https://sitelinearts.org Site Lines Tue, 03 Mar 2026 04:29:59 +0000 https://sitelinearts.org en https://sitelinearts.org/giloi Mon, 01 Aug 2022 20:14:33 +0000 Site Lines https://sitelinearts.org/giloi Hedges, Windows, Whispers I plan to make a sound map of the city, as people experienced and remembered those sounds. My goal is to resist the ‘soundless city’ of Newark’s urban planners, which negated and neutralized the existing community. I want to use the abstracted icons of families used in urban planning maps to create a topographic collage of sound. The icons of families slated to be removed turned them into iconographic entities that could, symbolically, be easily constrained and erased. I want to use those visual icons to repopulate the city with the traces of human sounds: music and noise, pleasurable and troublesome. The choice of a binary, music and noise, is intentional: sound is neutral by itself but is experienced in affective ways, either as pleasurable or as disagreeable. The pleasurable affect of community sound can bring people together; the disagreeable affect of noise can create boundaries between them. The former is aligned with the idea of urban arts; the latter is aligned with the idea of urban thresholds, inclusion and exclusion. Both are forms of taking possession of space through sound. My time focus is the 1960s, and I will be using a historical map from that time period [TBA]. To gather the sounds, I will be working with the publications of the urban planners, African American newspapers in Newark, and oral histories, all from the 1960s but before 1967. The family icon come from the map “estimated relocation families – next decade, by community” from Re:New Newark, from 1961, pictured above. I think I will be using this icon for all instances of sound, whether music or noise, to create a layered topographical map. But I will also use excerpts and quotes about those sounds in the free spaces of the map; these words will be pale and transparent enough that the street grid can be seen underneath, so that the words replicate the ephemeral nature of transitory sound. Depending on what I find in the official documents, I may also use another icon to mark places where the planners wanted sound to be eliminated. Urban Arts The city as envisioned by Louis Danzig of the Newark Housing Authority was soundless. In his articles, as in other urban renewal documents, there is little mention of sounds outside of officially sanctioned places of high art. Instead, Danzig emphasized the need for embodied self-discipline and proper behavior: “Self-discipline and courtesy are required in direct proportion to population density. City people must have patterns of behavior for populous places – habits of industry, emotional and family stability, strict accountability to the law. Everyone must stop on a red light.” (Louis Danzig in Newark Commerce 1961) For Mason Gross, President of Rutgers, who collaborated with Danzig in a shared vision of Newark’s future, sound was best contained in the ‘proper’ venues of high art: the concert hall or performing arts center. Gross deplored the deep cultural silence of the suburbs, which he saw as “weary, flat, stale, and unprofitable” with no opportunities for culture because of the alienated atomization of a vacuous consumer society. His answer was to promote the arts, and music in particular, in the cities, where urban-dwellers could attain true humanity through the beauty of the arts. But his definition of music, like his definition of the preferred audience, denied the existence of those already living in Newark: his definition of music was limited to the European traditions of opera, ballet, symphonies, and chamber music. Without these, New Jersey was culturally “bankrupt.” (Mason Gross speech, 1959) Gross and Danzig’s containment of sound in emotional discipline and racially-coded cultural capital is in direct contrast to the joyous community of sound and music that Nathan Heard describes as part of his upbringing in Newark in the 1950s. Music was the core of his neighborhood, derelict and decaying though it was: “At the time I knew [the jazz vocalist] Jimmy Scott he was sort of like this neighborhood, full of life, full of people, and full of music. Music was everywhere.” Heard’s venues were different from those envisioned by Danzig and Gross: “…there was so much music in this city at that time. Bars weren’t bars, they were places where you went to hear live bands.” (Nathan Heard interview) Participation in making pleasurable sound is a form of community building, but the value placed on the music – from the planners’ point of view – was related to the value placed on the community in question. To counter their vision of the soundless city, I want to use individual recollections of Newark to gather the ephemeral moments in which the spontaneous urban arts took place and how they created community: in churches, schools, street corners, bars. Community is also created, though, through other types of sound that are not usually understood as art but are rhythmic in their entrainment of affect, in the chants of protesters or children’s street games, for instance. These, too, are moments to be mapped. Urban Thresholds = Hedges, Windows, Whispers.I define ‘urban thresholds’ as sensory experiences and expressions that mark transitional points: they create boundaries of access and access and determine who gets to go where, when, and with what emotions. Sound is used by ‘insiders’ to identify outsiders, for instance. But sound also travels through and over physical thresholds, in distorted, muffled, and amplified ways. Physical thresholds, like hedges or windows, don’t stop sound but condition their affective impact, for instance as half-perceived whispers of exclusion. I will plot these points of sound, or noise, on the map as well, as part of the typography of the city soundscape. Oral histories recall these moments of exclusion and testing: the neighbors who listened behind hedges to monitor racially-different newcomers or who walked past the houses of other newcomers, pointing and whispering invectives. <img width="2000" height="2015" width_o="2000" height_o="2015" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2c1e371ec0f661680adbb77e1c76f1ab1ba8dc54dd9425b462f9c7c58cdcb54e/RenewNewarkp41.jpeg" data-mid="149351612" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/2c1e371ec0f661680adbb77e1c76f1ab1ba8dc54dd9425b462f9c7c58cdcb54e/RenewNewarkp41.jpeg" /> Digression: Sound as Affective Threshold My experience of sound as an affective threshold was first inspired by my experience of Robertson Hall, built on the Princeton University campus by Minoru Yamasaki, the architect of the World Trade Center, in the same years as the Newark campus was being constructed. Robertson Hall is shaped as a symmetrical rectangle, with identical entrances on its two parallel, longer sides. Walking into the building from either entrance, one steps into a central lobby with a high ceiling reaching up to a skylight and an internal balcony with offices ringing its upper third. Yamasaki envisioned the lobby as a communal meeting space in which scholars, emerging from the quiet isolation of their quasi-monkish office ‘cells,’ could join the community of scholars and the shared deliberations of the public sphere. At the same time, the narrow, vertical rise of the space also suggests the cathedral, as the thin lines of the design elements draw the gaze upwards to the light and invoke the quiet contemplation of the sacred space. Both interpretations – communal space and sacred space – are possible given the spatial design, and both modes are in fact experienced by the entrant, not simultaneously, but separately and distinctly depending on which entrance s/he uses. The doors – as structural thresholds – are identical in their shape, design, and materials. But if one enters from one side, one has the feeling of stepping into a communal space, in which people lounge and speak in natural tones of voice. If one enters from the other side, one has the feeling of stepping into a sacred space, one of hushed tones, with the imperative to lower one’s voice out of respect for the quiet sanctuary. What produces this profound difference in affect? Not the structural threshold – not the doors, or the walls – nor the activities occurring inside. If you enter the one side and then the other within a matter of minutes, with the same occupants inside, you still get the difference in sensory experience and affect. The difference is produced by the sound outside of the building. Outside of one entrance is a grassy knoll that slopes steeply down to a street intersection, making it inaccessible for people to sit upon. The grass lawn is empty and quiet. Entering from that side, the lobby seems like a space of social community, where normal tones of voice can be used in the hum of conversation. Outside of the other entrance is a large plaza with a recessed fountain that invites visitors to walk down into its flat basin. The fountain spray is loud and has the sonic effect of a waterfall, matching the noise of the families and children who play in the fountain. Entering from this side, the lobby seems unusually still and hushed, deep in serene contemplation, cathedral-like. <img