The Grand Tour of Random Cities

There is irony in the fact that a city founded by the most hard-core of the Puritans is now one of the least law-abiding places in the country. As the train enters the city, a decrepit brick building towering over the ruins of another building has a message in graffiti written across it: "Detox the Ghetto." And on the city's tourism website, the changing advertisements on the right of the page are for financial rewards for turning in guns or illegal dumpers, a crime hotline, and a neighborhood renewal group.

Newark, New Jersey, may have dropped from the most dangerous to the 20th most dangerous city in America, but it is far from feeling like an alive and healthy place. It was my latest stop in what could be called my "Grand Tour of Random Cities." In my travels in the past few years, I've gone to places that are largely off the tourist map--East Lansing, Michigan; St. Louis; Springfield, Illinois; Providence; Richmond; Columbus, Ohio; Baltimore; and now, Newark. Each of these cities has its merits, but they are all places that have struck me as still recovering from the near-death experience of white flight and urban decay in recent decades.

I only saw a small pocket of Newark during my visit to the New Jersey Historical Society, but what I found most creepy there--as in Richmond, St. Louis, and to some extent in Baltimore--was the lack of people out in the streets. Broad, congested city streets run through block after block of silent, cold buildings and the people are largely sealed inside their cars. The historical society is in one of the few remaining 19th century buildings in this part of Newark, and as I sat in the 5th floor library, the whole building occasionally shook as a trolley rattled past.

In a city like Newark, the past feels fragile. To walk through the empty streets of a half-dead city in order to read the papers of its earlier inhabitants, inhabitants who lived there when the city was growing and thriving, is in some ways a depressing endeavor. I feel like a voyeur who is peering into the city's past without contributing to its future. Unless, that is, cities like these can figure out--as Washington, Boston, or Charleston have--that their history is what could build their future.