TOWN AND COUNTRY
Can Cory Booker make peace between Newark and the suburbs?

by Robert Wiener
NJJN Staff Writer

Each weekday morning rush hour, they file by the thousands off trains and buses. Hundreds of others clog highway exit ramps and city streets on their way to work at the high-rise offices on downtown Newark’s Broad Street and the mom-and-pop stores and services in each of the city’s wards.

Many of these commuters — black, white, and Latino, Christian, Muslim, and Jewish — have historical ties to New Jersey’s largest city that date back for decades.

Growing affluence on top of “white flight” sent many to relocate in the suburbs after Newark’s violent upheavals in 1967, which were touched off by the arrest of an African-American taxi driver and rumors of his death in police custody.

Some called it a riot, others, a rebellion. But after six days, 23 people were dead, 725 injured; property losses were estimated in the tens of millions of dollars, and Newark joined the list of U.S. cities on the critical list.

But through four decades, Newark is a city whose supporters never lost faith that it will regain its self-confidence as the state’s transportation hub, inner-city business mecca, and locus of culture and higher education.

To a significant extent, the 120,000 Jews in the city’s immediate suburbs and thousands more in counties beyond retain a stake in Newark, even if many no longer have physical or professional ties to its offices and neighborhoods.

Now, on the eve of Cory Booker’s July 1 inauguration as Newark’s 36th mayor, many leaders involved in the Jewish community have a sense that the city will be strengthening its relations with the suburbs and suburbanites who surround it.

“I think Cory Booker is aware enough to know that to help Newark he has to reach out to other communities, ethnically and geographically, more than has been done in the past,” said Jon Shure, president of NJ Policy Perspectives, a Trenton think-tank involved with state issues.

“I think the most important thing is that, rightly or wrongly, Booker’s image as a rising star with charisma and the ability to connect to a broad range of people is actually significant in terms of enabling suburbanites to understand what Newark is, and not just what its perception has historically been,” said Kenneth Zimmerman, executive director of the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice.

Zimmerman, who commutes daily from Montclair to his downtown office on Park Place, is a key player in the effort to provide more jobs for Newark residents. He said he views Booker’s assumption of power at city hall “as a very important moment of transition” after departing Mayor Sharpe James’ five terms holding the office.

Pat Sebold of Livingston, the vice president of the Essex County Board of Freeholders and an active member of the MetroWest Jewish community, said she believes Booker’s election “bodes well” for the city.

“The inspiration is there,” she said. “The expectation is there. Someday I think you’re going to see a reversal of the white flight after the riots 30 years ago.”

Vital to that reversal will be Booker’s ability to convince suburbanites — powerbrokers and everyday residents — that they have a stake in the city’s future.

“Newark is important to the suburbs beyond what the suburbs think,” said Shure. “It’s a transportation hub for the entire state, and if Newark works well, the entire state works well. There are trains, there are the highways, there is the port, there is the airport. Newark is too important to overlook, so it is in everybody’s interest that Newark function well.”

The major reason is the financial one, said Shure.

“I guess people should care about it, even if they don’t think they should care about it, if for no other reason than if it works well, it costs the rest of the state less money. Taxpayers all around the state are paying for what goes on in Newark. We want to protect that investment, as opposed to walk away from it,” he explained.

That means appreciating the headquarters of big businesses, from the 133-year-old Prudential Insurance Company to the 16-year-old telecommunications giant (and Jewish-owned) IDT, which stand tall on the Broad Street skyline just blocks away from the construction site of a new luxury apartment complex. At the same time, appreciating the importance of Newark is recognizing that its residents too must feel the benefits of economic development.

To Shure, one of Booker’s big tasks “is to get the economic benefits to where they are helping people in the neighborhoods, creating jobs for those people and developing the rest of the city.”

A study by the Institute for a Competitive Inner City reported in late 2004 that of the 147,000 jobs in Newark, some 110,000 — more than three of every four — were held by commuters.

Booker, who has listed among his priorities fighting crime and gang violence, could also address Newark’s image problems, Sebold said. Since 1997, when the glittering New Jersey Performing Arts Center off downtown Military Park opened, city boosters have been trying to attract suburbanites. And while some four million people have attended cultural events at NJPAC, the city still carries a stigma.

“I think racism is a big part of it,” said Sebold. “Some people tell me they wouldn’t do jury duty in Newark or go to NJPAC. They’re afraid. I tell them, ‘I go to Newark all the time. It’s not a problem.’”

Lawrence Goldman, president and CEO of NJPAC since 1989, said part of the center’s mission is “to create a reconnection between Newark and its suburbs and Newark and the rest of the state. Newark is its largest city and its cultural hub, the way London is England’s cultural hub and Paris is France’s.”

But he lamented that “some people in the suburbs have chosen to eschew, to avoid, the historic connection between the suburbs and Newark as a natural place of employment, of culture, of restaurants.”

Beyond the arts center, Goldman said, the NJ Symphony Orchestra, The Newark Museum and the university community — including the six schools of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, Rutgers-Newark, Essex County College, New Jersey Institute of Technology, and Seton Hall University School of Law — are helping to reforge that connection.

“We’ve all been working really hard to think of this as one organic metropolitan region,” Goldman.

