Word: newark
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
What is most dismaying about the city is that it may well reflect the future of much of urban America. "Newark is the urban prototype," says Rutgers Urbanologist George Sternlieb. "A few years from now it will be Buffalo, Cleveland, St. Louis and Akron, and then it will be every older city in the country." Thirteen percent of Newark's citizens are on welfare. The city led the nation in serious crimes per 100,000 of population in 1967, and violent crime rose 41% in the first nine months of 1968. Double locks are becoming standard in most dwellings...
Turning Black. More than half of Newark's schools are over 50 years old. A shortage of 9,000 seats necessitates double sessions. Reading levels fall substantially below the national average, and the schools have been afflicted with so much turmoil that the city has posted 145 guards in them within the past two weeks in an effort to halt attacks on teachers and students...
Straining to cope with its growing burdens, Newark has been steadily raising taxes-to the point where the rates are now self-defeating. The real estate tax rate, already $7.90 per $100 of assessed valuation, is one of the highest in the nation, and may soon be increased. That is a powerful incentive for middle-class homeowners to flee. The tax on a $20,000 house in Newark is roughly $1,400 a year, about the same amount that a nearby suburbanite pays on a $50,000 home...
Hardly incidental to Newark's problems is the fact that the city is rapidly turning black. Negroes comprise 52% of the population, up from 34% in 1960 and 17% in 1950. So speedy is the flight of whites to the suburbs that they are expected to constitute less than one-quarter of the population by 1975. Middle-class Negroes are also joining the white exodus, settling in communities like East Orange. "It's like being caught in a scissors," moans Mayor Hugh Addonizio. "One blade is the financial crisis. The other is the racial crisis...
Libraries and Books. In an effort to dramatize its plight, Newark's city council last month voted to close on April 1 the city's public library system and its distinguished museum, which was the first in the U.S. to exhibit primitive American painting and sculpture. Newark-bred Author Philip Roth (Portnoy's Complaint) protested: "In a city seething with social grievances there is probably little that could be more essential to the development and sanity of the thoughtful and ambitious young than the presence of those libraries and those books." Last week Mayor Addonizio...