width="2000" height="2425" width_o="2000" height_o="2425" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/555bff3c7d7eab3ef7adceee7b017d17d7e77249af47623e38a8f384624a606a/Princeton.jpeg" data-mid="149351658" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/555bff3c7d7eab3ef7adceee7b017d17d7e77249af47623e38a8f384624a606a/Princeton.jpeg" /> https://sitelinearts.org/Floater Sat, 09 Jul 2022 20:40:30 +0000 Site Lines https://sitelinearts.org/Floater <img width="1140" height="922" width_o="1140" height_o="922" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/634e4039b82fb4852bbcb11a1e14889f21b8619f7487273784df47c0bd4a5b57/Screenshot-2026-02-08-at-21.11.25.png" data-mid="244610079" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/634e4039b82fb4852bbcb11a1e14889f21b8619f7487273784df47c0bd4a5b57/Screenshot-2026-02-08-at-21.11.25.png" /> Lab + Grid, version 2, 2026 HALSEY STREET: NODES + RHYTHMS + RHIZOMES This project maps the nodes of Halsey Street, with each location as a rhizome of meaning, texture, and horizontal significance. Centerless, the rhizomes deterritorialize, seek their desires, spread and connect. They flee the Grid and its reifications. Natives of the mazeway, their stories are affective, sonic, and sensory. CHEAP,&nbsp; &nbsp;TAWDRY,&nbsp; &nbsp;FLY-BY-NIGHTIn 1963, Newark’s Division of City Planning eyed Halsey Street as the ideal location for an outdoor commercial promenade, conceived by none other than Victor Gruen, father of the indoor shopping mall. To accomplish this consumer paradise, the city’s urban planners determined to remove ‘the cheap, the tawdry and the fly-by-night establishments’ that, established though they were, seemed intruders in the idealized streetscape of ‘quality shops’ and department stores.Grid sought to tame Labyrinth, and Legibility to clear Mazeway &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;Halsey Streetscape Map <img width="576" height="1344" width_o="576" height_o="1344" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/57253e251010ab2dc9c65818d662db4f185ddd5e645e764c0965a9b909b63ae3/Screenshot-2026-02-08-at-21.57.59.png" data-mid="244616190" border="0" data-scale="86" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/576/i/57253e251010ab2dc9c65818d662db4f185ddd5e645e764c0965a9b909b63ae3/Screenshot-2026-02-08-at-21.57.59.png" /><img width="684" height="164" width_o="684" height_o="164" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/cc3afbe5ccb7ef1204135e01b5e6035d0d5da059ab89052306512c7e308c21a1/Screenshot-2026-02-08-at-21.59.19.png" data-mid="244616195" border="0" data-scale="78" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/684/i/cc3afbe5ccb7ef1204135e01b5e6035d0d5da059ab89052306512c7e308c21a1/Screenshot-2026-02-08-at-21.59.19.png" /> <img width="2000" height="1000" width_o="2000" height_o="1000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9d5549018dcf6c268cbfe71ceef014da57f308d3955a105411c0c25120ff30b3/BackWallMap.jpeg" data-mid="147510956" border="0" data-rotation="-180" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/9d5549018dcf6c268cbfe71ceef014da57f308d3955a105411c0c25120ff30b3/BackWallMap.jpeg" /> Lab + Grid, version 1, 2023 <img width="792" height="1224" width_o="792" height_o="1224" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/203adf41bd06fa3e72bbda5ab21449201ee73343616ec1144bc7a8609baf18a2/mana-event.jpg" data-mid="171305106" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/792/i/203adf41bd06fa3e72bbda5ab21449201ee73343616ec1144bc7a8609baf18a2/mana-event.jpg" /> https://sitelinearts.org/Manifesto-of-Method Tue, 03 Mar 2026 04:29:59 +0000 Site Lines https://sitelinearts.org/Manifesto-of-Method Why Rhizomes: A Manifesto of Methods What makes a city? That question has been answered in many ways, each answer in accordance with the concerns of its time: a city can be made by urban planners from above, and remade by technological paradigm shifts or capitalist recuperation; its contours emerge from the cyclical rhythms of daily life and the spontaneous actions of inhabitants as they break through the homogenization of space; it finds its form in the mazeways of neighborhoods that foster familiarity and confidence; it gains heterotopic shape through sensory boundaries or is opened up to the world through flows and global mobilities. In each case, the city is seen as a tangible entity, its proper name giving it perceived existence across time, placing it in a “nowhen” of immanence and essence.We can write the history of Halsey Street in this classic manner, as a chronological account of the shaping and reshaping of the street from above through urban renewal, municipal ordinances, and enforcement, and from below through the practices of everyday life that either adhered to those regulations or found tactical maneuvers around their restrictions.&nbsp; But as illuminative as such a history would be, does a linear, overt account truly capture the whole of urban experience?&nbsp; Writing at the height of poststructuralist thought in the 1970s and 1980s, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari used the metaphor of the rhizome -- the underground weed root -- to describe human experience. In contrast to the tree, with its rigid, stratified (normative) structure from crown down to roots that fix order and priority in place, the rhizome spreads horizontally. Each rhizome connects promiscuously, transiently, opportunistically with other rhizomes. As Deleuze and Guattari write: “The tree imposes the verb ‘to be,’ but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, ‘and...and...and...”; and further: “a rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo” (25). As the rhizome flees any inherent structure, it also disrupts order: “The rhizome is an anti-genealogy” (11). If the tree represents the causal ‘line of descent,’ rhizomes intrude and interrupt that causality, at times massing and thickening into ‘bulbs,’ at other times diverting meaning into alternate connections. In the context of lived experience, the rhizome deterritorializes, respecting individual experience and liberating individuals from any forcible inscription into a ‘higher’ narrative. To do justice to the concept of the rhizome, we will narrate Halsey Street from the perspective of both overt rhythms of development and rhizomatic diffusions, allowing the tendrils of experience to expand and flow according to chance, with the expectation that occasionally a bulb will appear: the bulb of a rhythm, where flows coalesce into an identifiable narrative ‘event.’ To Be More Precise = Who We Are and What We ProposeWe started with Newark Rhythms as a project to chronicle the rhythms of urban renewal in Newark. Those rhythms included the urban planning that displaced people, but also the rhythms that made the city an organic space, from the rhythms of migration, to the sensory experience in the city streets, to the rhythms of music, sound, friendship, and community. From there, we moved on to the Labyrinth and the Grid to capture the phenomenological experience of four gridded streets -- Broad Street, McCarter Highway, Mulberry Street, and Halsey Street -- laid out in parallel rows but with starkly different atmospheres. We had two goals: 1. to look for urban thresholds: the sensory boundaries that divide inside from outside, determining who gets to go where, when, and how; 2. to tease out the labyrinth of experience: the ways in which people lived in the spaces laid out for them by planners and reappropriated them to suit their own purposes. We gave physical expression to the constrast between Lab + Grid in a series of affective and sensory maps, shaped into a mazeway. We now move on to the Halsey Street project to connect these ideas with the deterritorializtion inherent in Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome. Descriptions of rhythms, cause and effect, all types of histories both progressive and oppressive, are territorializations: they fix a vast assemblage of experiences and actions into a narrative structure of what is ‘important’ versus that which is extraneous. These narratives are necessary to create meaning, but they are also hierarchical and illusionary. As Deleuze and Guattari note instead, a society, a city, a streetscape: all are best grasped by what is fleeing from the impositions of meaning-making, by what is trying to be let loose from the strictures of normatives and narratives, by what is deterritorializing. We propose to write the history of Halsey Street on all of these levels. The first step is to describe the street rhizomatically. No one story is more significant or important or causal than any other.