Octavia
07-08-2007, 07:33 AM
by Brad Parks
Sunday July 08, 2007, 3:00 AM
He thought it was some kind of providence, the perfect confluence of a man, a time and a place.
The man was David Suchow, a 37-year-old pharmacist. The time was 1955. The place was the corner of Springfield Avenue and Bergen Street in Newark, where Suchow had just been given the opportunity to buy a pharmacy, Post Drugs, for no money down and a reasonable monthly payment.
To Suchow, it looked like a future. The location was in the middle of a two-mile-long commercial corridor stretching from Newark's downtown to its outskirts. In the days before shopping malls, Springfield Avenue was what shopping malls later would aspire to be.
"It was a hustling, bustling area," said Suchow, now 89 and living in Hunterdon County. "Back in my day, we called it action. It had great action, a lot of foot traffic."
What he couldn't know in those optimistic times was just how quickly the action was changing. A little more than a decade later, Suchow's corner and the blocks around it were the epicenter of one of the most severe civil disturbances in American history, a spasm of racially steeped violence and destruction that began one hot July evening in 1967 and ended five days later with 26 deaths and $10 million in damage.
As the city prepares to mark the 40th anniversary of the event, The Star-Ledger is examining the Newark riots from the vantage point of the neighborhood around Springfield and Bergen. Today and for the next three days, more than 50 years of the area's history will be revisited - from gilded commercial strip to riot-shredded shell, then from vacated inner-city wasteland to urban-redevelopment success story.
Drawing on thousands of pages of documents recently discovered in State Police headquarters, four decades of scholarly research, and the living memory of dozens who crossed through the neighborhood, this four-part series will debunk some popular myths and will reveal some never-before-reported details about the disorders.
Read the first installment here.
Read some of the recently discovered documents and watch video interviews at www.nj.com/newark1967.
Sunday July 08, 2007, 3:00 AM
He thought it was some kind of providence, the perfect confluence of a man, a time and a place.
The man was David Suchow, a 37-year-old pharmacist. The time was 1955. The place was the corner of Springfield Avenue and Bergen Street in Newark, where Suchow had just been given the opportunity to buy a pharmacy, Post Drugs, for no money down and a reasonable monthly payment.
To Suchow, it looked like a future. The location was in the middle of a two-mile-long commercial corridor stretching from Newark's downtown to its outskirts. In the days before shopping malls, Springfield Avenue was what shopping malls later would aspire to be.
"It was a hustling, bustling area," said Suchow, now 89 and living in Hunterdon County. "Back in my day, we called it action. It had great action, a lot of foot traffic."
What he couldn't know in those optimistic times was just how quickly the action was changing. A little more than a decade later, Suchow's corner and the blocks around it were the epicenter of one of the most severe civil disturbances in American history, a spasm of racially steeped violence and destruction that began one hot July evening in 1967 and ended five days later with 26 deaths and $10 million in damage.
As the city prepares to mark the 40th anniversary of the event, The Star-Ledger is examining the Newark riots from the vantage point of the neighborhood around Springfield and Bergen. Today and for the next three days, more than 50 years of the area's history will be revisited - from gilded commercial strip to riot-shredded shell, then from vacated inner-city wasteland to urban-redevelopment success story.
Drawing on thousands of pages of documents recently discovered in State Police headquarters, four decades of scholarly research, and the living memory of dozens who crossed through the neighborhood, this four-part series will debunk some popular myths and will reveal some never-before-reported details about the disorders.
Read the first installment here.
Read some of the recently discovered documents and watch video interviews at www.nj.com/newark1967.