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Originally published in 1939
Some of this information may no longer be current and in that case is presented for historical interest only.
Edited by GET NJ, COPYRIGHT 2003
In recent years the influence of New York City has strongly colored Newark's social and industrial life. With the development of modern transportation after the Civil War, New York City overflowed into New Jersey. A network of automobile highways followed the railroads across the Hackensack meadows, with the result that Newark began increasingly to share New York City's suburban population with the New Jersey cities along the Hudson, without losing its identity as the market center for the west.
This overflow from New York was a basic cause of the sudden expansion in the do's, noted above. Factories began crowding out the older residential districts along the river and along the main line of the Pennsylvania railroad between New York and New Jersey. The residents began moving to the higher ground farther up the river and along the base of the Watchung Mountains; then the wealthier commuting class from New York saw the advantages of the Watchungs as a residential haven, and soon the old villages which surrounded the city became prosperous-some of them very expensive-communities that reflect suburban New York life more than they do the quieter tempo of interior New Jersey.
The completion of the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad in 1911 between Newark, Jersey City, and New York under the direction of William Gibbs McAdoo greatly accelerated the intermingling of the population and speeded the development of the city. The new rapid transit attracted thousands from Manhattan to Newark and its suburbs, and in turn made "going to New York" for business or pleasure a Newark habit. Today, uncounted thousands commute daily to Manhattan offices and shops on the jerky red trains of the Hudson & Manhattan Railroad-known to everyone as "the Tubes." The same trains bring a substantial number of New Yorkers to jobs in Newark. Additional thousands of men and women who work in the banking, insurance and industrial offices of Newark have homes and interests in outlying suburbs. Like the New Yorkers they are only daytime Newark residents.
The city's newsstands offer further evidence of Newark's split personality. The logotypes of New York dailies outnumber those of Newark papers by a ratio of almost 3 to 1, and a large display of suburban and foreign language papers rivals the local publications. The patriarchal Newark Evening News is the mast influential paper of the city and State. The Sunday Call, published only once a week, is as much a part of most Newark homes as the radio. Nevertheless, thousands of Newarkers daily supplement local papers with New York publications.
The result of these pulls to New York on the east and to suburbs on the west, is that modern Newark is very little a city of common interests. Yet between these sizable commuting groups exists a larger and less well defined mass that may be called the population proper of Newark. These citizens range from descendants of those who sailed from Connecticut in 1666 to those who sailed from Genoa, Odessa or Danzig in 1896. Bankers and machinists, jurists and janitors, teachers and night school pupils-they compose the aggregate, dynamic Newark.
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