&nbsp; All nodes on the street are connected in a proliferating, horizontal way to other nodes. We aim to track the street’s Fluchtlinie, to borrow a German term that means both a line of flight/fleeing and a street’s building line or facade. Chronicling the assemblage of nodes along the street’s line of sight serves to identify what is fleeing, what is escaping the confines of narrative expectations and cooptations. In other words: what is there, is simply there.Our point is to aim for completeness as a form of equity as well as eternal expansion, the way that rhizomes grow and spread horizontally: every node is documented, regardless of its position in any narrative. From that initial rhizomatic structure, we will then piece together, in more traditional form, a story of the labyrinth: the spaces of sanctuary that resisted the surveillance and supervision of the forces of order. We will then set the story of the Grid, the city as laid out by urban planning, akimbo to the story of the labyrinth and the local rhythms that eluded urban gridding. https://sitelinearts.org/Unmappable Wed, 27 Jul 2022 13:53:20 +0000 Site Lines https://sitelinearts.org/Unmappable Mapping the Unmappable Question 1: How can we convey historical, affective, and sensory experiences of the city in visible form on a map? In what ways could we move beyond the top-down, god’s-eye view privileged by city-planners and politicians, and instead represent the richer messier, more human experience on the ground? What kinds of aesthetic tools can we use to go beyond the illusory reality of photography, to capture a more ‘suggestive’ representation of experience? <img width="2238" height="422" width_o="2238" height_o="422" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4c517510bbe32a2063b7c98d50e939d4a2d29799f23507bb36ff2e55ec824f3a/1947-plan-9---2.jpeg" data-mid="151558142" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4c517510bbe32a2063b7c98d50e939d4a2d29799f23507bb36ff2e55ec824f3a/1947-plan-9---2.jpeg" /> Question 2: Can resisting ‘legible’ behavior become a set of urban tactics? In his classic 1960 text, The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch developed a schematic classification of urban elements that make a city legible. He also implied that legibility is synonymous with a ‘pleasing’ aesthetic atmosphere. The drive for legibility and its normative aesthetic vision rely on the exclusion of elements that disturb the planner’s sense of balance, for instance ‘ethnic’ or ‘class’ neighborhoods in Lynch’s case. The construction of a desired atmosphere implicitly requires the control of both the aesthetics of the built environment and the aesthetics of the residents’ behavior. Behavior that is disturbing – in every sense of the term – is deemed illegible. What seems illegible to the dominant strata is legible to those ‘below’ and on the margins, however, as they inhabit these spaces and behaviors. Rather than illegible, such spaces and behaviors are anti-legible as part of the inhabitants’ mazeway. Can acts of anti-legibility be regarded as creative forms of endurance and persistence? How can we avoid romanticizing anti-legibility as overt resistance, raising the danger of ignoring the conditions of structural domination that create the necessity for survival strategies in the first place? <img width="2218" height="417" width_o="2218" height_o="417" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e1f249c7285d5dcc16e28d87fd1779919b9c85fc53c5144512641fcb90e8ffed/1947-plan-9---5.jpeg" data-mid="249126117" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e1f249c7285d5dcc16e28d87fd1779919b9c85fc53c5144512641fcb90e8ffed/1947-plan-9---5.jpeg" /> Question 3: What are the urban arts, beyond the formal institutions of the culture industry? What types of activities would we include in that concept? We aim, here, to look beyond official, overtly funded artistic initiatives, which are often a tool used for gentrification. Instead we are looking for more spontaneous, organic forms of creative expression. In the former, the culture industry places its mark on the urban space in the construction of arts venues to draw suburbanites into the city. While such programs foster the arts, they also reconfigure art-consumerism as an engine of economic growth. The commodification of creative expression overlooks the many ways in which city residents create their own aesthetic experiences, as well as the social communities that bind these experiences together. The organic urban arts focus more on local, spontaneous, and social forms of creative expression, such as the narrative practices of street-corner culture, sidewalk boom box parties, the rhythms and choreography of people moving down city streets, and embodied social performance in dance clubs, movie theaters, parks, train stations, and other venues of sociability. <img width="2244" height="542" width_o="2244" height_o="542" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c721c67e0bbf0ee1e8020ac0a4c301781fafe2d8598270d25a0eb998f5856442/1947-plan-9---1.jpeg" data-mid="249126324" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c721c67e0bbf0ee1e8020ac0a4c301781fafe2d8598270d25a0eb998f5856442/1947-plan-9---1.jpeg" /> https://sitelinearts.org/Urban-Arts-total-text Wed, 27 Jul 2022 13:53:00 +0000 Site Lines https://sitelinearts.org/Urban-Arts-total-text Urban Arts&nbsp;What are the urban arts, beyond the formal institutions of the culture industry? What types of activities would we include in that concept? We aim, here, to look beyond official, overtly funded artistic initiatives which are often a tool in intentional gentrification efforts. Instead, we are looking for more spontaneous, organic forms of creative expression. In official initiatives, the culture industry places its mark on the urban space, for instance in the construction of arts venues to draw suburbanites into the city, or the repurposing of historical structures into lifestyle or entertainment venues. While overt arts programs aim to foster the arts, they are also intended to reconfigure the city as a site of arts consumerism as an engine of economic growth. The commodification of creative expression overlooks the many ways in which city residents create their own aesthetic experiences and the social communities that bind these experiences together. Instead, can we develop a concept of the urban arts that focuses more on local, spontaneous, and social forms of creative expression? We might include, here, the narrative practices of street-corner culture, sidewalk boom box parties, the rhythms and choreography of people moving down city streets, and performative, embodied expression in dance clubs, movie theaters, parks, train stations, and other venues of sociability. We would also explore how the urban arts could be a means to take possession of the urban space, as a tactical form of self-assertion; and, as such, what value do we place on spontaneous, organic urban arts versus formal initiatives funded by state or city funds, for instance between graffiti versus officially supported murals painted on historic storefronts? Mapping the Unmappable In The City Lost and Found, Greg Foster-Rice explores how the Master Plans of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles changed in the second half of the 1960s, from an earlier model that focused exclusively on demographic data and technical infrastructure questions, to a later emphasis on quality-of-life issues. The Master Plan of New York, in particular, tried to highlight the city as it existed, rather than projecting an idealized vision of the city as it should be (i.e. what it would become once the plan was put into place). Even with this new emphasis, the purportedly more authentic experience of the city was captured only through photographic fragments. The serial but disconnected nature of the photographs implied that they were objective points of data, appropriate to the genre of a technocratic manual. In reality, they presented a highly choreographed vision of the city: if the images told any story at all, it was the story of the photographers who curated these arbitrary fragments into a simulacrum of ‘real’ everyday urban life. In this context, we ask the question: how can we convey historical, affective, and sensory experiences of the city in visible form on a map? In what ways could we move beyond the top-down, god’s-eye view privileged by city-planners and politicians, and instead represent the richer messier, more human experience on the ground? What kinds of aesthetic tools can we use to go beyond the illusory reality of photography, to capture a more ‘suggestive’ representation of experience? Amplifying Voices From the standpoint of reception history, we aim to amplify the voices of subaltern groups who do not have access to printed publications such as newspapers or memoirs to tell their story. Ego-documents and oral histories provide one method of amplifying these voices, but with the caveat that such sources are highly selective and often based on the happenstance of how the voices were recorded. Other techniques include teasing out testimonies from incidental sources, for instance court depositions in which common assumptions or viewpoints are expressed in the margins, or focusing on praxis over overt discourse: examining the circulation of material culture mobility patterns, sociability venues, visual culture, the appropriation of the built environment, to&nbsp; name a few examples. What innovative techniques can we use to amplify the voices of the dispossessed in the city? Decentering Vision Urban thresholds are about access and affect. They are created through intangible sensory boundaries that insinuate who gets to go where and when, and with what kinds of expressive behavior. Even though the physical space of a city may ostensibly be open to everyone moving&nbsp; within it, sensory and affective thresholds enable