tales of the city
manufactured discontent in newark and sf
You could say that Newark was doomed from the moment of its christening. If what would become the great skyline of New York had then just begun to cast a shadow, the founders of New Jersey’s largest city made sure Newark had stepped squarely inside it. Locals, of course, will roll their eyes and tell you that any nominative resemblance between Newark and New York is greatly exaggerated; the former’s true pronunciation is monosyllabic: “nork,” not “new-ark.”
But that distinction matters little to the majority of people who will ever enter Newark’s borders, however briefly; these people are not the 300,000-odd residents of Brick City, but the millions who pass through Newark as an unwanted stop on the way to Manhattan. The pleasure of their visit to Newark is inversely correlated to length: I suspect that the vast majority of those who have ever spent more than a few minutes in Newark are the victims of notorious NJTransit delays. Whether exhausted from their travels or daily commute, these half-asleep passengers hear a staticky “next stop, Nezzzrk Penn Station” and experience a momentary panic as they consider the possibility that they erred in their counting of the number of stops before their arrival in New York City. One exasperated netizen observes, “I’m a long time rider and it seems like on every northbound trip, someone is confused and needs to ask if they are in New York and not Newark.” Another replies: “As a New Yorker, I suspect this is a New Jersey ploy to try to lure unsuspecting victims into actually visiting New Jersey.”
My first extended stay in Newark came near the end of a two-year stint of living in New Jersey. The great ploy I had fallen for was graduate school, and the place that deceived me was Princeton, not Newark. I spent my weekdays in Princeton awaiting my weekend ritual of boarding a creaky, ancient railway car literally called the Dinky that would reluctantly transport me to the nearest NJTransit stop, where I could hop on the Northeast Corridor train and escape to New York City. Though I never did, I was terrified of missing my stop, so I paid close attention to every name uttered by the conductor, which I can still recall now, as if they were names of old childhood acquaintances: Edison. Linden. Elizabeth. Newark.
Eventually, curiosity got the best of me. In the spring of 2022, I planned a casual weekend trip to Newark with another researcher in the lab who shared my love of 90s R&B. (The legendary singer-songwriter and rapper Lauryn Hill, whose 1998 debut The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill was recently deemed the best album of all time, was born just outside Newark in East Orange.) My curiosity morphed into something closer to spite when we started telling other people in our lab about our weekend plans, and the reactions ranged from confusion to contempt. “Newark? Why there?” one snorted.
The great irony, of course, was that most of my graduate student cohort had bonded over a shared loathing for the town of Princeton, devoid of young people and oversaturated with luxury clothing stores. (The presence of an Hermès in the center of downtown felt especially hostile to anyone scraping by on a graduate student stipend.) So why the knee-jerk skepticism toward Newark, a seemingly normal city home to an array of museums, restaurants, and parks whose amenities were far more affordable than New York’s? Graduate school is a years-long commitment; surely Newark merited at least one visit during our time in New Jersey, though none of our disdainful peers seemed to actually have spent any significant amount of time there. No matter, my friend and I reassured each other. We were determined to have fun; we would disregard their disregard.
In 1975, Arthur M. Louis published a now-infamous piece in Harper’s called “The Worst American City.” In it, he compiled an ostensibly comprehensive ranking of 50 American cities and declared that out of all of them, Newark, New Jersey was the absolute worst. No one at the time, it seems, was surprised: the results of his “study” merely confirmed Newark’s abyssal position in the American public’s imagination, a perception that crystallized as the nation looked on in horror at the events of the prior decade.
Newark rose to infamy during the summer of 1967 when violent, armed conflict broke out in the streets over long-simmering anger about government corruption, racial prejudice, and civil rights. Cities all over the country experienced unrest, but only Detroit matched Newark in the scale of violence and destruction that was unleashed during the rebellion. In Newark, the event that (literally) sparked a conflagration was two policemen beating a Black taxicab driver named John William Smith to the brink of death. His alleged offense? Tailgating. During the protests, the National Guard and nearly 8,000 members of the police force were deployed. (For scale: at the Battle of Thermopylae during the Greco-Persian wars, the entirety of the Spartan army was 7,000 men). Twenty-six were killed and hundreds more wounded, including Joey Bass, Jr., a twelve year old boy shot by the police. A haunting photograph of his body bleeding on the pavement became the front cover of Life magazine’s July 28, 1967 issue.
