I have been trying to define what it is that I would like to research about Newark for my Masters Thesis. I have always been interested in the rebellion, both what led up to it and what the long-term consequences of it have been and still are. The history of the rebellion, especially the differences in the way it was reported and echoed at the time, compared to the evidence of its reality, and why those differences exist, was my gateway drug into Newark history[1]. Fundamentally, that is what has driven much of my research so far, be that the NHA and its projects, uncovering the story of Symphony Hall, or digging into hip-hop and Graffiti culture in the 90s and how very Newark it was in a cultural environment that from the outside still read very Black Power. It comes down to picking at consensus narratives and developing a richer understanding of the reality that created it. I like to think that that is what academic research is about. It’s a form of un-silencing the past, to paraphrase the work of Michel-Rolf Trouillot.
It is shifts of perception over time that I realize I find most interesting. Researching the history of the Mosque theater helped me realize this. The venue was the source of financial straits for every single one of its owners, yet only one owner both understood the reality of managing a cultural institution and had the ability and resources to do so. So much of how the history of the theater is told is engulfed in the politics of identity and renewal both pre and post rebellion, that it covers up a much simpler reality. Only Mrs. Griffith knew how to run a theater and did so successfully for 2 decades. All that came before or after her, be they Shriners, Fabian Movie house operators, Newark theater managers, the business elite, or appointees of the Gibson administration, failed. The simple truth that she discovered, and others thought they could ignore was that if you want to create an accessible cultural public good, you need to reconcile with the reality that it isn’t going to be self-sustaining.
Mrs. Griffith is quoted in a 1948 New York Times article as saying “It loses money, but it embraces virtually every mainstream of musical activity. Can it be made to pay? “On the one hand,” Mrs. Griffith said, “we have our established admission prices. On the other are the expenses of advertising, printing, administration, rental of the Mosque Theatre, and the biggest headache artists’ fees. Somewhere, somehow, the two must meet.”[2] The stark reality was that “For every dollar taken through the box office, the Griffith family must contribute 64 cents. “However,” Mrs. Griffith said, “we feel we are putting money back into the community where we made it.”[3] Prior to Griffith’s takeover of the venue in 1938, it functioned as a movie theater operated by the Fabian group until the effects of the great depression forced it to close in 1933. From the 1981 application to recognize Symphony Hall\Mosque Theater as a national historic site, it is clear that the Griffith tenure was seen as the venues’ golden era. “Mrs. Parker O. Griffith, was single handedly responsible for New Jersey’s entry into American cultural life. On Mrs. Griffith’s death in 1958, the foundation fell apart, but there is scarcely a musical institution in the Garden State which does not owe a great deal to Mrs. Griffith’s indefatigable work.”[4]
It’s difficult to ponder the 1960s in Newark and not feel the gravitational pull of the summer of 1967 functioning like the event horizon of a black hole, as if everything was circling towards an inevitable crescendo. That’s both an illusion, and also not entirely untrue at the same time. The rebellion and the establishment response occurred and were a result of the decisions and events that preceded it, but Newark wasn’t navigating the decade with a countdown timer levitating top of screen as if in a video game, tick-tocking to doom. The opposite seems truer, the ever present now allowed unresolved problems to be permanently pushed into an ill-defined future, with the next chapter of the Mosque Theater functioning as a poster child of business as usual.
Within four short years of Griffith’s death, intervention becomes necessary to save the Mosque from becoming part of the inevitable urban decay.[5] By 1964, Symphony Hall Inc was established and a deal was reached with city hall to bankroll the purchase of the building and to bankroll 50% of the funds needed to for capital investments.[6] Finally the titans of industry would swoop in to save a cultural icon in the no-nonsense-approach that was the catechism of their community. Harold Kaplan talks about this, specifically, how business owners had disassociated from Newark when they moved to the suburbs, but were still willing to swoop in to direct “special projects”[7]. This is how William Hughes, retired president of a New Jersey Telephone company would become the president of Symphony Hall Inc. In the June 1965 report to the Symphony Hall board of trustees, this savior complex is apparent when it describes itself as “an organization that would create a center for the performing arts in Newark”[8], apparently oblivious that the very same venue was just that in the 1940s and 50s. Interestingly, although newspaper reports from the period often refer to the Mosque theater by the name of it’s new owners, in the report to the board of trustees, Symphony Hall Inc always talks about the Mosque theater throughout the report. There is a clear awareness of the significance of the building and the cultural institution it once was even if they are confident that they will be able to run it better than previous owners.