access for some pedestrians and not for others, creating insiders and outsiders, inclusion and exclusion. Vision is a powerful tool in creating urban thresholds, in particular the vision of the city planner, who lays out prescribed uses of the urban space, and the surveillance practiced by authorities and residents to enforce those norms. But urban thresholds also rely on sonic, kinetic, haptic, and olfactory cues, which feed into affective responses. Moving beyond the emphasis on visibility as a strategy of control, we ask how the embodied process of moving through an urban space creates a sense of entitlement to, or exclusion from, the full and free use of the city? What kinds of examples of urban thresholds can we identify, historically or today, in Newark, for instance in the four streets of the Grid? City as Labyrinth In The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch developed a schematic classification of urban elements that make a city legible. He also implied, as a corollary, that legibility is synonymous with a ‘pleasing’ aesthetic atmosphere. The drive for legibility and its normative aesthetic vision both rely, though, on the exclusion of elements that disturb the planner’s sense of balance, for instance ‘ethnic neighborhoods’ in Lynch’s case. The construction of a desired atmosphere thus implicitly requires the control of both the aesthetics of the built environment and the aesthetics of the residents’ behavior. Behavior that is confusing or disturbing – in every sense of the term – is regarded as illegible. What seems like illegibility to the dominant strata may be legible to those ‘below’ and on the margins, though, as they inhabit these illegible spaces and these behaviors. Rather than illegible, such spaces and behaviors are anti-legible, carrying equal weight and right as the dominant strains of legibility. Can acts of anti-legibility be regarded as creative forms of endurance and persistence? Is there a danger of heroicizing anti-legibility as outright resistance and thus romanticizing the conditions of structural domination that create the necessity for survival strategies in the first place? https://sitelinearts.org/Halsey-Streetscape Mon, 09 Feb 2026 22:16:00 +0000 Site Lines https://sitelinearts.org/Halsey-Streetscape &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;HALSEY STREETSCAPE 1964 WASHINGTON PLACENewark Teachers Association&nbsp; =&nbsp; &nbsp; 9 J. Chesloff, furrier&nbsp; =&nbsp; &nbsp; 11 H. Kaplan, optometrist + vacant&nbsp; =&nbsp; 23 Personal Hearing Aid Service + Robert Hair&nbsp;Stylist + vacant =&nbsp; 25 Henri Hairdresser + Henri Joubault&nbsp; =&nbsp; 27 Halsey Medical Ctr + A. Baldwin Jr. MD + D.H. Rosenfeld MD&nbsp; =&nbsp; 29 L. Scherling, optometrist + vacant&nbsp; =&nbsp; &nbsp;31 M. Spitz, furrier + L. Louis, hair goods&nbsp;=&nbsp; 33 + World Wide Handicrafts&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Igoe Bros., home appliance distributors&nbsp; =&nbsp; 35 Max Braunstein, furriers&nbsp; =&nbsp; &nbsp;41 M. L. Chanko, optometrist + vacant&nbsp; =&nbsp; 43 Snedeker &amp; Ambrose, opticians +&nbsp;Charles B. Ambrose =&nbsp; 45 + Costello’s Travel Agency&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; Rabin &amp; Krueger, picture framing + Frank Coggins + vacant&nbsp; =&nbsp; 47 Luggage Repair Shop + Eaton luggage&nbsp; =&nbsp; 49&nbsp;+ The Forty&nbsp;Nine Co., luggage + vacant&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; William Lillys + vacant&nbsp; =&nbsp; &nbsp;51 Brides Shoppe&nbsp; =&nbsp; 53 Gabriel Handbag Co. + Hoagie Hut&nbsp; =&nbsp; 55 J. B. Reilly, church goods&nbsp; =&nbsp; 57 H. M. Troy Art Supplies + Helen McAfee + Harry Troy&nbsp; =&nbsp; 59 Brewster Bldg = Bel-Ami Beauty Salon&nbsp; =&nbsp; &nbsp;61 + The Plastic Shop, upholsterers&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; WASHINGTON PARK = HARRIET TUBMAN SQUARE&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; starting point of the pedestrian street mall <img width="760" height="874" width_o="760" height_o="874" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4fd9143591d533f6b5a175e0cc4bd03dbdf5682fd2d5264fe6cfe346474ace05/H-Streetscape-1.png" data-mid="244648363" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/760/i/4fd9143591d533f6b5a175e0cc4bd03dbdf5682fd2d5264fe6cfe346474ace05/H-Streetscape-1.png" /> WASHINGTON PLACE 12&nbsp; =&nbsp; Mike’s Barber 16&nbsp; &nbsp; =&nbsp; Halsey Luncheonette 22&nbsp; &nbsp;=&nbsp; Smith’s Rug Shop 24&nbsp; &nbsp;=&nbsp; Coon Wilbur Shoes 26&nbsp; &nbsp;=&nbsp; M. A. Short (Mrs.), furnished rooms + Bene beauty shop 28&nbsp; &nbsp;=&nbsp; H. A. Greene sporting goods 30&nbsp; &nbsp;=&nbsp; F. Michelli books 32&nbsp; &nbsp;=&nbsp; Newark Exchange Inc, knit goods 34&nbsp; &nbsp;=&nbsp; Josef Hairdressers 36&nbsp; &nbsp;=&nbsp; William H. Jamouneau Co, elec appliances 38&nbsp; &nbsp;=&nbsp; Hertz School of Music recording studio &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;+ Hertz Studios music teacher + vacant 60&nbsp; &nbsp;=&nbsp; Hahnes &amp; Co, back of store parking NEW STREET Glorified Poodles dog grooming&nbsp; =&nbsp; 67 + Typewriter &amp; Office Machine Co + B.L. Jobes, furn. rooms&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Kaufman Parking&nbsp; =&nbsp; 69 Kaufman Carpet&nbsp; =&nbsp; 77 Tom &amp; Danny beauty shop + Demirzian’s Oriental Rugs&nbsp; =&nbsp; 79 + Hearthstone Building &amp; Loan Assn + Cary &amp; Kenny pictures&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;Richard Niederbuehl + Volunteers of America&nbsp; =&nbsp; 81 Tumek P, pictures frames&nbsp; =&nbsp; 83 Teddie Brooker + Leslie Evans + William Johnson&nbsp; =&nbsp; 85 + William Roney + Andrew Hedegus + vacant&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Morris Music Co + Boston Music Co&nbsp; =&nbsp; 87 + Keegan J.J., opticians + The Art Gallery&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; Halsey Fabrics + vacant&nbsp; =&nbsp; 89 Samuel Klein &amp; Co, acct + Telephone Workers Union of NJ&nbsp; =&nbsp; &nbsp;91 + Drill Max Inc, builders + McBee Royal typewriters&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; + vacant + vacant + Pension Life Insurance Co of America&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; Blums Yarns + The Uniform Store, clothing + vacant&nbsp; =&nbsp; 95 Christian Book Store, The Evangelistic Committee of Newark&nbsp; =&nbsp; 97 Interstate Industrial Security Co + J. Deegan, shoes&nbsp; =&nbsp; 99 + Beneficial Finance Co of Essex County&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; Walk-Rite Juvenile Shoes&nbsp; =&nbsp; 101 Budget Shop, clothing + Orange Mattress Co&nbsp; =&nbsp; 103 The Hoagie Hut + vacant + vacant + vacant + vacant + vacant&nbsp; =&nbsp; 105 Maiden Lane Parking&nbsp; =&nbsp; 107 Queen Quality Shoes Shop&nbsp; =&nbsp; &nbsp;117 Janet Shops Inc + Lamston’s Five and Ten&nbsp; =&nbsp; &nbsp;121 vacant&nbsp; =&nbsp; 123 Air-O-Pedic Shoe Shop + Park Beauty School + vacant =&nbsp; 125 Cut Rate Watch Co + vacant&nbsp; =&nbsp; 127 Red Cross Shoes&nbsp; =&nbsp; 129 <img width="814" height="968" width_o="814" height_o="968" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/881dacd60ea7afb2064dabf2c75e2138bf6899d6e95a32c3186b28d11ec63e7d/H-Streetscape-2.png" data-mid="244648368" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/814/i/881dacd60ea7afb2064dabf2c75e2138bf6899d6e95a32c3186b28d11ec63e7d/H-Streetscape-2.png" /> NEW STREET 66&nbsp; &nbsp;=&nbsp; Todd Martha, milliners 68&nbsp; &nbsp;=&nbsp; Dervieu Dry Cleaners + Green’s Sewing Center + vacant store 70&nbsp; &nbsp;=&nbsp; Franklin Electric Co + Kay’s Reweaving &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; + A.R. Detamore (Mrs.), furnished rooms 72&nbsp; &nbsp;=&nbsp; vacant 74&nbsp; &nbsp;=&nbsp; Kresge-Newark, parking 88&nbsp; &nbsp;=&nbsp; H.M. Brody, optometrist + Essex Textile Co. + vacant 90&nbsp; &nbsp;=&nbsp; J.P. Mazza, barber 100 =&nbsp; S. Klein 102 =&nbsp; Fabric Gardens, linens 104 =&nbsp; Berks106 =&nbsp; R&amp;T Stores, variety + Christa &amp; Mehegan School of Dancing &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;+ Edwards Lunch + Central X-Ray School + Villa Beauty Salon&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;+ Tall Towne Fashions 108 =&nbsp; Weiner’s Shoe Shop110&nbsp; =&nbsp; T’Jais gift shop112&nbsp; =&nbsp; Harmon’s shoes + vacant + Buff’s Jimmy Stores, restaurant 114&nbsp; =&nbsp; Terzi R, jeweler 116&nbsp; =&nbsp; McCrory’s 5c to 10c Store 120 =&nbsp; Kresge Department Store RAYMOND BOULEVARDvacant&nbsp; =&nbsp; 137 Andrea International, wigs&nbsp; =&nbsp; 139 Strauss Building = Academy Optical Co + Flair Beauty Salon&nbsp; =&nbsp; 141 + Brody Employment Agency + Seaboard Finance Co&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; + Audio Visual Communications + W. Kidde Constructors&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; + N.D. Kurkin, MD + JoElla Alteration Shop + vacant x6&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;P.B. Levy, jeweler + M. Smallzman, optometrist&nbsp; =&nbsp; 143 Stynes restaurant + The Gift Box, clothing&nbsp; =&nbsp; 145 Singer Sewing Machine + Jewel Gift Shop&nbsp; =&nbsp; 147 Weissbard Bros, druggists&nbsp; =&nbsp; 149 Milmar Hosiery Shops + Arnold’s Shoes&nbsp; =&nbsp; &nbsp;151 vacant&nbsp; =&nbsp; 