Word: newarker
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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...
...Newark's financial problems would not be so great if its economic base were not crumbling. Downtown department stores have become marginal operations, wary of shoplifters and dealing in cheap goods. Because industrialists prefer to build modern, one-story plants in suburban areas, where land costs are low and the surroundings more congenial, Newark has lost almost 20,000 manufacturing jobs in the last 15 years. An expansion of headquarters facilities by banks and insurance companies located in Newark has partially offset this trend, but this tiny boom has not provided jobs for ghetto dwellers...