What is also clear from the report is that the organization is running at a loss from the start. The joint capital investment of $200,000 is supposedly deployed to resolve deferred maintenance but it is unclear how much of this went to the actual work the report claimed was done. The 1967 report highlights “cleaning and repairing our magnificent chandelier” [9], while the first annual report of the New Newark Symphony Hall published in 1978 describes how the same chandelier was cleaned for the first time in 25 years. This pattern of claiming that capital improvements were being implemented while seeking additional income to fund them continues with news reports of a “Newark Party Planned to Aid Symphony Hall”[10] in 1966 and “$350,000 Sought to Assist Jersey Orchestra and Hall”[11] in 1967. It is unclear how much money was raised. What is clear is that by February of 1976, the Mosque Theater was shuttered by the city due to a series of building code violations which were the result of defered maintenance. Symphony Hall Inc did not succeed in doing what the Griffith Foundation did in implementing both the necessary maintenance work and running cultural programs that attracted the public.
In an attempt to save the historic venue, Ken Gibbons appointed the New Newark Symphony Hall Foundation in 1977. The scope of its brief was more modest, using municipal and state funds, ensure that the building is maintained and can pass inspection. The foundation understood that they did not have the capacity to run programs, instead focusing on renting out the venue. The annual reports from 1977-1979 show that the foundation sees keeping the theater open as consequential to revitalizing the Lincoln Park area. Although the foundation was successful in keeping the theater open, it never returned to its position as a central cultural institution that it was under the stewardship of Mrs. Griffith.
The tenure of Mrs. Griffith in running the Mosque theater became its golden age. Like most golden ages, much of it is mythologized, meaning that the simple economics of running a thriving cultural institution, clearly grasped by Griffith, are ignored by those that come after her, confident they can restore the theater to its past glory. This is why I think the story of the Mosque is representative of what happened to Newark during the rush to urban renewal and dealing with its consequences. Hughes and the Symphony Hall crew were full of confidence that their background in running businesses and their philanthropic connections would allow them to revive a struggling theater. Their report to the board of trustees and the PR leading up to and following the acquisition was full of bravado and misplaced confidence. From my reading of the source material, I do not identify a Mason Gross[12] like drive towards Kultur by Symphony Hall. Programming had always been a mixture of classical, jazz and popular music. Just looking at the classical musicians that supported the effort to revitalize the Mosque makes this clear. Instead, the failure of the Mosque under the tenure of Symphony Hall Inc can be ascribed to incompetence rather than attempts to transform it into something it was not. It may seem like a small thing but the fact that the 1967 report touts cleaning the chandelier which is then revealed not to have happened a decade later shows a focus on architecting perception rather than a dedication to doing the less glorious work of figuring out how to make a venue as large as the Mosque successful in a city in deep, problematic transition in the 1960s.