153 Gibralter Building of Prudential Insurance Co of America&nbsp; =&nbsp; 155Bambergers Department Store&nbsp; =&nbsp; &nbsp;161Down Town Club&nbsp; =&nbsp; 169 <img width="850" height="784" width_o="850" height_o="784" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/96b14f8fa02e962321b82712751a9062674634ad5c472c090b36140d9a1a6657/H-Streetscape-3.png" data-mid="244887102" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/850/i/96b14f8fa02e962321b82712751a9062674634ad5c472c090b36140d9a1a6657/H-Streetscape-3.png" /> Corner of Market and Broad = ‘Four Corners’ end point of the pedestrian street mall RAYMOND BOULEVARD136&nbsp; =&nbsp; Farmer Fanny Candy Shop138&nbsp; = &nbsp;Wide Style Shoes140&nbsp; =&nbsp; French Millinery, Crown Tie Shop, &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;+ Newark Dressmakers Supply Co144&nbsp; =&nbsp; Loft Candy Co 146&nbsp; =&nbsp; vacant 148&nbsp; =&nbsp; vacant 156&nbsp; =&nbsp; vacant 160&nbsp; =&nbsp; Wolf’s Charmley Cut Rate Drug Shop 164&nbsp; =&nbsp; Paris Jewelry 166&nbsp; =&nbsp; Albert’s hosiery 168&nbsp; =&nbsp; Gale Frocks 170&nbsp; =&nbsp; Ohrbach’s MARKET STREET vacant&nbsp; =&nbsp; 189 vacant&nbsp; =&nbsp; 193 vacant&nbsp; =&nbsp; 197 Uncle Joe’s Corner Club&nbsp; =&nbsp; 199 G’s Luncheonette&nbsp; =&nbsp; 201 Alpha Rubber Stamp Co + Halsey Gift Shop&nbsp; =&nbsp; &nbsp;211 + Johnny’s Barber Shop + vacant + Branford Sign Shop&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; The Newark Star-Ledger + vacant&nbsp; =&nbsp; 225 vacant&nbsp; =&nbsp; 227 Reliable Parking&nbsp; =&nbsp; 229 vacant&nbsp; =&nbsp; 237 Tip Top restaurant&nbsp; =&nbsp; 243 <img width="476" height="450" width_o="476" height_o="450" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/86c83b6b6c4e9efe272e8390e2899fcd92217e19c4f24b8c72c6896d8b0971e0/Screenshot-2026-02-16-at-10.32.48.png" data-mid="244887104" border="0" data-scale="95" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/476/i/86c83b6b6c4e9efe272e8390e2899fcd92217e19c4f24b8c72c6896d8b0971e0/Screenshot-2026-02-16-at-10.32.48.png" /> MARKET STREET 196&nbsp; =&nbsp; Zinn’s Health Food + L. Palumbo, barber 198&nbsp; =&nbsp; J. Singer, stationery 214&nbsp; =&nbsp; Halsey Ticket Service + vacant 216&nbsp; =&nbsp; French Dry Cleaners 218&nbsp; =&nbsp; I.H. Rocklin, Mrs., optician 226&nbsp; =&nbsp; Shubert Parking 240&nbsp; =&nbsp; Ray’s Parking 246&nbsp; =&nbsp; Ronal Jewelry + vacant WILLIAM STREET B.L.M Jewelers, watch repairs&nbsp; =&nbsp; 259 vacant&nbsp; =&nbsp; &nbsp;261 Berry Solomon Co, store fixtures + Brilliant Fashions&nbsp; =&nbsp; 263 + Newark Star Dress + vacant&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; vacant&nbsp; =&nbsp; 265 United Auto Speciality Co&nbsp; =&nbsp; 269 vacant&nbsp; =&nbsp; &nbsp;271 vacant&nbsp; =&nbsp; 275 Arch Crown Tags + Jordan Services Inc, TV equipment&nbsp; =&nbsp; 277 M. Rutkins Electric Supply Co&nbsp; =&nbsp; 279 vacant&nbsp; =&nbsp; 287 C.C. Jacquet + Earl’s A &amp; T Service, auto repair&nbsp; =&nbsp; 289 + Mack Boring Co + Samuel Ponner&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Industrial Electronics Corp&nbsp; =&nbsp; 295 Newark Female Charitable Society + Gertrude Barnes&nbsp; =&nbsp; 305 + vacant&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <img width="422" height="338" width_o="422" height_o="338" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/812a349a055649c91ac9e5b8cc45908b6c869a4a8e283777df8597187350cc38/Screenshot-2026-02-16-at-10.33.37.png" data-mid="244887106" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/422/i/812a349a055649c91ac9e5b8cc45908b6c869a4a8e283777df8597187350cc38/Screenshot-2026-02-16-at-10.33.37.png" /> WILLIAM STREET 260&nbsp; =&nbsp; Electra-Craft Inc + vacant 262&nbsp; =&nbsp; vacant 264&nbsp; =&nbsp; Mack Boring &amp; Parts Co, auto accessories 268&nbsp; =&nbsp; Economy Auto Supply Co 270&nbsp; =&nbsp; vacant + Johnny Dunnell + Josephine Young + Marion Palmer 272&nbsp; =&nbsp; Ella B. Morton + D.H. Will Serious + vacant 274&nbsp; =&nbsp; Nina Stewart + vacant 276&nbsp; =&nbsp; vacant + vacant + vacant 280&nbsp; =&nbsp; vacant 282&nbsp; =&nbsp; vacant 286&nbsp; =&nbsp; vacant 292&nbsp; =&nbsp; vacant HILL STREETvacant&nbsp; =&nbsp; 323 vacant&nbsp; =&nbsp; &nbsp;381 <img width="1006" height="348" width_o="1006" height_o="348" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c5a2d40e402fa9881e5e279fbae6734f973eafe2708eb1db1910fe96a257ee78/Screenshot-2026-06-04-at-18.03.27.png" data-mid="249131612" border="0" data-scale="73" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c5a2d40e402fa9881e5e279fbae6734f973eafe2708eb1db1910fe96a257ee78/Screenshot-2026-06-04-at-18.03.27.png" /> <img width="402" height="540" width_o="402" height_o="540" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d466eb8a809db6cd9d5ff2b4ca3c21a0ea7829a3630b15bee243816e8c4af68d/Screenshot-2026-02-16-at-10.35.03.png" data-mid="244887107" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/402/i/d466eb8a809db6cd9d5ff2b4ca3c21a0ea7829a3630b15bee243816e8c4af68d/Screenshot-2026-02-16-at-10.35.03.png" /> HILL STREET 358&nbsp; =&nbsp; vacant <img width="438" height="236" width_o="438" height_o="236" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/39f59a803c76938f6268c8956eebffd9ab7e7f45c30485b440900e4e2e0676fe/Screenshot-2026-06-04-at-18.07.52.png" data-mid="249131649" border="0" data-scale="33" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/438/i/39f59a803c76938f6268c8956eebffd9ab7e7f45c30485b440900e4e2e0676fe/Screenshot-2026-06-04-at-18.07.52.png" /> WEST KINNEY STREET vacant store&nbsp; =&nbsp; 383 vacant&nbsp; =&nbsp; 385 &nbsp;Bennie Ariel + William Young + vacant&nbsp; =&nbsp; 389 Four Hundred Social Club + vacant&nbsp; =&nbsp; &nbsp;391 Cozzolino Printing Co&nbsp; =&nbsp; 393 Tessler &amp; Sons, auto painters&nbsp; =&nbsp; 395 Hagin &amp; Kaplin&nbsp; =&nbsp; 405 Grben Hobaidah + vacant&nbsp; =&nbsp; 409 vacant store&nbsp; =&nbsp; &nbsp; 411 vacant&nbsp; =&nbsp; &nbsp;413 vacant&nbsp; =&nbsp; &nbsp;415 Club Toledo Tavern + vacant&nbsp; =&nbsp; &nbsp;417 Scott’s Auto Repair&nbsp; =&nbsp; &nbsp;419 Lincoln Auto Repair + Halsey Parking Service&nbsp; =&nbsp; 427 <img width="426" height="396" width_o="426" height_o="396" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4fdb40322e444dea2098ddbab02dba3eaeccfe52ea151455e68f7ca7dfca350a/Screenshot-2026-02-16-at-10.35.19.png" data-mid="244887118" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/426/i/4fdb40322e444dea2098ddbab02dba3eaeccfe52ea151455e68f7ca7dfca350a/Screenshot-2026-02-16-at-10.35.19.png" /> WEST KINNEY STREET 390&nbsp; =&nbsp; Cities Service Oil Co 400&nbsp; =&nbsp; vacant 408&nbsp; =&nbsp; Usebius Maldondo + Antonio Melendes + Johnnie Hudson 412&nbsp; &nbsp;=&nbsp; Barbara Products, ironing board covers&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; + Textile Mills Co + vacant LINCOLN PARK https://sitelinearts.org/Muse-Report-1963 Sun, 01 Mar 2026 23:47:48 +0000 Site Lines https://sitelinearts.org/Muse-Report-1963 Our Muse = Halsey Street Mall: Preliminary Report, March 1963 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. <img width="2454" height="1460" width_o="2454" height_o="1460" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1ac1592e03808eb45ba428cf4bd837ba7d748a2003da2d116e6a5b4dd85c44d1/kiosks.png" data-mid="245909793" border="0" data-scale="72" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/1ac1592e03808eb45ba428cf4bd837ba7d748a2003da2d116e6a5b4dd85c44d1/kiosks.png" /> <img width="2836" height="1454" width_o="2836" height_o="1454" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/eb46c0fd27369d5797e52c878306d6630fc11ed2be66639bbe92c7cb516ed072/Screenshot-2026-03-11-at-18.10.28.png" data-mid="245909616" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/eb46c0fd27369d5797e52c878306d6630fc11ed2be66639bbe92c7cb516ed072/Screenshot-2026-03-11-at-18.10.28.png" /> 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. &nbsp; 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. <img width="1774" height="1138" width_o="1774" height_o="1138" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f15b31e4ee9c8b26e3d62e73b7f4dd007c92781f474468cb1bb26f1a6101c736/Our-Town-Halsey-3.png" data-mid="245918652" border="0" data-scale="49" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f15b31e4ee9c8b26e3d62e73b7f4dd007c92781f474468cb1bb26f1a6101c736/Our-Town-Halsey-3.png" /><img width="2374" height="1836" width_o="2374" height_o="1836" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8796a1ae9f69a910e314e9500d5f34a7f4a7612def1725bebc3ef0e232a31dc9/Our-Town-Halsey-2.png" data-mid="245918650" border="0" data-scale="41" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/8796a1ae9f69a910e314e9500d5f34a7f4a7612def1725bebc3ef0e232a31dc9/Our-Town-Halsey-2.png" /><img width="1138" height="1428" width_o="1138" height_o="1428" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f81cb00cb56ce4d698b3dfe4f35d3bb665c95d8554cda3a0502c12d79fb06ab3/Our-Town-Halsey-1.png" data-mid="245918653" border="0" data-scale="63" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f81cb00cb56ce4d698b3dfe4f35d3bb665c95d8554cda3a0502c12d79fb06ab3/Our-Town-Halsey-1.png" /> <img