Brick City

Brick City is Newark’s informal nickname and one of the book’s most concentrated expressions of place. It names a city shaped by depopulation, poverty, violence, and abandonment, but it also supplies a language of toughness and collective endurance. Its force comes from that tension: Brick City is both a description of hardened conditions and an attempt to imagine what those conditions might still produce when residents act together.

Origins and Meanings

A resident of Newark’s North Ward coined the nickname during the period when the city’s identity was being remade by long economic and social decline. The name carried several possible explanations. It could refer to the hardness and resiliency of Newark’s people, to the bricks that paved many of the older downtown streets, or to the easy availability of brick-shaped packages of crack cocaine. Rather than settling on one authoritative meaning, the book preserves the nickname’s ambiguity. Its material reference, civic compliment, and drug-economy association coexist, making Brick City a verbal image of Newark’s layered reality.

The phrase therefore does more than decorate the city with a memorable label. Bricks suggest construction, weight, durability, and structures built piece by piece; they can also suggest walls, confinement, and an environment in which hardness has become necessary. The nickname’s competing origins keep those possibilities in contact. Newark is imagined as a place whose people endure, whose streets bear the marks of older construction, and whose illegal economy has made another kind of brick readily recognizable.

Newark as Brick City

During Rob Peace’s early childhood, East Orange, where his family’s physical life was primarily based, had the second-highest concentration of African Americans living below the poverty line in the United States, behind East St. Louis. Its violent-crime rate reached thirty-five hundred per one hundred thousand people, nearly six times the national average and eight times the rate in adjacent South Orange. The nearby towns could be separated by half a mile yet divided by radically different probabilities of being robbed, assaulted, raped, or killed. Brick City thus belongs to a wider urban environment in which geography organized risk as sharply as it organized race and class.

Newark’s broader crisis was equally concrete. More than one in three Newark residents lived below the poverty line; the public high-school graduation rate was below 60 percent; the city had lost 130,000 residents since the 1967 riots; and the Ironbound District had deteriorated from a busy, ethnically diverse commercial center into a stretch of shuttered storefronts inhabited by squatters. Prudential Insurance and other downtown companies considered leaving because attracting workers had become too difficult. The city even built enclosed skyways two stories above street level so downtown employees could move between buildings without setting foot on the streets. Brick City consequently describes not a static architectural identity but a landscape of separation, retreat, and attempted preservation.

Political Recasting

The nickname acquired a more hopeful public meaning after Sharpe James was elected mayor in 1986. A former alderman, James campaigned on jobs, improved low-income housing, and bringing development money back to downtown Newark. He presented himself as a politician formed by the city rather than set apart from it: he had lived among its residents, wore jogging suits in public, and claimed an individual knowledge of the people he governed. Newark was then 52 percent African American, and much of the African American community adored him. Skeet Douglas was among those residents, and James was a regular presence in the neighborhood’s conversations during the eight months between his inauguration and Skeet’s arrest.

James’s administration sought to replace the project towers built under Mayor Addonizio in the 1950s with smaller-scale public housing and middle-income units and to bring a performing-arts center and sports arena downtown. Those ambitions unfolded alongside persistent poverty, high crime, weak educational outcomes, and the mayor’s own later corruption scandal. The book therefore does not treat political symbolism as proof that the underlying conditions had been solved. James offered Newark a dignified, locally rooted image of public service and a promise of revitalization, while the socioeconomic problems that made the promise necessary remained in place.

The Slogan of Resilience

The most explicit transformation of Brick City occurs when Mayor Booker uses it as a civic slogan. During the Great Recession, Newark remained exceptionally vulnerable because poverty was combined with high taxes, poor high-school graduation rates, and a shrinking employment sector. Foreclosures reduced property-tax revenue even as demands on social services increased. In late 2010, more than a year after the federal government had officially declared the recession over, Booker cut 163 police officers, or 13 percent of the force. Residents, store owners, remaining police officers, and public-school administrators began to fear that the city was returning to the atmosphere of the 1970s; during the following four months, the murder rate rose 65 percent over the same period the previous year.

Against that deterioration, Booker repeatedly insisted that Newark was strong, resilient, and enduring, comparing its residents to bricks and arguing that, when they came together, they could create and overcome what they could not overcome separately. The rhetorical shift matters because it does not erase the nickname’s harsher meanings. The same word that can evoke crack cocaine, dangerous streets, and hardened survival becomes an appeal to solidarity. Brick City is consequently both diagnosis and exhortation: it records what Newark has been forced to withstand and asks residents to convert endurance into collective construction.

Street Identity and Narrative Significance

For Rob Peace and Victor Raymond, growing up between Newark and East Orange meant learning to move through a neighborhood without appearing to stand outside it. They were mugged three times during middle school. When carrying money, they distributed bills among socks, back pockets, and underwear, leaving only a few dollars in their wallets so they could surrender the wallets if robbed. They carried school bags to signal that they were going to or from school rather than threatening anyone’s turf. Rob also spoke as people around him spoke, quoted the lyrics they quoted, played football as they did, and made sure no one forgot that he was Skeet Douglas’s son.

This code followed Rob into adulthood. At Yale, words could hurt feelings or start arguments, but they did not ordinarily carry the same prospect of lethal retaliation. In Newark, an insult or careless expression could mobilize an armed group in East Orange. Even the word Yale became dangerous as a marker of status. When people challenged Rob’s claim to have attended the university, he acknowledged it while trying to strip the label of power, then asked them not to invoke it again. Brick City therefore names a social world in which identity must be continuously calibrated: Rob could be an ideal student, a substitute provider on Chapman Street, a neighborhood kid, a Yale graduate, or a drug operator, but each role carried different risks.

The phrase also shadows the violence and commerce surrounding Rob’s later drug operation. At a party in East Orange, a stranger recognized him as the person who had gone to Yale, forcing the university credential into a room where Rob had tried to present himself as simply another local guest. Later, when Boobie, a forceful member of the Double II Sets, returned to the Smith Street house, Curtis Gamble saw a sedan idling outside with several silhouettes passing a glowing ember among them. Rob’s Sour Diesel had become known as exceptionally fresh, and he had been selling to some of Boobie’s people when Boobie could not be reached. The hard civic image of Brick City thus remains connected to the immediate, embodied dangers of reputation, territory, and drug-market competition.

At the same time, Brick City is not reducible to violence. Rob’s friends from Newark visited him at Yale bringing humor, music, marijuana, liquor, and the ordinary intimacy of old friendships. They were proud of him and did not treat Yale with cynicism or condescension, even as Rob’s life there was divided from the world in which he had learned to survive. The nickname’s deepest significance lies in this double vision: Newark is a place of danger and affection, exclusion and belonging, damage and resourcefulness. Brick City holds those contradictions together without resolving them.