CITY WIDE – The 5 Wards of Newark http://thefivewards.com Thu, 09 Feb 2017 21:39:30 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.7.3 http://thefivewards.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/cropped-H-1-32x32.jpg CITY WIDE – The 5 Wards of Newark http://thefivewards.com 32 32 Between the Lines http://thefivewards.com/2016/12/18/between-the-lines/ http://thefivewards.com/2016/12/18/between-the-lines/#respond Sun, 18 Dec 2016 08:03:30 +0000 http://thefivewards.com/?p=48862

Between the Lines

By Carrie Stetler and Akintola Hanif

The stigma of Newark breeds its own vicious cycle. Racist stereotypes and negative media coverage instill fear. Outsiders stay away or limit themselves to the downtown comfort zones deemed safe for visitors and commuters.

Because they avoid the city, or see such a small part of it, they have little reason to question Newark’s public image as a place where out-of-towners get shot if they venture a few blocks in the wrong direction—despite the fact that crimes against visitors are rare.  

Portrayals of Newark as the ultimate suburban nightmare are so pervasive they were deployed in an ad campaign by South Jersey Republicans in November.  “If you don’t want  Burlington County to turn into THIS part of North Jersey….vote for the people who make our county a special place to live,’’ urged local GOPs. A map with a red push pin through Newark illustrated the message.

In response, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and the NJ Black Mayors Alliance for Social Justice issued a statement. “The not so subtle message is that Newark and its suburbs are all that white voters fear in a community: Black, Latino, Poor, Dangerous, and Blighted.’’

Somewhere in between the hype pegging Newark as the next Brooklyn and news briefs on the latest killing, complete with updated body counts  (“This is the 67th homicide in the city this year”), are the communities that comprise Newark’s five wards.

The lines between them are artificial—bureaucratic designations that govern voting districts and trash collection. But they are also an essential part of what it means to be from Newark. “It’s about people having an allegiance to their communities and where they were born and raised,” says Baraka. “There is a long history of attachment.’’

His father, Amiri Baraka, renowned author, activist, and devout Newarker, put it this way in his 1984 autobiography: “….Despite our various lives somehow there was a collective passion, a collective life, generated by our presence together on those streets, in that playground, and in that school….they needed to be talked about. Why? Because they had something to do with it – the shaping, the answering – of the question, How did you get to be you?”

The dehumanizing clichés surrounding Newark do something more insidious than drive people away. They help ensure that visitors view the city through a narrow, distorted lens. The reality of Newark, in all of its dimensions and complexity, and the soul and identity of Newark residents, are endlessly obscured.

Newark is 26 square miles, smaller than many cities, but it is incredibly diverse. There are golf courses,  mosques, mansions, lofts, immigrants from Peru, Sri Lanka, Africa and the Ukraine. It’s also home to a thriving art scene, several college campuses, and an ever-growing business district, as well as city and community cultural institutions.

The people of Newark know that there is beauty and dignity amid struggle—and that not everyone is struggling. Even in communities where violence is pervasive, oftentimes around the corner are neighborhoods that are calm and stable. Newark is filled with light, depth, talent and resilience. But there aren’t many platforms for residents to tell their own stories and see themselves and their communities reflected in all their diversity.

HYCIDE | The 5 Wards is that place.

   

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Long Division http://thefivewards.com/2016/12/18/longdivision/ http://thefivewards.com/2016/12/18/longdivision/#respond Sun, 18 Dec 2016 00:59:41 +0000 http://artoholiks.net/5wards/?p=48354
1874 view of Newark, looking west

Long Division

By Carrie Stetler

Newark’s ward system was created in 1836, after the city became one of the most important industrial centers in the nation.  A population explosion transformed Newark, suddenly filled with immigrant laborers, and the creation of wards was viewed as a way to run it more effectively and impose law and order.

“Do you wish to have an efficient watch  protect your wives and daughters from insults in the streets?” a newspaper editorial of the era asked rhetorically. “Do you wish to have disturbers of the peace, riotous houses, and all other offending against good order brought to speedy justice?”

Officials divided the city into East, West, North and South.

As the population redistributed itself and political factions grabbed for territory, the wards were subdivided, and subdivided again. By 1871, there were 15, although two years later they were reduced to nine. In 1906, they ballooned again to 16.

In 1954, Newark returned to the original ward system in an attempt to combat corruption and patronage. “Political candidates had a lot of ethnic loyalties and would  dole out jobs and contracts to people who were loyal to them,’’ said John Johnson Jr., a Newark historian and assistant professor of history at St. Peter’s University in Jersey City.  “There was a lot of corruption in Jersey in general, and a push for charter change and a mayor and council form of government rather than commissioner system.”

Ward politicans reflected the predominant ethnicities within their borders: the North Ward was largely Italian, the South Ward had a large Jewish population and the East and West Wards were mostly Irish and Slavic.  But in 1954, a fifth ward was created, the Central Ward, home to many of the city’s Black residents. “It created a Black voting block and so people were able to vote for someone who represented their interests,’’ said Johnson Jr., who grew up in the South Ward.

The designation resulted in the first Black ward leader, Councilman Irvine Turner, namesake of Irvine Turner Boulevard, which runs from the Central through the South Wards.

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Decisive Moment http://thefivewards.com/2016/12/16/decisive-moment-2/ http://thefivewards.com/2016/12/16/decisive-moment-2/#respond Fri, 16 Dec 2016 12:54:14 +0000 http://thefivewards.com/?p=49142

Decisive Moment

Words and Images by Manuel Acevedo

The Newark where I was born and raised was a city on the verge. After the uprisings in 1967 and the Puerto Rican Riots (or rebellions) in 1974, the city seemed to hover on the imminent edge of disaster, danger, change, and triumph. Through street photography, I gained trust in my ability to capture it all. In order for me to make a photograph, however, I had to determine the “decisive moment” (to quote Henry Cartier-Bresson), defined as that sliver of time significant to an event just before or after the next happening. For me, the decisive moment continues to represent the precise organization of form and the framing of a picture that breathes life into my images.