width="1472" height="974" width_o="1472" height_o="974" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e4677a1b85dbeec60dff6c0ce8a848539b62c3593a0090259386c72c6bd4ff6e/Screenshot-2026-03-11-at-21.05.18.png" data-mid="245918699" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e4677a1b85dbeec60dff6c0ce8a848539b62c3593a0090259386c72c6bd4ff6e/Screenshot-2026-03-11-at-21.05.18.png" /> 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 &amp; 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&nbsp;Master Plan of 1964. <img width="1044" height="1348" width_o="1044" height_o="1348" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/fc096765f195e6db8a5c264cfc2077f395f9a9c97601987b9deb73de610acbd0/Screenshot-2026-03-11-at-21.06.40.png" data-mid="245918783" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/fc096765f195e6db8a5c264cfc2077f395f9a9c97601987b9deb73de610acbd0/Screenshot-2026-03-11-at-21.06.40.png" /> <img width="2106" height="1154" width_o="2106" height_o="1154" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/35f0218d8714ab84604bd6c5feb8de34c7e5651ae90a94832ca8c6fb8a567eaa/Screenshot-2026-03-11-at-21.04.24.png" data-mid="245918815" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/35f0218d8714ab84604bd6c5feb8de34c7e5651ae90a94832ca8c6fb8a567eaa/Screenshot-2026-03-11-at-21.04.24.png" /><img width="2566" height="1898" width_o="2566" height_o="1898" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1184fbbc3c2ac48b9565682018047282bf5fc3c97a64355f6918221aa777404b/Screenshot-2026-03-11-at-21.03.06.png" data-mid="245918886" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/1184fbbc3c2ac48b9565682018047282bf5fc3c97a64355f6918221aa777404b/Screenshot-2026-03-11-at-21.03.06.png" /><img width="1248" height="776" width_o="1248" height_o="776" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/202b3ab5009ddd6550b3a10491636941fbb618299cf7a2cd16f07a4e8dccd976/Screenshot-2026-03-11-at-20.54.56.png" data-mid="245918839" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/202b3ab5009ddd6550b3a10491636941fbb618299cf7a2cd16f07a4e8dccd976/Screenshot-2026-03-11-at-20.54.56.png" /> 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’&nbsp; 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.’&nbsp;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 ImplicationsThe report did not pull its punches in singling out who had to go. XXXX 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.&nbsp;The planners intended to break a lot of eggs to make a more ‘palatable’ omelet. <img width="1162" height="618" width_o="1162" height_o="618" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2c6fb0603731412f3c34d4d264d6844fd2566cf5deea2cbddbfc0a61528ca5cf/Screenshot-2026-03-11-at-21.59.11.png" data-mid="245919364" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/2c6fb0603731412f3c34d4d264d6844fd2566cf5deea2cbddbfc0a61528ca5cf/Screenshot-2026-03-11-at-21.59.11.png" /> * 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&nbsp; https://sitelinearts.org/Newark-Lab-Maps Wed, 27 Jul 2022 14:29:32 +0000 Site Lines https://sitelinearts.org/Newark-Lab-Maps The Maps Maps below: Abstractions, Threads, Newark 2000, Soundless City 1 + 2, Fugue No. 7 , Penn Station <img width="2342" height="1940" width_o="2342" height_o="1940" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/cba240bb929828b435a2142ac19828dca09e8a57df2acdd86977de7be7199cd7/Back-Wall-map.png" data-mid="166894170" border="0" data-scale="91" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/cba240bb929828b435a2142ac19828dca09e8a57df2acdd86977de7be7199cd7/Back-Wall-map.png" /> “It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of the airplane for modernist thought and planning.” The ability to see from above, writes James Scott, introduced a sculptural ambition into urban design. Geometric clarity demanded behavioral order too: behavior that was disturbing – in every sense of the term – was deemed illegible and out of order.&nbsp; In this Abstract Map, the city is made intentionally illegible as the abstraction of geometric order gives way to the abstraction of porosity and disorder. <img width="1714" height="1716" width_o="1714" height_o="1716" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1dbbdcdd1b33fca3ec8b368057edbd49164c4a7149180415ece73bb28196a632/Screen-Shot-2022-11-13-at-16.12.23.png" data-mid="158899897" border="0" data-scale="90" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/1dbbdcdd1b33fca3ec8b368057edbd49164c4a7149180415ece73bb28196a632/Screen-Shot-2022-11-13-at-16.12.23.png" /> <img width="3456" height="2880" width_o="3456" height_o="2880" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3f6f1a45f513b581df15f346f869581bab8bd6e53a9380a59dc0ed7b4c124b70/ErinWebMapTest.jpeg" data-mid="166554128" border="0" data-scale="88" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3f6f1a45f513b581df15f346f869581bab8bd6e53a9380a59dc0ed7b4c124b70/ErinWebMapTest.jpeg" /> Many threads connect a city, but in 1960s Newark, urban planners focused mainly on the city’s financial ties, arguing that a strong economy would expand the city’s employment options, tax base, and vital services. They regarded prestigious urban renewal projects, like the Newark Plaza shown here, as serving the city by supporting upper income residents and business interests that would boost the economy. The relationship between the Central Business District and the city was, in their view, reciprocal, symbiotic, and therefore equal, as represented here by the threads running out from the Newark Plaza. In reality, though, the Newark Plaza distorted the relationship between city and CBD: while workers were drawn to work in the CBD from all over the city, that workspace was small and restricted, which pressed the city into service of an isolated elite. Rather than spread employment throughout the city, urban renewal funds were used to concentrate power in the hands of the business elite, creating distortions in commuting, food deserts, and gentrification for other residents. This distortion of scale and purpose is represented by the second set of threads, running from all across the city to a tiny spot at the heart of the CBD. <img width="1928" height="1314" width_o="1928" height_o="1314" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b67863cde46276804feabfe2a556e8f469fbf3ee5483ea6284ff3c60885bb2a9/Screenshot-2023-04-19-at-11.55.39.png" data-mid="175930363" border="0" data-scale="95" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b67863cde46276804feabfe2a556e8f469fbf3ee5483ea6284ff3c60885bb2a9/Screenshot-2023-04-19-at-11.55.39.png" /> Spirit House. Kawaida Temple. CFUN Headquarters. So many of the spaces and places where Newark Poet, Playwright, Activist, Professor, Father, Husband, Leader, Amiri Baraka changed his city and from here, changed the world, are gone. Urban renewal. Institutional expansion. These rhetorical staples of urban planning are meant to sound anonymous, unbiased, evenhanded, but the erasure of Amiri Baraka’s spatial legacy seems anything but accidental. The great artist who spent his life fighting for justice in Newark’s Black community deserves to be memorialized here. This map is a preliminary patchwork, pulling threads from the archives to imagine such a tribute.&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;<img width="1406" height="1822" width_o="1406" height_o="1822" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f2b22c00153b4a089f6cd91703fe78dfcee0f033eabd8a832331bb70d62a92ed/Screenshot-2023-04-19-at-12.11.11.png" data-mid="175933937" border="0" data-scale="56" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f2b22c00153b4a089f6cd91703fe78dfcee0f033eabd8a832331bb70d62a92ed/Screenshot-2023-04-19-at-12.11.11.png" /> <img width="1542" height="866" width_o="1542" height_o="866" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/bfdedf44f5b3b9e5f4ca531dab97553207c19ac58bdae9dece2ec17fde7f3338/Doyle_Map-for-Sitelines.png" data-mid="171237125" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/bfdedf44f5b3b9e5f4ca531dab97553207c19ac58bdae9dece2ec17fde7f3338/Doyle_Map-for-Sitelines.png" />What is a map? A document of observation, maybe. I like to think of a map as a musical score. It provides a set of guidelines for the performance of movements in time and space. Each performance has its own dynamics, which operate around, through, and beyond the temporal and spatial logics we construct (1). This map is a notation of movements performed around and within the parameters of what, out of a continuous, ongoing landscape, has come to be defined as “Newark.” The arrangement of the notation is my own, as is every map—a reflection of subjective observations. It allows, I hope, for spontaneity—in the ways I look at the landscape as it passes by the train window, in the conversations I have at the market or the coffee shop on Halsey Street. With an embrace of spontaneity, creativity, experimentation, contradiction, and difference, I resist the tendency for a map to become entirely stable or uniform. Part of this resistance is an acknowledgement that my map is one of multitudes, a number of lines in a vast polyphony of routes. This map attempts to document an intensity of attention. Images taken in and around Newark exist under the overlaying image of a tree. Train tracks and foot steps laid down become indistinguishable from the tree’s bark. The images dissolve into a rhythmic dynamics. The logic