Newark's Revival, Revived

New money, old pipes, and a mayor who’s trying to manage both.

- Justin Davidson

CAN A BEATEN-DOWN downtown find a way to thrive without getting pummeled by gentrification? Can longtime residents who have paid their dues welcome newcomers without losing their sense of home? Can a once-handsome, but dilapidated, center rebuild without shiny ugliness? One of the unlikeliest places to come looking for a yes to each of these questions may be Newark, New Jersey’s Central Ward, where forlorn history and frantic optimism mix in a distinctive local brew. There’s a snap of fresh money in the air. Cranes are doing slo-mo pirouettes above the skyline. Glossy renderings circulate again, and this time they’re coming to fruition. Yet there are also toxic chemicals in the drinking water: lead in some buildings with corroded pipes and high levels of a possible carcinogen, haloacetic acids, at eight testing sites, including one downtown. You could hardly ask for a starker example of the bifurcation that is plaguing American cities: a glass tower on one block, poisoned water on the next. As faucets in Flint and subways in New York have proved, in a nation with an old and brittle infrastructure, the most basic services can be levers of inequality.