Although capital construction and inner-city hiring programs were under way before the opening of NJPAC, Goldman said, much of it was “done with a kind of defensive fortress mentality.” Many of those economic development efforts, he said, included walled-off, high-rise office complexes “to keep people off the streets of Newark.”

“What makes cities great is the diversity of street life,” said Goldman, who lives in New York City. “An active 24/7 street life is what makes cities safe. Newark is getting to be more of that than it has been.”

Booker himself is a transplant from the suburbs, having grown up in Harrington Park before moving to a housing project in Newark, where he became a tenants’ rights advocate.

In between, he attended university at Stanford, Oxford, and Yale, where he dodged tacklers as an All-American football player as deftly as he cultivated friends in high places. Booker came to the attention of the Jewish community as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford. There he developed a friendship with media-savvy Rabbi Shmuley Boteach and eventually became head of Boteach’s L’Chaim Society, a Jewish social and debate club.

Back in the New York area, Booker drew the favorable attention of wealthy Democrats and others in his first run for mayor of Newark. Last year, longtime supporter Andrew Tisch of the Loews Corporation, former president of UJA-Federation of New York, held a fund-raiser for Booker at the Regency Hotel.

Those connections make him a formidable deal-maker, observers say, and a well-placed advocate for the city.

Goldman said he “is just getting to know Cory Booker, and from everything I know about him, I don’t think there is a mayor in the United States who has a better chance of healing or repairing this false chasm that has grown up between city and suburb.”

Past and present

For many Jews in the region with roots in Newark or homes in suburbs created by those who fled the city, the chasm between city and suburb is also one between past and present.

A bygone Newark holds a unique place for many Jews whose lineage dates back to a heyday that lasted from the 1920s — when the city had a thriving immigrant Jewish community of some 65,000 — until the mid-1960s.

It is enshrined in many works of the city’s best-known author, Philip Roth, who returned to Newark last October to be honored with a plaque and a street sign outside his Summit Avenue boyhood home.

But the legacy of Newark past is expressed in other ways — through synagogue field trips to the former homes of suburban congregations, through active membership in the alumni association of Weequahic High School (which, when Roth attended, was more than 80 percent Jewish), and even through memories of the ambiance and aromas that once pervaded the delis and appetizing stores on Chancellor Avenue.

Linda Forgosh, curator and outreach director of the Jewish Historical Society of MetroWest New Jersey, said many of those memories motivate suburbanites who remain active philanthropists at such prominent institutions as NJPAC, The Newark Museum, and Newark Beth Israel Medical Center.

Robert Steinbaum of Montclair is among those boosters. He formed his professional and cultural ties to the city in 1979, when he moved there to become an assistant United States attorney.

For five years Steinbaum lived in an apartment on Newark’s Mount Prospect Avenue. “I just fell in love with Newark. I really got into the grittiness of Newark. I wanted to be involved in urban America,” he said.

Today he is publisher of the NJ Law Journal, which has its offices on Mulberry Street.

Since 1979, he has been a member of Ahavas Sholom, Newark’s sole operational Conservative synagogue (there are two Orthodox centers). He currently serves as its vice president.

By his count, “400 people give money to Ahavas Sholom, and at the High Holy Days we have 140 worshipers.” Only 20 of them are Newark residents.

But Steinbaum insists that commuting to religious services in the inner city is not something unique to the Jewish community.

“The fact that Ahavas Sholom pulls people from the suburbs and that only a handful come from Newark is no different from any other religion,” he said. “Even black Baptists. Even African Methodist Episcopalians. The large inner-city churches associated with African-American religions have larger majorities of their populations who live outside of Newark.”

But Steinbaum said he realizes that warm memories and Saturday services are not going to ignite NJ suburbanites’ interest, or investment, in Newark.

Newark’s “fundamental importance,” he said, “is as an economic engine that employs thousands of suburbanites who each day come to this city and make good livings here.”

They are the people who fill downtown Newark’s 12 million square feet of office space and work in its universities, hospitals, and industries. They might come through on the NJ Transit, Amtrak, and PATH trains and can be enticed to stay for a show at NJPAC, a baseball game at Bears Stadium, or dinner at a Portuguese restaurant in the Ironbound district.

“People do that every day, they do it safely, and they have done it for decades,” said Steinbaum. “For people using the business and cultural institutions in Newark, there are simply no safety concerns. That is not to say that if they are in some far-off neighborhood in a bar that they wouldn’t get shot. But that’s not the experience most people have.”

But it is not just an older generation that feels a strong affection for the city.

Case in point: Jeffrey Bennett, a 26-year-old intern at the Jewish Historical Society of MetroWest, who is the founder and Web master of a site www.NewarkHistory.com.

Bennett, who is pursuing a master’s degree in library science from Rutgers University, put his site on-line last October “because I was required to start one for a class, and I got carried away. It is a nice thing to do for the city of Newark, and a nice thing to do for myself.”

Bennett graduated from the University of Chicago as a history major and feels a special obligation to a city where, unlike New York, “knowledge of its history is a lot less accessible.”

His roots there go back four generations. “My mother was born in Newark. Her mother was born in Newark. Her father came to Newark as a little kid. And I have four great-grandparents who are buried there.”

As he looks toward the city’s future as well as its past, Bennett said, “I think I am sharing with people what Newark is like now, what it was like, and maybe people who see the Web site will have a greater appreciation for the city.”