Illtown

Illtown is the colloquial name associated with East Orange after the city’s population changed from 39 percent Black and 53 percent white in 1960 to 89 percent Black and 4 percent white in 1980, the year Rob Peace was born. The expression does more than describe a demographic transformation: it gathers together the effects of racial realignment, white flight, factory closures, poverty, and the stigmatizing gaze directed at a predominantly Black city. Against that label, the book presents East Orange as both a damaged urban environment and the dense social world from which Rob drew loyalty, money, anger, and purpose.

Origins and Urban Change

In Jackie Peace’s experience, the transformation appeared first through ordinary visual details rather than through demographic statistics. When she took the bus to her first job after high school in the mail room of Orange City Hall, she saw “FOR SALE” signs appearing three and four to a block. The western spur of Interstate 280, completed in 1973 only four blocks north of Chapman Street, shortened trips from downtown Newark to suburban areas in Morris County and the Watchung Mountains from more than an hour on surface streets to about fifteen minutes. The freeway therefore became not only a transportation link but also a corridor through which people uneasy about the city’s racial tensions and impoverished neighborhoods could pass quickly toward the suburbs.

Jackie’s father spoke contemptuously of realtors who profited from that unrest. They persuaded white homeowners that the arrival of one Black family would bring more Black families, causing property values to fall unless the homeowners sold. Over the following decades, Jackie sensed neighborhoods such as Vailsburg, Irvington, and East Orange becoming “blacker,” house by house and block by block, as Black residents moved west from downtown Newark. The expression Illtown thus emerged within a history in which racial change was not simply spontaneous migration: it was accelerated by fear, speculative real-estate practices, segregated housing patterns, and the withdrawal of white residents.

The city’s racial transformation coincided with the collapse of its industrial economy. More than six hundred factories in and around Newark eventually closed as manufacturing moved toward cheaper land, foreign goods became more competitive, and American companies outsourced labor. Tanneries, glass plants, plastics manufacturers, and industrial-machine-parts factories disappeared one after another, bringing mass layoffs. Illtown therefore names a place shaped by overlapping processes: racial isolation and the erosion of the industrial jobs that had once supported urban households.

The Label and the Lived City

The book treats Illtown as a public shorthand that risks reducing East Orange to sickness, danger, or failure. Jackie did not initially interpret every demographic shift as a historical process; as a young woman, she was primarily glad to find work and to help pay for enjoyment when money allowed. Her daily life was not an abstract case study in urban decline. It was organized around employment, family, housing, and the practical effort to remain secure while the surrounding economy contracted.

Rob’s later life further complicates the label. East Orange supplied the people and relationships that remained central to him after he entered elite institutions. His friends came from Oakdale Elementary School, Mt. Carmel Elementary School, football games, East Orange stoops, St. Benedict’s Preparatory School, and various dealing networks. Their circumstances varied sharply: Shannon Heggins had children whose fathers had left; Curtis held a decent job; Flowy lived more precariously; and Tavarus Hester was arrested for possession with intent to distribute. Yet Rob continued to regard these people as his own. Illtown was therefore not merely a backdrop of deprivation but a social field whose members remained connected through practical reciprocity.

That reciprocity often took material form. When classmates at St. Benedict’s Preparatory School asked Rob to buy marijuana from him, he refused and directed them to Tavarus, who could obtain larger quantities through his older brother. Tavarus later gave Rob a twenty-dollar kickback for the referral. Rob changed the money at a store on the way home and left half of it for Jackie, as he had done with money before. The episode shows how an informal economy could be woven into family provision: the transaction was illegal, but its immediate meaning for Rob included helping his mother.

Violence, Respect, and Social Boundaries

Illtown also signifies the violent conditions that shaped how Rob understood disrespect and accountability. At Yale University, a dining-hall encounter with members of the crew team became a severe test of the divide between his student identity and his working position. The students, associated with wealth and elite New England boarding schools, left their trays on a dirty table instead of carrying them a few steps to the window. Rob asked them courteously to take care of the trays, but they ignored him, avoided eye contact, and walked away without thanking the workers.

Rob responded by imagining a practice he called “curbing,” in which a victim’s head is forced against a curb until the teeth are knocked out. Unable to retaliate against the students on campus, he bused their trays and then put his fist through the wall in the dish room. A cook promised to repair the hole before the manager arrived so that Rob would not be fired. His Yale friend understood that the anger exceeded the apparent triviality of the incident: the slight represented a social order in which privileged students could treat workers as invisible and leave without consequence. The same encounter that seemed unremarkable to the friend carried, for Rob, the accumulated pressure of a world in which dignity had to be defended because institutions did not reliably defend it.

The contrast between Yale and East Orange sharpened this perception. Yale initiations involved singing Madonna songs in the dining hall for the water-polo team or arm-wrestling campus police for Elihu. In East Orange, the surrounding gang culture was tied to drug distribution and retribution; initiation could mean murder as proof of the hardness required to protect the group. Twenty percent of Newark gang violence was drug-related, compared with 5 percent nationally, and distribution corridors ran through the city as cooperating gangs enforced them. For a young Black man with cornrows, tattoos, cash, and marijuana but no gang affiliation, ordinary movement through the streets could become mortally dangerous.

