Grit Makes Cities Great
For the past year, since my return to Miami after a two-year stint in Newark, I've been looking for signs of a mature city, something that would draw memories of the Northeast. I came south to escape the snow, but I'm really missing the grit of a city with some miles on her. In Miami, so much of history lies in the last 50 years, and the focus is more directed to one glaring aspect--its chance relationship with the cold war and growth as a transnational suburb in exile of Havana--while tourism has flourished to disguise this fact to the rest of the country. There is also a visible history here, from 20th Century architecture to a unique blending of Latin American nationalities. But Newark, which has lived a sort of transnational existence itself, hosting wave after wave of newly arrived immigrants throughout each of the American centuries, is somehow more deeply layered, more complex.
Newark, arguably the downtown of metro New Jersey, has a tight, defined city center, with b...