My first photo essay was the Wards of Newark 1982-1987, a portrait series that captured the city during a time of industrial and residential abandonment. In 1981, I was an amateur photographer—a naïve 17-year-old living in the Vailsburg section of the West Ward on Brookdale Avenue, off South Orange Avenue. My parents, Manuel Sr. and Edith, raised five children. We moved to a five family three-story home shortly after my father’s stint as a numbers runner—in Spanish, un bolitero. We were one of very few Boricua (Puerto Rican) families on the block, which was a cultural mosaic representing the African diaspora, Irish, Italian and Ukrainian descendants. My sense of both demography and geography was limited to Newark, and through frequent travel to visit family in Aguada, P.R., until I was thirteen-years-old.

I was accepted to Newark’s Arts High for my junior year—the same year I was recruited into the Newark chapter of the Guardian Angels , a growing organization of unarmed citizens originally created to combat crime and violence in the New York City subway system. In addition to photographing the Angels, I began to make images in my home and neighborhood; children playing in the streets, my family in the kitchen.

On December 31, 1981 I received a call at home from Chris Taylor, NJ chapter leader and spokesman of the Guardian Angels about Frank Melvin—the first Guardian Angel to be killed by a police officer. He was fatally shot while on patrol at the scene of a burglary on a tavern rooftop near Newark’s Dayton Street projects. I photographed a protest organized by Curtis Sliwa (the Angels’ founder) and Chris and held at Newark’s City Hall. The Guardian Angels were holding up signs demanding a special investigation. It was rumored that the officer who fired the fatal shot and the fallen Angel were close acquaintances. At that time I captured a few memorable images, including one photograph of mirrored sunglasses worn by a fellow member. I framed the composition tightly. It depicted the Angels in formation, marching in front of the hall. Soon after, I borrowed a super-wide angle lens from my art teacher, Mr. K. I wanted to harness the power of a photograph, juxtaposing the human figure against a mild or wild urban background.

To some degree, I took advantage of my participation in the Guardian Angels for greater access to Newark streets and less familiar areas in New York. I had an intuitive sense of injustice and the run down, blighted conditions in my home city, but the continued decline of resources and decaying conditions I witnessed in both Newark and New York City shed light on our shared experience.

The neighborhoods I frequented included well-kept small homes juxtaposed by large condemned properties existing side-by-side. The empty lots turned into overgrown fields with obvious footpaths created over time by residents navigating the abandoned terrain. Many derelict lots expanded throughout South Orange Avenue in both the Central and West Ward.

When I began shooting the Wards of Newark, it was called Newark People. I wasn’t attempting to be a journalist, but I created a photo journal of a special time and place that represented my daily life, routines, and shared conversations. I was diligent in my practice of walking the streets and shooting for days, weeks and months at a time. I spent countless hours with a camera strapped in my hand, driven by an ironic sense of urgency, given that there were only subtle changes in living conditions throughout the wards of Newark over the course of five years.

On Broad and Market Street, faces turned willfully towards my camera with interest and curiosity. People engaged with me, looking close-up and straight into the lens, revealing their complexities, challenges and secrets. The personalities ranged from vendors on the sidewalks, activists, politicians, artists, graffiti writers, jewelry hustlers in alleys, homeless in the parks, tired parents, sleeping babies, and teenagers cutting school, sampling what the streets had to offer.

By nature of time and place, I was a witness and contributor to the graffiti movement, as well. My identity as a street photographer and artist evolved very organically at a time when we were constructing hip-hop (but had no name for it) as an expression of the street. I was rarely without my bag of tools—camera, film, black book and pens—and moved seamlessly from one to the other. My street name was Prins NAM, which stands for No Apparent Motive. I was down with the NRG crew, which was started in the North Ward by Jstarr. He lived a short walk from Elliot Street School in a strong Caribbean neighborhood that was deceptively calm during the day and rowdy at night.

During one of my visits to Jstarr’s apartment, I had an opportunity to make his portrait. His bedroom/painting/music studio was inscribed with cryptic glyphs, symbols, and images that were reminiscent of ancient writings found on the hidden walls of sacred spaces. The overlapping of codes and ciphers were mesmerizing.

My focus shifted in the late 1980’s, early 90’s from portraiture to landscape—with a territorial imperative to reveal its neglected spaces, discarded parts and vacancies in the era of demolition. I began to visualize my Altered Sites project through drawing and photography, combining the two mediums and the latent possibilities of derelict spaces in Newark’s West, Central and North Wards. I drew on top of the photograph to transform the bleakness or under utilized landscapes into visionary architectural proposals such as sites for the discovery of children’s play or adaptations of Russian artist, Tatlin’s tower as bird structures.

These symbols of modernity and spirituality were never built however, and my vision wasn’t as real as the closing of Pabst Brewery in 1986, the willful neglect of the Bricks public housing, abandoned cemeteries, the demolition of beautiful churches and synagogues or the last homes standing on Prince Street that I recorded on film.

Thirty years later, I am bearing witness to Newark, once again, on the verge of transformation with the potential to alter the psychology of the city. The resurfaced landscape feels like my next cue to revisit the Altered Sites project. It’s time to propose projects that engage the local communities and the city at large, as residents await changes that reflect the city’s history with greater transparency and provide real opportunity for the people of Newark.

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