This project crystalized from anti-matter: the Halsey Street pedestrian mall, long anticipated but never consummated.

In the abstract, the pedestrian mall sounds pleasant enough. Eight blocks in what was already a popular shopping district in Newark would be freed from all vehicular traffic, creating a promenade that privileged pedestrians. Fountains, plazas, cafes, kiosks, and even a botanical garden would provide elegant entertainment for shoppers, without the noise, congestion, and noxious exhaust fumes of cars and trucks.

The mall was a forerunner to the shopping passages that cities use today to create a strong brand identity and attract tourist dollars into struggling urban economics. But the Halsey Street mall was also more than that. Anchored by major department stores on either end of a corridor of fine apparel, home furnishings, and beauty shops, the outdoor mall was to be entirely enclosed in glass, fully air-conditioned, and graced with moving walkways.  

If this sounds like the class indoor shopping mall turned inside-out, that’s because it was designed by Victor Gruen, the Austrian-turned-American father of the indoor shopping mall, who pioneered this new architectural genre in the Southdale Center in Minneapolis in 1956 and went on to build fifty more over the next two decades.

A year after the Southdale Center opened to great fanfare in Minnesota, plans for a pedestrian mall in Newark were put on the table. In 1957, the mall showed up in the Our Town exhibition at the Newark Public Library. A year later it was discussed, with some skepticism, in Newark’s daily newspapers. Gruen himself folded the mall in the feasibility report that his company, Gruen & Stonorov, drafted for Newark’s urban renewal program in 1959. And the mall found its way into 1961’s monumental Re:New Newark, the City Planning Office’s public relations bid to smooth the way for the dislocations implicit in the Master Plan of 1964.

Much dreaming, no realization. Lacking federal funding, the City Planning Office published the Halsey Street Mall: Preliminary Report to drum up support for the project among businessmen in the downtown area, including department stores like Bambergers, Hahnes, and Kresges as the intended anchors to the mall.

So why would this seemingly innocuous, pedestrian-friendly plan spur us to embark on a rhizomatic mapping of the street? The answer requires a deeper dive into the report, which is less innocent than it appears at first blush.

“Halsey Street Lends Itself to Mall Development” = provided everything ‘cheap, tawdry, and fly-by-night’  be removed first...

The planners regarded the pedestrian mall as a way to revitalize the inner-city core, aka the Central Business District or CBD. Like many post-war northern cities that would eventually become known as the ‘rust belt,’ 1950s-1960s Newark faced a decline in employment as wartime industries demobilized and peacetime businesses moved into the suburbs or further south where corporate taxes were lower. That shift was facilitated by the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, which built the Interstate Highway System over the following decade and made transportation from suburban factory to urban market cheaper and more accessible. Those same highways also quickened the pace of suburbanization, which in Newark manifested as a classic case of ‘white flight.’ 

To say that the city’s population dropped from 438,776 in 1950 to 405,220 in 1960, and then further to 381,930 in 1970 tells only half of the story. With the second wave of the Great Migration, Newark’s African-American population rose from 45,760 in 1940 to 74,965 in 1950 at the same time that higher-income white families were moving out to the suburbs courtesy of the GI Bill’s racially biased mortgage practices. By 1960, African-Americans made up 34% of the city’s population, and 84% of the residents in the Central Business District where Halsey Street and other lucrative commercial areas were located.

This was the trend that the planners wanted to reverse. On an overt level, the Halsey Street mall was meant to pursue two immediate goals: to prevent city residents from patronizing suburban shopping centers and highway discount stores, and to draw other shoppers into the city from the suburbs. The goals were related: both were intended to increase consumer spending in downtown shops in order to raise profits and feed into the city’s tax base.

But both were also embedded in a larger vision that was euphemistically described as encouraging higher-income earners to relocate from the suburbs back into the city. In the planners’ minds, persuading middle-class white people to move to downtown Newark required clearing out the ‘tawdry’ people who had settled there, primarily lower-income minority groups. The Halsey Street mall was therefore embedded within a much larger urban renewal plan that aimed to construct and expand university campuses, cultural institutions, hospital facilities, motels, autoramas, and luxury apartment buildings surrounded by parks to create a suburban atmosphere within the city.

In the short term, what the mall planners called “non-retail and marginal uses” on Halsey Street, mainly people’s residences, were to be cleared out to make space for more parking to accommodate the thousands of shoppers the mall was meant to attract. In the long term, urban renewal displacement in toto would force up to 31,400 families out of their homes, their neighborhoods, their social networks.

Overt Implications

The report did not pull its punches in singling out who had to go.

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Covert Implications

As only one element in a multi-pronged attack, the mall’s tendrils were intertwined with numerous other facets of Newark’s urban renewal plans; to many residents, those same plans took on the sordid undertones of a vast conspiracy theory. With one of the largest urban renewal programs in the country per capita, the Newark Housing Authority had 12 clearance projects underway by 1963, affecting 80,000 people or 20% of the city’s population. 

The planners intended to break a lot of eggs to make a more ‘palatable’ omelet.

* Rezoning Clinton Hill

* South Broad Street and the Hill Street Apartments

* City Hall and the Civic Center

* Midtown Connector

* Lincoln Park, Symphony Hall, and the Barbary Coast

* The Newark Plaza aka Gateway Center

* Rutgers Newark and University Heights

* Orpheum Theater, Newark Star-Ledger, Autorama

* Howard Street + Prince Street = containment