THE CITY: PROBLEMS OF A PROTOTYPE

BEFORE it exploded in the historic race riot of July 1967, few people outside New Jersey knew much about Newark, an old industrial city with a population of 407,000, roughly the same as Kansas City, Mo. Newark is still scarred by the riot, which took 23 lives and caused $10 million in property damage. Parts of its central core look like bombed-out Berlin after the war. Abandoned buildings with shattered windows cast their shadows over littered sidewalks and stripped, rusting autos. Springfield Avenue, the main shopping street of Newark's black ghetto, is now largely boarded up. Increasingly, whites cluster on the fringes of town.

What is most dismaying about the city is that it may well reflect the future of much of urban America. "Newark is the urban prototype," says Rutgers Urbanologist George Sternlieb. "A few years from now it will be Buffalo, Cleveland, St. Louis and Akron, and then it will be every older city in the country." Thirteen percent of Newark's citizens are on welfare. The city led the nation in serious crimes per 100,000 of population in 1967, and violent crime rose 41% in the first nine months of 1968. Double locks are becoming standard in most dwellings. One physician has been mugged so many times he has hired a professional bodyguard.

Turning Black. More than half of Newark's schools are over 50 years old. A shortage of 9,000 seats necessitates double sessions. Reading levels fall substantially below the national average, and the schools have been afflicted with so much turmoil that the city has posted 145 guards in them within the past two weeks in an effort to halt attacks on teachers and students.

Straining to cope with its growing burdens, Newark has been steadily raising taxes--to the point where the rates are now self-defeating. The real estate tax rate, already $7.90 per $100 of assessed valuation, is one of the highest in the nation, and may soon be increased. That is a powerful incentive for middle-class homeowners to flee. The tax on a $20,000 house in Newark is roughly $1,400 a year, about the same amount that a nearby suburbanite pays on a $50,000 home.

Hardly incidental to Newark's problems is the fact that the city is rapidly turning black. Negroes comprise 52% of the population, up from 34% in 1960 and 17% in 1950. So speedy is the flight of whites to the suburbs that they are expected to constitute less than one-quarter of the population by 1975. Middle-class Negroes are also joining the white exodus, settling in communities like East Orange. "It's like being caught in a scissors," moans Mayor Hugh Addonizio. "One blade is the financial crisis. The other is the racial crisis."

Libraries and Books. In an effort to dramatize its plight, Newark's city council last month voted to close on April 1 the city's public library system and its distinguished museum, which was the first in the U.S. to exhibit primitive American painting and sculpture. Newark-bred Author Philip Roth (Portnoy's Complaint) protested: "In a city seething with social grievances there is probably little that could be more essential to the development and sanity of the thoughtful and ambitious young than the presence of those libraries and those books." Last week Mayor Addonizio led the city council and some 500 protesters in a march on the statehouse in Trenton, pleading for increased state aid. Back home, the council voted to keep the museum and the libraries open for the rest of the year--but faces the prospect of a stiff tax increase if outside help is not forthcoming.

Newark's financial problems would not be so great if its economic base were not crumbling. Downtown department stores have become marginal operations, wary of shoplifters and dealing in cheap goods. Because industrialists prefer to build modern, one-story plants in suburban areas, where land costs are low and the surroundings more congenial, Newark has lost almost 20,000 manufacturing jobs in the last 15 years. An expansion of headquarters facilities by banks and insurance companies located in Newark has partially offset this trend, but this tiny boom has not provided jobs for ghetto dwellers.

The city's race relations probably hit bottom during the 1967 riot. The militants are now concentrating most of their energies on capturing the mayoralty in May 1970. Though they make up a majority of the population, Negroes were unable to win even one of three city council seats that fell vacant in 1968: the black population is younger than the white citizenry and does not turn out as heavily to vote. The two leading Negro mayoral possibilities are both moderates: Kenneth Gibson, a structural engineer in the city's buildings department, who ran for mayor in 1966 and finished third, and hard-driving Oliver Lofton, head of the city's Neighborhood Legal Services office.

Wrenching Election. Mayor Addonizio, who is now in his second term, is currently under investigation by an Essex County grand jury looking into charges of corruption in the city government, but he says he will probably run again. If he does, the mayor is favored to win, since he has a liberal record and has in the past drawn large numbers of Negro votes. If Addonizio decides to quit, though, Newark can look forward to a wrenching election that is bound to polarize the community. Councilman-at-large Anthony Imperiale, the outspoken organizer of a white vigilante squad and a supporter of George Wallace in the last election, would probably emerge as the leading candidate.

Whatever happens in next year's election, Newark's problems will not go away. If the city is to provide its citizens with anything approximating equal opportunity, it will need much more state and federal aid. With acid eloquence, Mayor Addonizio recently declared: "America is not prepared to save its cities, and the cities are not in a position to save themselves." If this situation continues, Newark and cities like it will become, in effect, as inherently unequal as the rural South in the days of Jim Crow.

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