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Health & Fitness

Newark's Penn Station: More Than A Masterpiece, A Portal to Hope

An architectural gem, this station also played a fascinating role in the lives of those fleeing from the Jim Crow South...

Every history teacher has taught about the Statue of Liberty. We all know the story. A gift from France, our sister republique, she “stands tall” in the midst of New York’s windswept harbor. Over the course of three very different centuries she has welcomed immigrants, refugees, returning troops and tourists alike. Countless political cartoons have employed her, or some version of her, to point out America’s promise, hypocrisy and confidence. And in innumerable disaster movies, she’s been damaged, frozen, cut up, knocked down, obliterated and washed away. No doubt such scenes were meant to demonstrate the futility of the nation’s overconfident ego in the face of all-powerful enemies such as Mother Nature, aliens or sea monsters. Even this week, tri-state residents cheered as she again welcomed visitors, reopened with New York State funds in response to the recent silly Federal shutdown.

 

It must have meant a lot, really, more than anything, for immigrants arriving by ship to pass her by in a bygone age. Many of us might recall that amazing flashback scene from The Godfather Part II, when a young, lonely Vito Corleone rushes to the side of his ship to catch a glimpse of the Copper Lady.

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Again, educators love to recount how the wretched millions escaped a Europe filled with ancient hatreds and hopeless poverty to our land of hope and opportunity. But what a lot of people don’t know – including my students – is that Newark has its own version of a “Golden Gateway,” a portal that openly welcomed, year after year, oppressed masses bolting from a life of hatred, unjust debt and endless penury. The locale is one of Newark’s most beloved landmarks and its great Art Deco masterpiece: Penn Station.

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Architecturally its one of the city’s gems. Constructed during Newark’s difficult Depression years, it opened to great fanfare in March of 1935. The building was designed by the famed firm McKim, Mead and White.  In years past, they had been known for their marble wedding-cake structures of the more confident Gilded Age, especially the entire neoclassical campus of Columbia University in Manhattan.

 

Newark’s Penn Station is a more distant relation of such grand assemblies. It’s somewhat smaller, but still grand. Its balanced and stony, but sleeker. Its grand main room, like its haughty sister station Grand Central in New York, greets arrivals with a grand vision of chandeliers, dark, long wooden pews and reliefs in stone telling visitors of the nation’s transportation history. Its high ceilings and gymnasium-like proportions mix with sleek art deco designs in an effort to remind travelers that this is a modern, industrial city. This is a city that makes things. Lots of things. This is a city that hums.

 

What the designers might not have expected is that Newark’s grand portal would welcome hundreds of thousands of African-Americans fleeing the Jim Crow south of the 1930’s, 40’s, 50’s and 60’s. Many of my students don’t realize (and neither do most Americans) that the segregated South of poll taxes, lynchings and chain gangs didn’t belong in some distant sun-soaked state like Alabama or Georgia. Rather, the “South” began an hour’s train ride from Newark’s Penn, in Maryland, Washington, D.C. and Virginia. For many of these arrivees, the land of fear and fury was a mere two stops behind Newark.

 

In the 1940’s the station’s meaning as a beacon of freedom was so perceptible in the black community that one of the nation’s foremost African-American newspapers published a story on it. Titled “Newark’s Penn Station Gateway to Freedom for Dixie Migrants,” the article profiled what the station had become for America’s internal refugees. Many of those interviewed for the 1947 article openly conveyed the elation at their arrival in the Brick City. Those featured repeatedly expressed relief at their arrival to a place that promised more employment, less violence, and less racial discrimination. By this time in history, Newark’s transportation system was openly and legally desegregated. Newly arrived migrants marveled over the equal availability and common nature of seats, stores, taxis, water fountains and waiting areas for black and white.  

 

Those interviewed claimed a variety of destinations. Some were headed to settle with relatives in Newark and eastern Essex County. Others pointed to establishing new lives at the Jersey Shore. Still more were there to transfer to local lines to Manhattan or Jersey City. But nearly all had one general conclusion: they weren’t going back. Ever. One young male passenger straightforwardly stated, “I’ll never go down that low again.” Whether he meant geographically or literally, it really didn’t matter. Readers got the point.

 

From a contemporary prospective, we know that, of course, racial discrimination and poverty would continue to exist on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line for decades to come. That’s not the point here. What is the point? Hope. It’s what the station represented to so many. I pass through it every day on my way to school. My heart still soars, even on the rainiest and coldest of days, when I transverse that grand room to my own house of light, my own Art Deco beacon of learning, Arts High. 

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