The expression Illtown consequently carries an unstable relationship to violence. It reflects a city where violence was real and structurally intensified by the drug economy, but it can also become an external caricature that erases the economic and racial history producing those conditions. The book keeps both realities in view: the danger cannot be sentimentalized, yet the city cannot be understood through danger alone.

Economy, Loyalty, and Mobility

Rob’s dealings show how the city’s informal economy operated through changing connections, negotiated risk, and obligations to relatives and friends. His first supplier disappeared, probably to avoid conflict with a rival, the police, or both. Later, Carl acted as his connection, insisting on attending every transaction. Rob drove Carl from Bloomfield to a supplier’s house in Ivy Hill, inspected the marijuana, negotiated a price of $1,800 per pound, and returned Carl home with $200. The arrangement was financially inefficient and personally risky, but Carl was treated as an uncle, and Rob’s economic decisions were shaped by kin-like loyalty as well as profit.

Rob’s friends questioned why he relied on Carl when more stable suppliers were available. Their criticism revealed the operating code of the trade: a dealer had to appear relaxed but imposing, willing to walk away but not too eager, and able to maintain enough distance from unstable people to protect the business. Yet Rob never fully separated business from responsibility. He gave money to friends who needed rent or children’s clothing, offered rides, and showed up when someone wanted company. When his tire blew at one in the morning on the Merritt Parkway, Flowy drove an hour each way to bring a spare and help with the jack. When tenants failed to pay rent at the Greenwood Avenue property, Drew came to pressure them into paying. These exchanges made the city’s networks function as an informal system of assistance, even when the same networks could expose participants to arrest or violence.

After Skeet Douglas died, Rob redirected some of this energy toward Peace Realty. By the beginning of the 2006–07 school year, he had renovated the house on Greenwood Avenue, lived with Jackie on Chapman Street, and rented all three Greenwood units for a fluctuating profit of about $1,000 a month. He imagined real estate as a legitimate version of the same resourcefulness: find an undervalued property, renovate it, locate the right homeowner, and earn $20,000 or $30,000. Housing represented shelter, heat, security, and family, so the enterprise offered Rob a way to convert his labor and social skill into an openly constructive form of mobility.

The difficulty was that his obligations remained larger than any single legal or illegal enterprise. In 2006, while driving toward Boston with approximately five pounds of marijuana in the trunk, he told Oswaldo Gutierrez that he wanted to succeed. Oswaldo answered that Rob wanted to succeed simultaneously in business and as a dealer, and that he had to choose. Rob’s problem was not simply greed. He cared about the people around him too much to become the cold-blooded kind of dealer who commanded wealth through lethal fear, yet he continued to treat drug money as a resource for family, friends, debt, housing, and future plans.

Illtown as an Enduring Frame

The label remained powerful because Rob’s education never erased the city’s claims on him. At Yale, he could enter elite intellectual and social spaces, but a dining-hall insult could return him to the moral grammar of the streets. In Elihu, he presented his father’s conviction as the product of a system designed to keep ordinary Black men down, and Arthur Turpin recognized that Rob’s defense of Skeet Douglas came from a deeper emotional history than Rob could fully explain. The city’s past entered elite rooms through Rob’s anger, loyalty, and insistence that institutional respectability had not made him forget where he came from.

After leaving teaching and returning to drug dealing, Rob was held at gunpoint during a failed negotiation in August 2003. He paid several hundred dollars more than the agreed price, then began teaching high school and left the trade. The revolver reduced his scientific knowledge, Yale credentials, and personal achievements to the immediate fact of survival. The event made clear that Illtown was not merely an identity Rob could visit or discard; its risks remained physically present whenever his work brought him back into the drug economy.

Years later, Nathan asked Rob at the Gaslight Brewery in South Orange what he was doing. Rob replied that he had gone to Yale and knew what he was doing, but Nathan reminded him that Yale had been ten years earlier. The exchange exposes the unresolved tension behind Illtown: education had given Rob extraordinary mobility, yet it had not settled the demands of home, friendship, family, and self-definition. His answer invoked Yale as proof of accomplishment, while Nathan’s question returned him to the present tense of obligation.

When Rob later employed four young men as couriers, paying each $400 a week, gas money, and commissions, one of them wept because the work would keep him from homelessness. Rob acted like an older brother and mentor, insisting that the men keep their cars registered, maintain working taillights, and obey traffic laws. For three weeks, they moved nearly a pound a day. Rob used the early proceeds to repay investments to Curtis Gamble, Tavarus Hester, Drew Jemison, and Flowy; make mortgage payments on Greenwood; contribute to Jackie; repair the Chapman Street house; pay credit-card debts incurred for Frances Peace’s dialysis and emphysema care; and help friends with rent, car repairs, and marijuana. The operation was illegal and dangerous, but within Rob’s moral economy its money was repeatedly translated into care.

Illtown therefore functions as a compressed social history and a contested name. It points to racial transition, white flight, industrial collapse, drug-related violence, and persistent inequality, but it also contains the relationships through which people survived those forces. The book’s central irony is that Rob’s movement beyond East Orange never amounted to simple escape. Yale, science, teaching, real estate, and the drug trade became successive attempts to convert intelligence and labor into security for himself and others, while the city called Illtown continued to define the loyalties, wounds, and responsibilities he carried with him.