Newark's tale is Buffalo's, minus the snow

on June 22, 2007 at 7:56 PM, updated June 22, 2007 at 8:04 PM

In its heyday, Newark was a big, bustling town. By the 1930s its population approached half a million, it had the tallest building in New Jersey, and busy Bamberger's on Market Street ranked fourth in sales among the nation's department stores.

But because of its relationship to a colossus to the east, Newark was not a major league city. For all its vigor, it was minor league: the hub of a subregion, not the center of a vast metropolitan universe.

Overshadowed by New York City, Newark lacked many of the cultural and civic institutions that characterized city life. To the west, another force also squeezed Newark early on: suburbs.

Still, Newark was a significant manufacturing center, a place where capitalists employed people and made money producing beer, leather goods, electrical parts. It was a place of promise for people looking for jobs, attracting migrants from the South and immigrants.

Today Newark is a former industrial city in slow, steady decline. Unlike such cities as Boston and Chicago, it has not experienced growth in new economic sectors, said James W. Hughes, dean of the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers.

"As manufacturing hemorrhaged, the private-service sector hasn't filled the void," Hughes said. "Though Newark is being force-fed some life-support systems" in the form of government aid and other public money, "it's gasping."

It's hard to compare cities, but Newark belongs in a midsize league including Buffalo, N.Y., and Akron, Ohio, he said.

In fact, despite the snow factor (average annual snowfall in Buffalo: 91 inches), Newark and Buffalo are pretty much in the same boat.

In 1994, Newark, with 259,000 residents, ranked 63rd in population among American cities, just below St. Paul, Minn., and just above Anchorage, Alaska. Buffalo, with 313,000 people, ranked 53rd. Newark's black population made up 58.5 percent of the city, compared to Buffalo's 30.7 per cent. In Newark, 22.8 per cent of families were living below the poverty line; in Buffalo, 21.7 per cent. The median household income in Newark was $21,650; in Buffalo, $18,482.

Sure, there are other differences -- Buffalo, spread over an area twice as big, has a Midwestern flavor; it has football's Bills and hockey's Sabres, a theater district that attracts suburbanites, and a neighborhood where wealthy people still live. But "they've both fallen," Hughes said. "Buffalo probably further."

Both were booming lunch pail factory towns that lost their industrial bases more than 20 years ago. And neither found a new niche.

"The typical pattern for the Rust Belt cities was factories closing, factories being padlocked, factories being abandoned -- but at the same time, many cities began to develop a professional-service sector associated with banking, legal activities, and retailing," said Mark Gottdiener, professor and chairman of the department of sociology at the State University of New York at Buffalo and an author and expert on cities.

"Unfortunately, that sector never developed in Buffalo the way it did in other cities," he said.

Nor in Newark.

From 1975 through 1995, Newark lost jobs not only in manufacturing, but in communications and utilities; wholesale trade; retailing, and finance, insurance, and real estate, according to a Rutgers employment study. The sole job gains were in transportation, related to Newark International Airport, and in services, largely related to the health care field.

In Buffalo, the picture is similar; the area's biggest employer is the university at Buffalo -- whose main campus is in suburban Amherst.

Newark and Buffalo are related in other ways. Each was devastated by highways. Race riots decimated Newark in 1967; racial upheaval in Buffalo in 1968 didn't kill anyone but was equally frightening. Residents in each place fled to the suburbs.

Neither city has a department store. Macy's, formerly Bamberger's, closed in Newark in 1992. In Buffalo, the Bon Ton, formerly AM&A's, closed in 1996.

Despite the bloodletting, Buffalo and Newark shouldn't be viewed as terminal, Gottdiener said. Instead they should be viewed as part of new "multicentered metropolitan regions."

"That's the new form of metropolitan life. We live in multicentered regions," he said. "Central cities are pretty much all in a decline in the United States. But there are regions that are growing and developing and prospering.

"The real issue is: How is the region doing?"

That's not to say he advocates ignoring the central cities.

"We have to find out what kind of social problems are specific to the central city" and attack them, Gottdiener said. "If extreme poverty -- which is inexcusable in the United States, no matter where it is -- concentrated in the central declining cities, which it is, it's a national problem."