"Kept on the Run": Urban Erasures in Essex County, NJ

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Urban Erasures and Contested Memorial Assemblages" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Essex County in northern New Jersey experienced dramatic urban development and change in the second half the 20th century. Essex is home to Newark, New Jersey’s largest city, as well as 21 other municipalities that range from poor and densely packed cities to affluent and amenity-rich suburbs. This paper examines how urban spaces are created, preserved, and erased in the county showing that urban and suburban communities have developed along separate trajectories reflecting different experiences, consciousness, and ways of life. A key distinction is how suburbs in Essex County have faced little erasure of their history and landscape while the landscapes of Newark and other urban places have been twice (or more times) cleared by a decades-long urban renewal strategy. A successful protest against the construction of I-75 in the 1970s, led by African Americans residents in Newark, illustrates the social dynamics of urban erasure.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2019   •
• Urban Erasures and Contested Memorial Assemblages

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 136