearny, and Belleville would be
desirable acquisitions. By an exercise of discretion
we can enlarge the city from decade to decade
without unnecessarily taxing the property within
our limits, which has already paid the cost of
public improvements.”
 But for some reason, Newark delayed and by the
1930s it was too late: Newark started to turn down
and wealthy suburbs, rather seeing joining Newark
as benefit saw it as a liability.
Annexation in Newark cont.
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1903-1911: A plan for Greater Newark developed with projected annexation of
much of Essex and Hudson counties and parts of Bergen and Union counties,
including the city of Elizabeth.
Newark sought to become the fourth largest city in the United States, ahead of
St. Louis in population, manufacturing, banking and property valuation.
The strategic impediment to Newark’s annexation of territory depended on the
relative sophistication and maturity of targeted towns’ infrastructure.
Elizabeth’s Water company (founded 1854), drew on the Elizabeth River to fill
two reservoirs. In 1889 the company operated forty-six miles of water mains,
serving 35,000 individuals. Its capacity was sufficient for foreseeable future
development in the eyes of its directors.
In addition, Elizabeth had railroad service since 1836 connecting it to interior
towns like Somerville as well as New York City ferries. Its internal street railway
dated from 1888. Electricity arrived in 1888 and the telephone followed a few
years later. Highways to adjacent towns by 1890 boasted macadam or stone
pavers, an advantage for "wheeling clubs" and their cycling members. The city
circulated seven newspapers in 1890.
A strong city infrastructure was the key to the city’s independence and
progressive spirit in the early years of the 20th century and a defense against
Newark annexation.
Annexation in Newark cont.
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1869: Newark added Clinton
1871: Woodside
1897: Rest of Clinton township
1905: Vailsburg
The failure to annex more due to was poor
municipal leadership
 During 1890s Kearny and Harrison were willing to
join, but political leaders delayed and towns had
grown so that did not want to cede power to
Newark.
Newark Development cont.
 In summary, on the eve of the mass Black migration from
the South, Newark was experiencing great stress from its
rapid rise as an industrial powerhouse and its decisions
regarding zoning, pollution and annexation.
 By the 1920s, Newark was mostly a lower middle class,
immigrant city, suffering from a tremendous housing
shortage, large pollution problems, and rising taxes and
expenditures.
 As shown in map (handed out), Newark by 1910 was more
a city of ethnic enclaves than coherent city.
 Nonetheless, because of its industrial economic base
Newark remained a tremendous draw to Southern blacks,
especially during WWI, after the drop off of European
immigration.