of the lines and the meter becomes irrelevant. The map is re-created every time. 1: Larry Richards, “The Anticommunication Imperative,” inCybernetics and Human Knowing (2010). <img width="2000" height="2800" width_o="2000" height_o="2800" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a04bdf705cd435442aa2b16b383afb7d2d3c960f59be324f93eedc02979f5869/Newark-Map-2000.jpeg" data-mid="166265435" border="0" data-scale="82" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/a04bdf705cd435442aa2b16b383afb7d2d3c960f59be324f93eedc02979f5869/Newark-Map-2000.jpeg" />A dark future, a hideous vision of eternal technocracy...what if the old guard of Newark had seen their visions through in an uninterrupted, untrammeled reign from the post-war period to the Year 2000? Would this be the "Newark millennium"? <img width="4500" height="4500" width_o="4500" height_o="4500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1cf536c85c352bc1e92ee654f012d4b5ae1afca7413dc9221853656357894666/MarcoNew-Web.jpg" data-mid="166275386" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/1cf536c85c352bc1e92ee654f012d4b5ae1afca7413dc9221853656357894666/MarcoNew-Web.jpg" />Since 2019, Newark Penn Station has been undergoing a ‘modernization process’ funded mainly by the State of New Jersey and NJ Transit. The indoor spaces of the station have been filled with warning signs, directive panels, hostile architecture, and physical thresholds, pushing those who experience the space to act as appropriate ‘paying passengers.’ This map indicates where those controlling elements are positioned, distinguishing between those that dictate which behaviors are accepted as ‘appropriate’ in the environment, and those that identify spaces that are physically barred to subjectivities who differ from the ‘proper passenger.’ The discourse of safety that underpins these acts of control and exclusion took on a very different complexion in the gay scene of the 1960s and onwards: people in the community often recall Newark Penn Station as a safe space for sociability and cruising, at a time when they were otherwise excluded from open participation in public sociability. <img width="4500" height="4500" width_o="4500" height_o="4500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2f35e5a73388aaab5b1f81c189daf7dfcfdc663308458e8b96b69767512880f7/EvaMap---v2-Web.jpg" data-mid="166514055" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/2f35e5a73388aaab5b1f81c189daf7dfcfdc663308458e8b96b69767512880f7/EvaMap---v2-Web.jpg" />The soundless city of Newark’s urban planners negated and neutralized the existing community. In the planners’ imagination, the city needed to be cleared out so that proper populations, sounds, and behavior could replace the improper ones. In the planners’ words, they would replace blight with high culture. The city was already full of sounds, though. In these two maps, the voices of those living in neighborhoods repopulate the barren urban renewal map with waves of human sounds. The three Soundless City maps reflect the richness of sound in the existing community. As Nathan Heard said about his upbringing in Newark in the 1950s, music was the core of his neighborhood, deteriorating though it was: “At the time I knew [the jazz vocalist] Jimmy Scott he was sort of like this neighborhood, full of life, full of people, and full of music. Music was everywhere.” In these maps, the voices of those living in neighborhoods repopulate the barren urban renewal map with sound and take possession of the space. <img width="3600" height="4500" width_o="3600" height_o="4500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ed44ce9c581c3c61de14617d085137298a82f9ba6c68704e405da68748bcf311/EvaSecondMap-web.jpg" data-mid="166513356" border="0" data-scale="80" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ed44ce9c581c3c61de14617d085137298a82f9ba6c68704e405da68748bcf311/EvaSecondMap-web.jpg" /> <img width="1370" height="1426" width_o="1370" height_o="1426" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2497b5791e4726202359d73dc031292dbc1a845ad22f0b82e79ea59fa771974c/Screenshot-2023-04-19-at-12.34.01.png" data-mid="175938716" border="0" data-scale="69" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/2497b5791e4726202359d73dc031292dbc1a845ad22f0b82e79ea59fa771974c/Screenshot-2023-04-19-at-12.34.01.png" />“But when the workday is over, and between 300,000 and 400,000 in-migrant workers desert Newark for their suburban sanctuaries, the city becomes a place bereft of culture and interest.” With these words, the Urban Land Institute sought to justify a sweeping urban renewal program in 1960s Newark, even more immense than the one undertaken by the Newark Housing Authority. The NHA’s plans, which would have displaced 20% of city’s population (80,000 people) was too cautious and contained for the ULI, which advocated further clearing for cultural institutions that would attract white suburbanites to live or play in the city after working hours. Culture as a tool for colonization, through the erasure of existing residents, was thus central to official efforts to wrest the city’s meaning away from its (unwelcome) inhabitants. To resist this erasure, the Place in Progress map layers its meaning on top of the Soundless City map to amplify the city’s residente cultures in another way. It asserts that every city is a work in progress created by its residents in spontaneous ways, whether through formal artistic production or the exuberance of street art like graffiti. https://sitelinearts.org/sound_map Tue, 31 Jan 2023 00:07:17 +0000 Site Lines https://sitelinearts.org/sound_map Soundless City The city as envisioned by Louis Danzig of the Newark Housing Authority was soundless. In his articles, as in other urban renewal documents, there is little mention of sounds outside of officially sanctioned places of high art. Instead, Danzig emphasized the need for embodied self-discipline and proper behavior: “Self-discipline and courtesy are required in direct proportion to population density. City people must have patterns of behavior for populous places – habits of industry, emotional and family stability, strict accountability to the law. Everyone must stop on a red light.” (Louis Danzig in Newark Commerce 1961) For Mason Gross, President of Rutgers, who collaborated with Danzig in a shared vision of Newark’s future, sound was best contained in the ‘proper’ venues of high art: the concert hall or performing arts center. Gross deplored the deep cultural silence of the suburbs, which he saw as “weary, flat, stale, and unprofitable” with no opportunities for culture because of the alienated atomization of a vacuous consumer society. His answer was to promote the arts, and music in particular, in the cities, where urban-dwellers could attain true humanity through the beauty of the arts. But his definition of music, like his definition of the preferred audience, denied the existence of those already living in Newark: his definition of music was limited to the European traditions of opera, ballet, symphonies, and chamber music. Without these, New Jersey was culturally “bankrupt.” (Mason Gross speech, 1959) Gross and Danzig’s containment of sound in emotional discipline and racially-coded cultural capital is in direct contrast to the joyous community of sound and music that Nathan Heard describes as part of his upbringing in Newark in the 1950s. Music was the core of his neighborhood, derelict and decaying though it was: “At the time I knew [the jazz vocalist] Jimmy Scott he was sort of like this neighborhood, full of life, full of people, and full of music. Music was everywhere.” Heard’s venues were different from those envisioned by Danzig and Gross: “…there was so much music in this city at that time. Bars weren’t bars, they were places where you went to hear live bands.” (Nathan Heard interview) Participation in making pleasurable sound is a form of community building, but the value placed on the music – from the planners’ point of view – was related to the value placed on the community in question. To counter their vision of the soundless city, I use individual recollections of Newark to gather the ephemeral moments in which the spontaneous urban arts took place and how they created community: in churches, schools, street corners, concert halls. Community is also created through other types of sound that are not usually understood as art but are rhythmic in their entrainment of affect, in the chants of protesters or children’s street games, for instance. These, too, are moments to be mapped. <img width="1156" height="1288" width_o="1156" height_o="1288" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ec87ebd973bebf35c539a816ec87a15430b155dd2ffcdac86b1f95e9b9b20e57/Screen-Shot-2022-09-05-at-12.20.49.png" data-mid="166701401" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ec87ebd973bebf35c539a816ec87a15430b155dd2ffcdac86b1f95e9b9b20e57/Screen-Shot-2022-09-05-at-12.20.49.png" /> Urban Thresholds = Sound as an Affective ThresholdI define ‘urban thresholds’ as sensory experiences and expressions that mark transitional points: they create boundaries of access and access and determine who gets to go where, when, and with what emotions. Sound is used by ‘insiders’ to identify outsiders, for instance. But sound