Why Newark Might Not Stand a Chance

I don’t know too much about Newark, but I am going to write this as if I do. I never really gave the city a fair chance, but acknowledging that doesn’t change how I feel about it.

I spent just about two months living there. I hated it. I couldn’t find any reason to like the place. This has a lot to do with the internal state I was in, but I think it also has something to do with the external city I was in. It has something to do with Newark.

There was nothing there for me to hold onto. West Baltimore is a tough place to live, but there was always that something a mile down the road to find rest in. There was the Harbor and its surrounding neighborhoods, weighing down the city as an attractive anchor of promise. This anchor also happened to be tied with a short rope around the waist of my neighbors, and pulled them to the bottom of the filthy water, but at least as they fought for the surface they could look at the pretty anchor and know there was more to the world than burnt row homes and broken vials.

I couldn’t find an analogue to the Inner Harbor in Newark. There is no such thing. With the exception of campus apartments, it is pretty much a city of uniform poverty. This made it a really hard place for me to live.

Last year, I learned I have little problem immersing myself in the broken parts of a city. I lived in one and found a lot of joy and a lot of life there. But being in Newark suggested that maybe I am comfortable only if I know there is something nicer down the road—only if I know there is another part of town with people who came from places just like me, eating avocados and wearing pastel shorts. Even if I don’t go there, it is comforting to know that such a place exists.

It helps to know Baltimore still has its graduates of private colleges who went to Sunday mass with their wealthy parents; it makes me feel at peace to know those people are climbing the corporate ladder, and that I can go see them if I need to. I never need to -- I never even want to -- but it settles my restive heart to know that I can. They assure me that I am not permanently trapped in this place of drugs and violence. I can just wander down the road and find people who remind me of my roots.

I never thought about this when I was in Baltimore. I didn’t think about it at all until I moved to Newark. Because Newark doesn’t have any of that. There are no up and coming parts of Newark. It has not been gentrified. It is not a divided city. It is not segregated. It is poverty living next to indigence, living across from destitution. That’s what Newark is. There is no escaping it.

In Baltimore, I was “living simply”. This was a pillar of my volunteer program, and I embraced it. It didn’t feel like I was “living simply” while I was in Newark. It felt more like I was living in a shitty place. Living simply hinges on a decision. It is a choice—a conscience deprivation of things surpassing necessity and a grateful acceptance of those things that are truly life-giving.

I discovered that when you come from the background I do, I can have very little money and material, but still I can’t really be “poor”. In Baltimore, I couldn’t do much more than live simply, because I if things started to get a little too radical, I could just fall back into a solid support system of friends and family who were themselves solidly supported. I could never get rid of this reliable safety net of privilege.

In Newark, the poverty seemed more definite, more ubiquitous, and therefore a much less tolerable thing to accept. There was no reachable antagonist to the poverty that I could compare it and romanticize against. It was what it was.

I don’t think this realization is an entirely bad thing. I think it is doing more than revealing flaws in my experience in Baltimore and limits of my character. I think the despair I felt in Newark is telling me something about what it means to be a healthy city, or at least a city with a chance. A city needs something to aim for. It needs something beautiful, to confirm that beautiful things belong there. It needs something people can look at, and touch, and maybe find hope in, because hope is the essential enzyme of change.

Whenever I waited for the elevator on the 10th floor of my apartment building in Newark, I would stare out the window and into the horizon. I found that every day is a foggy day if you try to look too far in the distance. In Newark though, the smog makes you considerably more myopic than usual. I could see Manhattan at the edge of the world, but the characteristic sharpness of its skyline was obfuscated by the industrial air, leaving a cloudy blend of blues and greys. Even this most powerful city is rendered drab and hopeless by a polluted lens.

I thought about how said that was. I am not all that partial to New York City, but I can't deny being awed by its grandeur. It stands as a symbol to the near limitlessness of humanity. The people of Newark, however, have only a distorted view. The solid structures stand tall, but the hope they carry is void of clarity and is way too far to reach out and touch.

This is why I think a segregated city is better than a plain poor city. Neither is perfect, but segregation is better. The reason being the proximity of the dichotomies. They are separated, but only just. The membrane that makes the divide is a dense one, but a permeable one. Every once in a while, maybe just by chance, someone will find himself on the other side of that membrane. He will get to know what the other side is like, and he will not forget this. Over time, more and more people might do the same, and they will come to find that the membrane is not as dense as they originally thought. And as long as there’s a membrane, there’s a shot at equilibrium.

In a segregated city, at least there is this line of contact. Both parties are present and close enough to give way to the chance encounters necessary to learn something about each other.

While we are disgusted by the dynamics of segregated cities like Baltimore, we should appreciate them as the seeds for something better. The dichotomy of a segregated city might mean more outrage, more frustration, more fighting; but this is a good thing. All this conflict is the stuff needed for a story to progress towards a resolution.

Newark needs a lot of work. It is going to be challenging to turn the city around, because right now, a lot of its people might not even know what to work towards. They’ve never seen a healthy city. They know nothing but each other and a blurry skyline way off in the horizon.

#baltimore #medschool