As James Baxter Terrace is razed, Newark loses a part of its history

James Baxter Terrace is in its final incarnation. The tear-down phase.
A chain link fence surrounds the vacant 502-unit public housing complex. The heavy metal doors are welded shut, some in three or four places after vagrants pried open the first welds. The ground floor windows are not boarded up; they were filled with cinderblocks and concrete. Through the second and third story holes where windows used to be, you can see torn out light fixtures and collapsed ceilings.
On the courtyards and playground, grass is hay length. Macadam is broken into gravel in driveways. The playground equipment is rusted, the laughter of children a ghost in the wind. The drug dealers took over at night, then took over all day. Now the dealers and the bag-of-bones addicts who drifted in and out of James Baxter Terrace have moved on, too.
-Trapped in the long, uncut grass is evidence of the societal demise. Empty minis of Cruzan Spiced Rum, Paul Masson Brandy, empty mini heroin bags, and litter from Jonesing diets of candy and potato chips and cheap soda. A dirty couch, its fabric torn and soaked with rain water, is the last piece of furniture in James Baxter Terrace.
It will be gone soon, and a new Newark Housing Authority development will be built.
But pieces of the wreckage are being preserved and sent to Washington to be included in the Smithsonian’s National African-American Museum, because for all its blemishes, James Baxter Terrace is a historic site.
Thousands of commuters and college students who pass it on their way to Route 280 everyday don’t see it that way. They might not see it all. It became a part of the Newark history everyone wants to avoid.
But it didn’t start out that way. It started out as a story of urban optimism; a place where working people could find safe, livable and affordable housing, as they worked their way up America’s economic ladder. It was place built with good intentions.
"This is part of the African-American urban narrative, the good and the bad," said Clement Price, the Rutgers-Newark history professor who suggested sending pieces of James Baxter Terrace to Washington. "It was a wonderful place to live and raise a family for many years, probably through the 1970s. But, as everyone in Newark knows, the facility became challenged with the ills often associated with America’s poor, inner city black communities."
Lonnie Bunch, the director of the African-American Museum, is a Belleville native and welcomed the James Baxter artifacts because they tell the story of public housing in this country: a story too often about good intentions, gone bad.
It was among the first projects in a national housing initiative signed into law by President Franklin Roosevelt, as a public works project.
"These were designed by the best architects and were built with very good materials," said Ulana Zakalak, whose company is deconstructing an entranceway to send to the Smithsonian. "The designs of these early projects were to give people yards and community open space. These were two- and three-stories high, not the high rises of the 60s."
Early pictures of James Baxter Terrace show women with baby carriages, children on tricycles and gardens in yards.
James Baxter Terrace was built as a safe haven for working class people before WWII. It was a mult-racial housing development of factory workers and other lower middleclass wageowners. But as industrial jobs disappeared and poverty crept in, it became a crime-infested open air drug market, and the buildings fell into disrepair. The city is razing it now, but its history is an essential part of the African-American urban story. The facade at 25 Nesbitt St., aka building 9, is headed to the Smithsonian.
Baxter, himself, was a historic figure in Newark.
"James Baxter, was the famous Negro principal of the First Colored School in Newark. He was an iconic figure in the black community," Price said.
It opened as a segregated apartment complex — the white section ran along Sussex Avenue and Nesbitt Street, the black section was along Orange Street – but integrated during the repeal of Jim Crow laws. It was 1954 when New Jersey ended residential discrimination in public housing.
In its original incarnation, the project was built for low-income workers, who found jobs at nearby Westinghouse and the Borden Farms distribution plant and in Newark’s machine works industry. The first residents moved in in 1941, when the war kept Newark manufacturing busy. But those jobs dried up after the war, and the city went into a tailspin. Fast forward 50 years, and the solid-built project became too far gone.
The doorway was taken apart brick by brick by Zakalak’s crew at 25 Nesbitt Street. In the original building, there were sidelights behind glass, lighting the frame, and wood doors with windows. What the Smithsonian will get are the heavy metal doors with the weld marks, and new brick that replaced the broken sidelights.
"They want it as it appears today," Zakalak said.
At the Newark Housing Authority there are renderings for a new project called Baxter Park. They show cityscapes with ground-floor stores, and mixed-income housing. They show new, quiet streets and shrubbery and children playing on the streets. Phase 1 is already under construction. The history of urban optimism continues.

Link to the soon-to-be demolished James Baxter Terrace:
www.bing.com/maps/#JnE9Lm5ld2FyayUyYm5qJ...MTE1LjA2NzE5MjA3NzU=
Link to the Original Article:
blog.nj.com/njv_mark_diionno/2012/01/di_...es_baxter_terra.html