Forget the international news of the day. Newark, NJ, has elected Cory Booker, the anti-corruption candidate who just missed beating the incumbent, Sharpe James, last time around. James Sharpe replaced Kenneth Gibson, who, in spite of being one of my father’s running partners back in the day, was a typical corrupt Newark politician. The city went deeper into debt and crime under each successive regime. Booker ran as a reform candidate, but couldn’t beat Sharpe’s machine (and the likely corruption that ensured the win). This time around, James declined to run. I’ll have to go find out why. There’s no way a man like that gives up power voluntarily, unless someone’s got something on him that’s going to the Attorney General’s office.
Sharpe James ran Newark for 20 years. Twenty years.
The election of Booker, a 37-year-old Rhodes scholar and Yale-educated lawyer who moved to Newark just a decade ago, opens a new chapter in the city’s political history. A self-proclaimed reformer, he is Newark’s first new mayor in 20 years and just the second since 1970.
His easy victory yesterday was made possible after Mayor Sharpe James announced in March he would not seek a sixth term.
Four years ago, James defeated Booker by less than 3,600 votes, or 53 percent to 47 percent, in a vitriolic race that left the young challenger fighting the perception he wasn’t experienced enough or local enough to govern the state’s largest city.
Newark was a beautiful, thriving city when my parents were young. My mother told me how on Saturday nights, after Shabbos, she and her friends would take the trolley downtown and hang around at Broad and Market, one of Newark’s major intersections. Years later, I commuted to Montclair State College while living with my father, and had to transfer near that intersection. Even in the daytime, you had to be wary of your surroundings. At night? Fuhgeddaboudit.
Newark’s crime rate is one of the highest in the nations, its poverty rate and high school dropout rates are shameful, and its lack of industry a crime.
Here’s hoping Cory Booker can do what he set out to do four years ago, and clean up Newark. It is a city that deserves to be reborn.
Do you know, one of America’s 58 cathedrals is in Newark? Did you know that Newark was founded in 1666, and that it is still one of the most important ports and airports in the country?
It deserves a renaissance. If it had had one ten years ago, I may never have left New Jersey, because I lived in or around Newark my entire life. Back in the day, it was great. If they’d made it great again, I was thinking a loft, downtown — near Broad & Market, if possible.
Maybe in ten or twenty years, it will happen. That’d be nice.
I dearly wish Asbury Park would have a renaissance. It is a desperately sad place, despite the fact that if properly developed, there’s hundreds of millions of dollars of beach-side real estate there.
Newark (like Detroit), has never gotten over the 1967 riots.
Yes, but I think 40 years of corrupt politicians had a lot to do with that. If the money had gone into services and jobs for Newark, instead of into greedy pols’ pockets, we’d have seen a different Newark by now.
Phillip Roth’s novels (if they are your cup of tea) – give a good idea of what the Newark of the 1930’s, 30’s and 50’s were.