also travels through and over physical thresholds, in distorted, muffled, and amplified ways. Physical thresholds, like hedges or windows, don’t stop sound but condition their affective impact, for instance as half-perceived whispers of exclusion. I will plot these points of sound, or noise, on the map as well, as part of the typography of the city soundscape. Oral histories recall these moments of exclusion and testing: the neighbors who listened behind hedges to monitor racially-different newcomers or who walked past the houses of other newcomers, pointing and whispering invectives. My experience of sound as an affective threshold was first inspired by my experience of Robertson Hall, built on the Princeton University campus by Minoru Yamasaki, the architect of the World Trade Center, in the same years as the Newark campus was being constructed. Robertson Hall is shaped as a symmetrical rectangle, with identical entrances on its two parallel, longer sides. Walking into the building from either entrance, one steps into a central lobby with a high ceiling reaching up to a skylight and an internal balcony with offices ringing its upper third. Yamasaki envisioned the lobby as a communal meeting space in which scholars, emerging from the quiet isolation of their quasi-monkish office ‘cells,’ could join the community of scholars and the shared deliberations of the public sphere. At the same time, the narrow, vertical rise of the space also suggests the cathedral, as the thin lines of the design elements draw the gaze upwards to the light and invoke the quiet contemplation of the sacred space. Both interpretations – communal space and sacred space – are possible given the spatial design, and both modes are in fact experienced by the entrant, not simultaneously, but separately and distinctly depending on which entrance s/he uses. The doors – as structural thresholds – are identical in their shape, design, and materials. But if one enters from one side, one has the feeling of stepping into a communal space, in which people lounge and speak in natural tones of voice. If one enters from the other side, one has the feeling of stepping into a sacred space, one of hushed tones, with the imperative to lower one’s voice out of respect for the quiet sanctuary. What produces this profound difference in affect? Not the structural threshold – not the doors, or the walls – nor the activities occurring inside. If you enter the one side and then the other within a matter of minutes, with the same occupants inside, you still get the difference in sensory experience and affect. The difference is produced by the sound outside of the building. Outside of one entrance is a grassy knoll that slopes steeply down to a street intersection, making it inaccessible for people to sit upon. The grass lawn is empty and quiet. Entering from that side, the lobby seems like a space of social community, where normal tones of voice can be used in the hum of conversation. Outside of the other entrance is a large plaza with a recessed fountain that invites visitors to walk down into its flat basin. The fountain spray is loud and has the sonic effect of a waterfall, matching the noise of the families and children who play in the fountain. Entering from this side, the lobby seems unusually still and hushed, deep in serene contemplation, cathedral-like. Mapmaker: Eva Giloi Posted 5/2/2023 <img width="2000" height="2425" width_o="2000" height_o="2425" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/555bff3c7d7eab3ef7adceee7b017d17d7e77249af47623e38a8f384624a606a/Princeton.jpeg" data-mid="166701579" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/555bff3c7d7eab3ef7adceee7b017d17d7e77249af47623e38a8f384624a606a/Princeton.jpeg" /> https://sitelinearts.org/planners Tue, 31 Jan 2023 00:35:41 +0000 Site Lines https://sitelinearts.org/planners <img width="2258" height="694" width_o="2258" height_o="694" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a4f0321632d46b7bfbcd8fd11196ff35b5584dc22898cd48e17ee54130f77526/Screen-Shot-2022-10-07-at-12.48.48.png" data-mid="166702805" border="0" data-scale="99" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/a4f0321632d46b7bfbcd8fd11196ff35b5584dc22898cd48e17ee54130f77526/Screen-Shot-2022-10-07-at-12.48.48.png" /> The invocation of culture and civilization is common to all colonizing projects. Colonizers claim superior culture and humanity to justify the suppression and removal of subjects deemed less civilized and thus less human. This was no different in 1960s Newark, where urban planners used the language of high culture to demote and delegitimize existing populations. Even a humanist like Mason Gross, philosophy professor and President of Rutgers Uinversity, placed his idealism into the service of exclusion. While he deplored the deep cultural silence of the suburbs and the alienated atomization of a vacuous consumer society, his definition of cultural renewal for cities like Newark was rooted in a vision of European culture as superior, allowing him to claim that New Jersey was culturally bankrupt despite the rich cultural efflorescence in Newark’s African American community. The city’s urban planners, developers, and think tanks like the Urban Land Institute seized on these tropes of superior culture to justify the clearance of existing minority families based on their supposed lack of aesthetic sensibility, covering over urban renewal’s actual, far more venal goals: the desire for economic expansion and profit. <img width="770" height="502" width_o="770" height_o="502" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f47029ef1ba05208cf15ef521f516a7e429631847550626838f3bc7767b975ab/Screen-Shot-2023-02-02-at-21.02.19.png" data-mid="167089743" border="0" data-scale="58" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/770/i/f47029ef1ba05208cf15ef521f516a7e429631847550626838f3bc7767b975ab/Screen-Shot-2023-02-02-at-21.02.19.png" /> The quotes below show how culture and clearance were intertwined in public documents in Newark’s urban renewal. They are represented on sound map 1 on the bottom left, and form a counterpoint to the voices of local community members which detail a rich culture of sound. “To meet the great need for urban renewal within the foreseeable future, the Newark program must be large. Projects must be large to avoid being overwhelmed by surrounding blight and to justify the lengthy procedure of a complicated process. The program must advance simultaneously on many fronts. - 1 It would appear then, that blight is closely attached to aesthetic appearance and by multiplication of component parts – to that of a neighborhood and community. If the visual impression evokes no comment, criticism, objection, or revulsion, then it can be reasoned that an aesthetic receptivity is absent. - 2 And this offense is an affront to the human appreciation of and need for aesthetic order, harmony and balance. - 2 What is being measured is the extent to which the community, in its institutions, its investments, and its communal behavior, publicly and expressly fosters and cherishes these cultural values. - 3 But when the workday is over, and between 300,000 and 400,000 in-migrant workers desert Newark for their suburban sanctuaries, the city becomes a place bereft of culture and interest. - 4 A society without culture is a society without either a mind or a soul, a society which tends to man’s physical desires only while his wits become dull and his feelings are desensitized. In such a society there is no joy in living and no tragedy in dying. - 3 Let’s face it – if New Jersey is educationally impoverished and in debt, she is culturally almost bankrupt. - 3 I may be ignoring some local activities, but in general it seems true to say that there is no legitimate theater and even very little popular theater except for the summer reruns; there is absolutely no opera and no ballet; most of the efforts at symphonic music fall far short of professional standards, and there is no effort at publicly supported chamber music. Exhibitions of first quality of painting or sculpture are at a minimum, and even local shows designed to encourage genuine developing talent are few and far between. - 3 Beauty, harmony, and visual satisfaction are elements which an urban renewal program should consciously introduce into residential and other types of neighborhoods. - 5 Because of its key location only 15 minutes from midtown or downtown Manhattan, the Newark Plaza will appeal to businesspeople who are exhausted by subway rush hours or who have become tired of suburban living. It will provide its residents with all the conveniences of “close-in” living, including proximity to transportation, good theater, art galleries, museums and music. - 6 In the last analysis, the future of cities depends on the behavior of people. Everyone must stop on a red light. - 1 1. Louis Danzig, “Newark’s Urban Renewal Problems,” Newark Commerce, 1961 2. George Oberlander, Newark Urban Renewal Plan: A Demonstration Grant Project, 1959 3. Mason Gross, “The Cultural Dependence of New Jersey,” 1959.4. Leo Adde, Nine Cities: the Anatomy of Downtown Renewal, 1969. 5. George Oberlander, Re:New Newark, 1961. 6. Matthew B Weinstein, “Newark Plaza,” Newark Commerce 1961. Mapmaker: Eva GiloiPosted 5/2/2023