In reading Kaplan[13], the incompetence of the group trying to “fix” the Mosque is entirely missing from the work of Louis Danzig. He seems to appear wholly formed as Executive Director of the Newark Housing Authority on July 1st 1948, like a modern-day Athena from the head of Zeus. Part of his success, if we measure success as the ability to implement the agenda of his agency, was the result of a willingness to work harder than others to achieve his goals. Danzig certainly had political talent, but it would be a mistake to ignore the sheer effort that went into ensuring that his agenda was implemented at the municipal, state and federal level. His opponents, such as the NCNCR, never matched the amount of time and effort Danzig put into preparing city council members, state and federal bureaucrats and others prior to decisions that impacted the NHA, be they large or small. Danzig was able to understand the obstacles he had to deal with to implement his grandiose plans for urban redevelopment and change his approach accordingly. This included preparing the ground from local survey to federal approval, through identifying the right developers before bringing proposals to the city council for approval. When Danzig discovered that local developers were reluctant to take on large redevelopment projects, he switched to larger, outside developers, with a little help from Robert Moses. This focus on removing obstacles to achieve progress, when progress was measured in Federally funded slum clearance and privately funded redevelopment, made Danzig blind, or indifferent to the toll this was taking on the entire city.
The Clinton Hill project, for example, that was meant to demonstrate rehabilitation’s potential instead demonstrated the limits of agency accommodation without genuine coordination. What Kaplan identifies as NHA’s strategy of “non-public negotiations for the peaceful resolution of future differences” succeeded in neutralizing NCNCR as a source of opposition to clearance. But it did so by creating parallel tracks that never genuinely converged. Each agency could proceed autonomously within its designated territory, neither challenging the other’s domain. The result was precisely what Kaplan describes: “a permissive environment, where redevelopment proposals are approved as a matter of routine,” achieved not through the elimination of potential opposition but through its geographic segregation into harmless isolation.
Clinton Hill during the 1950s and 60s embodies much of the political manuevering by Danzig in the face of it being the site of NCNCR opposition to federal involvement and clearance. It would also become the site of the demographic pressures that represented both the results of massive clearance opperations and already ongoing changes in the makeup of who was living in the city. In 1950 only 8% of the neighborhood was black, by 1960 that number would be 44%.[14] Many of these were transplants from the central ward, renting rather than owning their homes. By the 1970s, the mostly Jewish white population of the neighborhood was gone, according to Arnie (I don’t have his last name) the 70 year old neighborhood historian I met while volunteering for Clinton Hill Neighborhood Action. The ghosts of that community and the process of the neighborhood transition persist with the retirees I meet during the groups local history focused steering committees.
The dismal failure of urban renewal, not only in Newark but in many other cities, the civil uprisings of the 1960s that became associated with it, and especially the intellectual weight of works like The Making of the Second Ghetto[15] and The Origins of the Urban Crisis[16], cast a heavy shadow over what was a utopian enterprise. I’m interested in uncovering the ideas and motivations of those involved in the planning and execution of urban renewal in Newark during the post War era up to the rebellion. The NHA when Danzig started leading it, and especially after recruiting Joseph Nevin, was focused on developing affordable middle-income housing and clearing slums. How did the pursuit of those goals evolve over time, and how did its participants explain and justify their actions both at the time and in hindsight? Many of those involved in Newark urban renewal were Europeans Jews who had recently immigrated or were the children of immigrants. To what extent were central European ideas about urban development influencing their ideas on how to improve Newark? How significance was their shared ethnicity and how Jews in America saw their role in improving it?
My motivation is not to recast the story of urban renewal as told through the person of Louis Danzig, but rather to enrich it. It feels wholly too convenient to simply cast him as a mini Robert Moses. This is reductionist, in the same way that Newark is not a smaller version of New York City. It is a thing unto itself as is Danzig. Simplification and comparison ultimately turns into a form of silencing. If all I knew about the Mosque theater was its purchase and recasting as a cultural venue by Symphony Hall Inc, it would easily fit into a narrative of white business interest blind to the culture that does not fit their Mason Gross like framing. By uncovering the work of Mrs. Griffith in newspaper articles from the 1940s and the results of a decade of mismanagement by Symphony Hall Inc in the annual reports of the New Symphony Hall from the 1970s, a much richer understanding comes to the surface. On the one hand, the mismanagement of Symphony Hall Inc helps to illustrate a greater municipal mismanagement that made the rebellion of 1967 an ever-increasing possibility. On the other hand, regardless of the motivations of the operators, running a cultural institution, especially one not focused on being profitable is technically difficult, requiring a skill set that few of its owners ever possessed. As long as the history of Louis Danzig starts in 1948 and ends with his retirement in 1970, it is as if we only know about Symphony Hall Inc running the Mosque theater. How did Danzig become conversant in public housing and urban renewal prior to heading the NHA? How was his tenure reframed, better understood, criticized, analyzed both by himself and others in the decade following his retirement? Answering these questions will make an analysis of his two decades at the helm of the NHA profoundly richer.
