Greetings! My hope is that this site can be a kind of encyclopedic tour guide to today's Newark. I want to have plenty of information about Newark's past, but in a non-nostalgic way. I also want to let people know what contemporary Newark looks like.

Downtown Newark is great, but there's a huge part of the city to which many visitors never make it. This site is about Newark's outer neighborhoods.

If you would like to write something for this site please ask. I welcome any kind of article that ties the past to a specific place.

In the Nineteenth century, Newark moved too briskly to worry much about its history. Newark was a city on the move, some felt destined to be the world's greatest industrial center, it had no time to pause for historical commemorations.

In the early Twentieth century Newark began to take stock of its history. Newark staged a grand 250th birthday, it completed enduring monuments, yet, while the founders of Newark were honored, the creative destruction of capitalism destroyed irreplaceable remnants of the past to make way to better things.

Since World War II Newark has been, frankly, too poor to properly take care of its monuments. In the 1950s, dazzled by federal dollars and in the thrall of Modernist prophets like LeCorbusier and Mies van der Rohe, the leaders of Newark decided that the only way to save Newark was to destroy Newark. Sadly, the parts of Newark that escaped urban renewal have experienced neglect. Mansions have been allowed to rot, vandalized statues have not been replaced, and historic churches have burned down. --Lamentations

You can email me at this address, but please remove the spam stopper.

I've learned about Newark through my own research. The Star-Ledger, the New York Times Historical, John T. Cunningham's Newark: A History have all been immensely informative for me.