November 17, 2002
Newark Puts Its Fiery Riot Behind It
By BRENT STAPLES
The riots that burned through this country in the late 1960's ravaged more than 125 cities and reached into 28 states. Most Americans would find it difficult to name even a dozen of those cities. But the conflagration that ripped through Newark in 1967 remains especially fresh in public memory, perhaps because most people had never heard of the city until they watched it burning on the evening news. Try as it might to escape, Newark has lived in the shadow of its riot for 35 years.
The riots sent businesses and middle-class families streaming into the suburbs. But one of the lesser known legacies of all that fiery violence is what urbanologists call "the architecture of fear" — which includes gated communities and those ubiquitous fortress-style office towers that project windowless stone walls to the sidewalk where stores and shops should be. The architecture of fear has killed the possibility of street life in downtown Los Angeles and hurt the revitalization of Detroit as well. Visit Newark at rush hour on a weekday evening and you will see the same symptoms on display. The train station at rush hour is bustling with commuters sipping coffee and reading, many waiting to be picked up and whisked off to the suburbs. But a short walk from the station, into the heart of the city, you encounter the eerily vacant thoroughfare of Raymond Boulevard, lined with buildings that feature blank facades instead of stores or coffee shops. The Hilton Gateway Hotel has a drab cement-colored face that looks like some kind of bunker at the street level.
Covered elevated walkways allow workers to move from the train station to any one of several office towers without ever touching the street. There is little to see anyway, since the designers omitted shops and retail spaces that would have attracted people. At 6 in the evening, I walked several blocks into this city of 274,000 people and encountered fewer than a half-dozen pedestrians.
Planners and community groups in Newark have become vividly aware of this problem. The architecture of fear downtown seems to have met its match, in the approachable, human-scale architecture of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. This graceful, low-rise, red brick structure, awash in light, is a visual oasis in Newark and more engaging by far than its unglamorous acronym, NJPAC, suggests. The building has become a magnet for foot traffic in a previously vacant corner of downtown.
The first time I visited the area around the center at night, I passed through empty streets and suddenly encountered throngs of people filing in to see the British pop star Elvis Costello. "If someone had told you 10 years ago that there would be 3,000 people in downtown Newark at night, you would have called them crazy," said Lawrence Goldman, NJPAC's president and chief executive.
The main performance hall, done in warm woods and copper trim, has the intimate feel of a nicely appointed living room. The foyers and lobbies have a similarly warm, even homey feel. The building is popular with foundations and businesses staging parties and retreats. During the summer, the front plaza becomes the stage for weekly free outdoor concerts that attract as many as 2,500 people a night. Once stark and fearsomely vacant, the area is now a thriving singles scene. Restaurants and parking lots have sprouted nearby.
Mr. Goldman was seen as crazy when he first argued that the city should build a world-class cultural institution in its desolate downtown. One set of skeptics told him that white suburbanites who had been scared away by the riots would never come back at night. Another set of skeptics predicted that white suburbanites would come but that black people would stay away in droves.
The doubters have proved to be spectacularly wrong. Celebrating its fifth birthday this fall, NJPAC has become what surveys describe as one of the most well-attended performing arts centers of its kind in the country, outstripping its peers by a significant margin. One in four tickets is bought by minority patrons — a proportion that puts performing arts centers in most other cities to shame.
With its intimate feel, the center has little in common with stolid, formal institutions like the Kennedy Center in Washington or Lincoln Center in New York. Mr. Goldman's architects were pushed to create what he describes as a "welcoming building" that "makes people feel hugged when they come in" — and makes them want to linger.
Mr. Goldman is campaigning to ensure that other parts of downtown Newark are rebuilt with the same goal in mind. His influence is apparent in the new 12-story F.B.I. building that is going up just a stone's throw from NJPAC. What could easily have been a cold, stone obelisk has turned out to be an illuminated, window-filled building that will have restaurants and retail space. Though not perfect, the building harmonizes with the waterfront in a way that a traditional fortress structure would not.
In the old days, Newark would have been pleased to have any building it could get, fortress or not. But the tempering of the look of the F.B.I. building reflects a new awareness that good architecture will help the city's renaissance and that bad architecture can hurt it. When the history of the Newark comeback is written, it will likely begin at the start of the 21st century, when NJPAC solidified its position as the living, breathing town square that had been missing in downtown Newark for 40 years.
Copyright The New York Times Company