Perhaps what made Newark such a potent symbol for the rest of the nation was the way it acted as a crucible for a plethora of trends transforming cities all over the country. (Kenneth Gibson, who served as mayor of Newark for sixteen years and was the first Black mayor of a northeastern city in the US, once observed: “Wherever American cities are going, Newark will get there first.”) After World War II, the pace of Black migration to Northern cities intensified, as many hoped to earn their share of postwar prosperity. Instead, they were met with persistent employment discrimination, racial housing covenants, and exclusion from political representation.
The newer arrivals had also come at a time of structural headwinds for both the labor market and city governments. Well-paid blue-collar jobs, the predominant form of labor available to Black men, became ever more scarce due to deindustrialization, factory automation, and the weakening of labor unions. Simultaneously, as wealthier white families with access to cars and federally subsidized housing loans moved to suburbs farther out from the city center, city governments found their financial coffers running dry.
All of these trends had been decades in the making, but as esteemed urban planner Robert Beauregard notes, it was the summer of unrest that marked a paradigm shift in the minds of the American public. In Voices of Decline, his seminal work, Beauregard traces American perceptions about urban progress and regress in the twentieth century through a discursive analysis of the media commentary that accompanied each decade. Prior to the sixties, the problems of cities were largely portrayed in the media as serious but soluble; if the public took note of issues, commentators framed them as calls to action, eventually giving rise to Progressive-era reforms, such as anti-corruption measures and the “City Beautiful” movement.
But when the long, hot summer of 1967 ignited a media maelstrom of violence and property playing on repeat on their television sets, Americans changed their minds about cities. Norman Mailer, writing an essay in The New York Times Magazine during a failed 1969 campaign for New York City mayor, was unequivocal in his cataclysmic estimation of the problem: “Everything is wrong…We are like a Biblical city that has fallen from grace.” This apocalyptic rhetorical move, Beauregard observes, coincided with the enjoinment of urban ills and race in the public imaginary. As historian Thomas J. Sugrue writes in The Origins of the Urban Crisis, “the sight of a seemingly feckless, rough crowd of black men who drank and hung out on street corners reinforced images of white respectability and black indolence - images that became central to debates over poverty.” America had entered an era of urban “decline” and “crisis,” and there was no going back.
Or so it seemed. Newark, by all objective measures, has made a stunning recovery. Once derided for having the highest crime rate in all of the country, its homicide rate today is about a third lower that of Philadelphia1. A 1971 New York Times article portrayed Newark, four years out from the riots, in dire straits: “the same sights are repeated; the blackened hollow shells stand, some boarded up, some closed off by iron gratings, all in ruin.” Forty-five years later, the paper of record is markedly more optimistic, pointing to Newark’s “slow and steady transformation,” a competent and beloved mayor “defying expectations,” a city whose star is “on the rise.”
Yet to outsiders, Newark’s reputation has never quite recovered from the hit it took in the sixties. The cold reactions I received in 2022 were almost identical to what Bill Einreinhofer, then a 25-year-old journalist, experienced upon announcing his move to Newark in 1967: “[t]here was general agreement that I was crazy…People who have never been to New Jersey, let alone Newark, all contend that they know how ‘awful’ the city is.”2
If Newark’s reputation is still stubbornly stuck in the past, so, too, is our discourse. Our conceptual vocabulary for describing the state of our cities devolves into apocalyptic terms at the slightest hint of urban disorder or imperfection. San Francisco, where I currently reside, has for years been said to be in a “doom loop,” largely due to the high vacancy rate of downtown office buildings. (Is it possible that infinitely increasing property values in San Francisco were actually always unsustainable, and that a downward correction in the price of real estate might actually be a useful intervention?) Social media is flooded with opportunistic influencers like Ricki Wynne baiting engagement with videos of unhoused residents in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood. In the provocatively-titled book San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities, conservative commentator Michael Shellenberger peddles a dystopian vision of the city as fundamentally lawless, ruined by incompetent liberals.
What bothers me most about this inflammatory language is that it provides ideological cover for only the shittiest of knee-jerk solutions. In the Progressive era, Beauregard observes, commentators believed problems could at least be fixed. Terms like “crisis,” “doom loop,” and “urban death” carry a far more intractable connotation or at least suggest that drastic problems can justify the most drastic solutions. Echoes of the militarized response to property damage in Newark can be heard in the demands that police get homeless people off San Francisco’s streets using whatever means necessary. Coffee shops, including the one where I am writing this essay, have hired bodyguards to maintain order, a trend that reflects the encroachment of private security forces into every public space. In classic American fashion, we place our faith in bullets and the boys in blue, and justify it by vague assertions that San Francisco is overrun by crime. Never mind that San Francisco’s homicide rate is 90% lower than Newark’s at the height of its unrest fifty years ago, never mind that overall crime in San Francisco is the lowest it’s been in two decades. The gap between sign and signified grows ever larger, yet we cling to worn-out urban scripts as if they were pearls.