Clearly a full biography of Danzig is beyond the scope of a masters thesis. Instead I want to focus on the before, especially the decade leading up to his appointment to head the NHA. Besides uncovering an unexplored area of his biography, I think the process will make me a better researcher in the face of the paucity of materials on Danzig from this period. I will need to learn how to unearth echoes of Danzig in the history of others, such as his political patron. Danzig was Ralph Vilani’s executive secretary in the 1940s prior to him becoming Mayor. When did Danzig start this position? Why was he chosen for it? If Vilani was first elected commissioner in 1941 and Danzig joined him later, how did the way he functioned politically change when Danzig joined his team? Danzig was involved in the development of the 1949 Federal Housing Act, which would transform the way the NHA functioned and what it aimed to achieve. How did he get to a position to exercise influence on this legislation?
It is entirely unclear where and if I will find answers to these questions, or what other questions I will need to ask to better understand the evolution of Louis Danzig, which is precisely why I think this project will hone my skills as a biographer. I will need to extract Danzig from newspapers, legislation, the work of people he associated with, his background and ethnicity to develop a thesis on how he was so ready by 1948 to run the NHA. I will need to expand my network of Newark nerds to help me think of and discover avenues of investigation. Precisely because it is unclear how much the archive will reveal, this is also an opportunity to reconcile American Studies approaches to history, so prevalent in our department, with the practice of pursuing original historical research.
I came to the graduate program looking to develop a better understanding of what contributes to civilians becoming sufficiently radicalized to rebel, especially in the context of Newark. While doing so I came to realize that even more than politics themselves, I get excited by uncovering the mechanics that drive politics. Reviewing federal housing legislation, and deep reading Kaplan helped me to realize to what extent technical, legal, financial and political limitations drive planning and implementation of projects as impactful as urban renewal. The 1940s where when the frameworks, motivations, and experiences were formed that would impact how urban renewal was implemented. Danzig is in there, in that decade. I believe that finding him will enrich our understanding of how and why 1950s and 60s unfolded in Newark.
[1] Mumford, Kevin J. Newark : A History of Race, Rights, and Riots in America. 1st ed. New York: New York University Press, 2007. https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9780814761151.
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/1948/11/14/archives/mrs-griffith-builds-newarks-musical-life.html
[3] ibid
[4] Symphony hall application to historical register, quoting a March 23, 1975 article in the Sunday Star Ledger.
[7] Kaplan, Harold. 1961. “The Politics of Slum Clearance : A Study of Urban Renewal in Newark, New Jersey.” Thesis (Ph.D.)–Columbia University, 1961.
[8] June 17, 1965 – Report to the Symphony Hall Board of Trustees
[9] June 17, 1965 – Report to the Symphony Hall Board of Trustees
[12] Cite the speech
[13] Kaplan, Harold. 1961. “The Politics of Slum Clearance : A Study of Urban Renewal in Newark, New Jersey.” Thesis (Ph.D.)–Columbia University, 1961.
[14] Epps, Linda Caldwell. 2010. “From Zion to Brick City : What’s Going on? : Newark and the Legacy of the Sixties.” Thesis (D. Litt.)–Drew University, 2010.
[15] Hirsch, Arnold R. 1998. Making the Second Ghetto Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960. Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press.
[16] Sugrue, Thomas J. 2014. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. First Princeton classics edition. Princeton University Press.
Newark State of Mind 
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