Four Corners was the name given to the intersection of Broad and Market, reaching back to the turn of the twentieth century. By the 1910s, it was said to be one of the busiest intersections in the country, and one of the first with a traffic light. Histories of Newark describe the intersection with nostalgia, harkening back to a time when Newark was a city with promise with innovative manufacturing industries in patent leather, jewelry, and celluloid.

Four Corners was also a shopping magnet and rival to New York: on Market and Halsey sat the Bamberger’s Department store, the rival to Macy’s (until 1929 when the Bamberger family sold the store to Macy’s which kept it running under its original name).

The glamour of Four Corners became a victim to Newark’s troubles in the 1960s – according to many historical narratives. Bamberger’s, and Newark more generally, declined when it lost customers and prestige after the rebellion of 1967, as higher income White residents moved out of the city.

In fact, though, the troubles had begun decades earlier, when the GI Bill and federal mortgage policies encouraged White middle-class families to leave for the suburbs, without making the same subsidies available to African-Americans and other minority groups. At the same time, the Federal Housing Administration redlined inner city Newark, marking it as unsafe for mortgage guarantees or investment. In Newark, as in many other US cities, these racialized incentives, combined with existing racial biases, resulted in a simultaneous “white flight” out of the inner-city core and an isolation of African-Americans in declining housing stock in the inner-city neighborhoods.

By then, industry and light manufacturing had also begun to leave the city in search of cheaper land and cheaper labor, whether on the urban periphery, in the countryside, or further away in the South and abroad. Not only did the wartime spike in production slow after 1945, but the federal tax structure encouraged manufacturers to build factories in outlying areas rather than refurbish existing facilities inside the city. In the 1950s, the population of Newark decreased by 92,000 people as suburbanization advanced.

The Newark Housing Authority embarked on a decades-long urban renewal program meant to draw middle- and upper-income earners back into the city by revitalizing the Central Business District and establishing cultural and educational institutions in urban renewal territory. These measures were intended to alleviate investor fears and attract funds to redevelop these contested areas. They also cut across the fabric of existing neighborhoods, breaking up active family networks and communities as the housing stock was cleared out. For most of the 1960s, urban renewal policies rejected selective rehabilitation in favor of large-scale clearance and the redevelopment of entire neighborhoods.

The burden of relocation, especially in Newark’s Central Ward, fell largely on the shoulders of its predominantly African-American residents: from 1959 to 1967, 12,000 African-American families in the city center were displaced by land clearance to make room for public housing and highway construction.

This is where the Grid comes in, specifically the four parallel streets of McCarter Highway, Mulberry Street, Broad Street, and Halsey Street. Each street was conceived and configured to draw the planners’ idealized residents (back) into the city.