If the societal remedies inspired by a degraded discourse of doom leave much to be desired, then the individual actions prescribed by this degraded discourse only generate further discontent. If your city truly is doomed, then amidst heightened pessimism about governmental efficacy, exit seems the only logical choice. During the pandemic, the media breathlessly reported on an “exodus” of tech workers from San Francisco for supposedly greener pastures in Texas and Florida; a few years later, a report in Business Insider interviewing SF-to-Austin migrants found widespread regret. Transplants hate the traffic, the middling tech scene, the heat that makes it impossible to leave the house. “Austin is where ambition goes to die,” one founder said. At dinner with one such recent ex-San Francisco transplant, I was surprised to hear him expressing doubts about his future in Texas, despite having purchased a home and started a family in Dallas. “I want to move back to the Bay,” he confessed to me. “I miss being able to walk to a park or the grocery store.” The most depressing loop, it seems, isn’t one of urban death or decline, but our own inability to avoid parroting the flawed discourse that we’ve inherited from the sixties.
I like to think that Philip Roth, a native son of working-class Newark and one of the most decorated American writers of the twentieth century, would’ve hated the doom loop narrative. I first learned of the prolific author when I paid a visit to the Newark Public Library during my trip in 2022. Tucked inside the library, itself a recurring motif in his sixty-year career, is a stately, colorful room that houses Roth’s personal collection of 7,000 books. Three years later, I encountered his novels again, this time as a reader, not a tourist. Last month, I finished Sabbath’s Theater, the recipient of the 1995 National Book Award. I wept for an hour, knowing that my life had been altered forever.
It would be awfully convenient if I could paint Roth as some great defender of Newark who refused to succumb to narratives of doom, but the truth is that he wasn’t. Roth’s novel American Pastoral, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1998, portrays the tragic life of Swede Levov, a conventionally successful Jewish American businessman from Newark who finds his upper middle-class life upended by the turmoil of the 1960s. Levov describes the streets of Newark “as ominous now as any ruined street in America.” Roth never sugarcoated the extent of the physical scars left by the riots, nor did he downplay a deeply felt sense of loss for the once-thriving Newark of his childhood.
But Roth never abandoned Newark, certainly not in his writing. Following his departure from Newark for college at the age of eighteen, Roth spent the majority of the next sixty years painstakingly depicting the lives of the vibrant Jewish American community in Newark. Roth, who received criticism from some corners of the Jewish community for unflattering portrayals of Jewish characters, nevertheless returned endlessly to the place that made him. At the end of Sabbath’s Theater, the titular character, unable to depart from a life in a town full of people who hate him, asks himself: “How could he leave? How could he go? Everything he hated was here.”
Roth didn’t just write about the Newark of his youth, he fought for it. In 1969, with the memory of Newark’s long, hot summer still fresh, the Newark City Council had proposed budget cuts that included a provision to shut down the Newark Public Library. Writing in The New York Times, Roth pleaded with the public to save the library. “When Newark was mostly white and I was being raised there,” Roth observes, “it was assumed the books were ‘ours’… It is strange, to put it mildly, that now when Newark is mostly black, the City Council (for fiscal reasons, we are told) has reached a decision that suggests that the books really don’t belong to the people after all.” Within the month, the money was found, and the library (and the adjoining Newark Museum) were kept afloat.
Fifty years later, at the very same museum he helped save, Roth delivered a set of remarks on his eightieth birthday. It was the specificity of Newark and everything in it, he explained, that was the foundation of all of his work. “The war. The school. The park. The field. The museum. The library. The fights. All of which over the years inspired in me, when I was working at my best, what I once described elsewhere as ‘that lubricious sensation that is fluency.’” It would be a mistake, I think, to separate Roth’s efforts to save the public library and the attention to the truth of everyday life that gave his fiction its intoxicating force. “It is from a scrupulous fidelity to the blizzard of specific data that is a personal life, it is from the force of its uncompromising attentiveness, from its physicalness, that the realistic novel…derives its ruthless intimacy.”
Flight from any attachment to objective reality is what reveals grand narratives of urban decline, whether about Newark in the past or San Francisco in the present, to be nothing more than shitty fiction. There is no intimacy in their ruthlessness, only cynicism. These stories seduce the public not by drawing on the richness of realism, but from dark fantasies predicated on class anxiety and racial prejudice. This tactic trades Roth’s passion for “the hypnotic materiality of the world as it is” for the addictiveness of the doomscroll. The stubborn persistence of such narratives is proof only of many other deaths: of critical thinking, of our collective ability to separate fact from feeling, of any sense of local duty or agency.
I don’t want to imply that I have all the answers. I’m just one resident in San Francisco among eight hundred thousand others. While I reject claims that San Francisco is in a doom loop or experiencing a steady decline, I do agree that I feel a dwindling sense of social trust, both here and in cities across the country. But I can’t imagine rebuilding a truly civically-minded culture without each of us exercising a bit more critical curiosity, both inwards, towards the true sources of our own anxieties, and outwards, towards the messy reality of the world around us.
What I do know for sure is that there once existed a path of least resistance where my relationship to the world around me was structured according to a logic of ruthless optimization for personal comfort. In this parallel universe, I believe certain neighborhoods and entire cities are essentially worthless, meriting none of my curiosity or time. I religiously avoid any areas that feel “sketchy,” always opt for Uber over public transit, and measure the value of every social interaction in its perceived utility to my career. I live in an expensive high-rise, I DoorDash every meal, I don’t have a library card.
My sole relationship to anyone outside of my social class would be arranging my life to place them out of view, rendering my assumptions about them wholly unfalsifiable. Instead, I would scroll through videos of car break-ins and feces on the street. Feeling renewed gratitude for my comfortable perch in a luxury apartment, I would conclude that my suspicions about those people had been right all along. The city is composed not of flesh and steel but of floating signifiers, Yelp reviews and Instagram ads and pithy tweets.
I know this is possible, because I have been surrounded by people like this ever since I was an undergrad. In the real life I do lead, I know that I already have more than I need; in that other imaginary one, I would probably be richer in one literal sense and immeasurably poorer in others.
As I finish typing this essay, late at night in a burger joint on Market Street that is open late and (for some reason) has free WiFi, I spot a young man with dark curly hair dressed in a black pinstripe suit out of the corner of my eye. On his table sits a platter with a hamburger, French fries drenched in melted cheese, and a chocolate milkshake. Occasionally, he stands up and alternates between dancing and pacing through the establishment. At some point, he walks up to me and taps me on the shoulder and asks me if he can borrow my portable charger. I hand it over, and he asks what I’m working on.
“I’m writing something about how people relate to the cities they live in,” I tell him. He nods slowly. “San Francisco saved my life,” he replies. A beat passes. “But this place also hurts me sometimes,” he adds, frowning. I try to nod knowingly and strain to hear him over the speaker blasting ‘80s dance hits. He was born and raised in the Bay Area, and has been regularly coming to the city for something like five years. Tonight, a guy told him he didn’t love him back. I start to say that I know how he feels, but now he seems lost in his own thoughts. His phone has enough juice to power on, and he falls silent looking at his texts. I return to my essay.
“I’m gonna grab a water from the soda machine. I’ll be right back,” he says. “Okay, I’ll wait here,” I reply. He walks away with my charger and his phone. He turns a corner, leaving behind only his half-eaten fries.
A few minutes pass.
I feel myself getting a little antsy.
That thing cost a pretty penny on Amazon. How did he know?
Eventually, with the restaurant about to close and reality setting in, I begin to pack my things. I put on my coat, stuff my journal and pen back into my messenger bag, and empty out my tray above the garbage can. The thoughts begin to cascade: the irony of this happening right now is so painfully clear, how could I have been so naive in this city, oh — who’s that tapping on my shoulder, and then the charger is back in my hands, now I’m saying “Have a lovely evening, and I hope you feel better,” and then I am outside in the cool San Francisco night air, taking my time as I walk home, glad that I took a risk that wasn’t a risk at all, feeling like tonight I wrote truth into reality, marveling at how little I know about anything other than the fact that I arrived in San Francisco a year and a half ago and not once have I wanted to move to New York.
A protest, a pastry, a sunset, the union. Misty sunlight splintering softly through the evergreens in the Panhandle. Friends who read and write, strangers who speak my mother’s tongue, flowers pushing through the concrete. I will die on every last one of this city’s stupid hills. In cafes and cha caan tengs, on the BART between book clubs, among the Painted Ladies and drag queens, both the fact and feeling of the matter is this: here I am, I am, I am.
Einreinhofer, William. “Newark, the Lively Melting Pot.” The New York Times, 8 Jan. 1978, https://archive.is/ghCjr
lover of san francisco until i die
BRILLIANT BRILLIANT BRILLIANT!!!