By mantunes

I drank my last latte at Black Swan Espresso last October. The small coffee shop on Halsey Street had been my second home for almost eight years. I’d sunk thousands of dollars into the place—and just as many hours. Black Swan gleamed like the beacon it truly was: a meeting place for both Old and New Newark alike, fiercely devoted to providing the same quality of third-wave coffee that Brooklynites take for granted. Its closure tore through my heart.

This didn’t come as a surprise. For nearly a year, one of its owners had intimated that the coffee shop would not be around much longer. The slow degradation of service confirmed it: items disappearing from the menu, irregular hours, ponderous business choices, staff generally on edge. If anything, Black Swan’s closing was a form of euthanasia.

Black Swan’s demise culminated a year of bad news for the Halsey Street Corridor—a business area that serves as both a bellwether for Newark’s local economy and a measure of its viability as a residential neighborhood for young professionals. The very next week, the Green Chicpea abruptly shuttered its doors. Green Chicpea was Newark’s only front-facing Glatt Kosher offering. I was on good terms with the owner and knew that he owned his building, a luxury most businesses don’t have. Still, he’d long complained about the complete hollowing out of office-worker foot traffic after the COVID-19 lockdowns. Every time I casually chatted with him about the state of things downtown, he had the same refrain: “They have to come back.” This was both a command and a mantra. So it was no surprise when I discovered on Reddit, of all places, that the Green Chicpea was no more after nearly 15 years. No formal notice to the wider community from ownership was given.

A walk between Raymond Boulevard and Washington Place on Halsey Street—a walk that takes no more than 15 minutes and covers what many would consider the corridor’s true center—reveals a surprising number of shuttered businesses and empty storefronts. Granted, some new businesses have opened. Qaali Coffee made a big splash last summer. More More Now, a vinyl record store, impressed me with its optimism about the city and is exactly what I want to see here. The Green Chicpea, without skipping much of a beat, is being replaced with the decidedly not Kosher CHEESTEAKS. Cortaditos, a Belleville-based operation, seems exceptionally busy. Yet comparing what Halsey Street looked and felt like in 2018 to how it looks and feels now, you can’t help but feel a low-key sense of dread or disappointment. Many of those promises of a bustling neighborhood have vanished. There’s a general sense of stalling. This feels discordant with the sheer number of high-rent residences launched onto the neighborhood—residences filled with tenants who, in theory, should be driving more businesses to open and thrive.

Among friends and confidants, I’ve started calling this phenomenon “the Halsey Street Recession.” The name captures the very real pullback on the dreams many had for this city, especially after the effects of the 2008–09 Great Recession finally abated. When I moved into the former leasing office of my building in 2021, building management offered to remove a decal mural in one of the rooms so I could have a bare wall in what would become my office. I asked them to keep it up, thinking it would make an interesting backdrop for virtual meetings. At the time, I was heavily involved in Newark work and thought it would be a bit of a flex to have a map of Downtown Newark looming behind me. The map presented a highly-stylized view of downtown, focused on the different amenities and retail offerings in the area. While pitching prospective tenants, I imagined the leasing officer used the map to highlight all the things they could do in the evenings or on weekends. That list (not solely of businesses on Halsey Street) included: Marcus B&P; Kilkenny Alehouse; Dinosaur Bar-B-Que; the Green Chicpea; 27 Mix, Black Swan Espresso; Nizi Sushi; Burger Walla; Barcade; and Meatball Obsession. All have closed or ceased functioning since 2018. Churn is normal in the independent leisure and hospitality sector, but this amount of closure is way past the normal failure rate. 

Photo by mantunes

Today, I have half a mind to have this map peeled off, as I probably should have done when I moved in. The map is now just an ever-present reminder of a Newark that was. No more than eight years old, it has become a graveyard of things that once existed here but are no longer around.

The Halsey Street Recession is not a commentary on the overall health or progress of the city as a whole. Instead, it’s an observation about highly localized economic conditions that have had an outsized impact on a particular neighborhood. More important—and probably more dangerous—the term forces us to admit an unpleasant truth about the narrative we tell about this town: that growth, development, and opportunity in Newark (especially post-1967) can only move up and to the right. We must confront the very real possibility that progress can not only stall but actually recede.

Many of the driving factors of this phenomenon are beyond the control of the city’s political and economic actors. My biggest fear remains the macroeconomic factors outside our control. I believe recessions hit Newark earlier, harder, and longer, and we seem due for some kind of larger economic contraction. Still, I believe there are many things we do—or don’t do—as a city that exacerbate these problems.

First and foremost, the COVID-19 pandemic caused an irreparable shift in the city’s business patterns, particularly on the demand side. Many offices have begun to mandate the return of workers in person; nowhere near the same numbers have come back. The owner of the Green Chicpea zeroed in on this exact phenomenon, but he’s not the only small business owner to complain about the lack of foot traffic. These workers were the lifeblood for many of the cafés and lunch spots that formed the core of the retail experience downtown. Businesses built their menus, set their hours, and structured themselves around the daytime crowd, and I would argue to their own detriment. They were overexposed to such a shift in a way that a similarly situated Hoboken or Jersey City neighborhood just wasn’t.

Not being open in the evenings meant that residents—high-spending ones who chose to live in neighborhoods where the sandwich shop didn’t close at 3PM or wasn’t closed on Saturdays and Sundays—weren’t around during the roughly two-year period of exclusive work-from-home mandates and solely takeout orders. Many businesses didn’t survive, but those that did hobbled along with vastly reduced sales, which meant reduced offerings, reduced staffing, and reduced hours and which only further exacerbated the problem. This, in turn, leads to a vicious cycle where residents leave the neighborhood because of the lack of options during non-working hours, and businesses suffer and close because of the lack of resident customers.

Second, it’s really hard to open a small business in this town. Long gone are the days of simply hanging your own shingle and watching the customers flow in. Countless permits and licenses bedevil even the most sophisticated developers. I’ve had several business owners tell me about monthlong waits for run-of-the-mill permits or inspections, requiring them to call City Hall several times a week. Rumors abounded this past summer of some kind of collapse that caused the state to come in and pick up the slack at City Hall—something that hasn’t been confirmed by reporting but that I’ve heard from several sources who would know. On top of that, knowing whether you’re in compliance feels like playing roulette, where the house only seems to win and you perpetually lose. I have a friend who owns a business who thought they’d passed inspection, only for the inspector to come back after construction had finished and mandate a particular feature be built—one that I’ve seen rarely used and that came at great cost in time and money to the owner.

Newark’s downtown also suffers from a particularly mercenary landlord class that has found economic benefit in leaving storefronts empty or renting only at costs unsustainable to tenant businesses. Rents are really high for an otherwise demonstrably unprofitable commercial corridor. Drawing from my own personal experience: if you’re lucky enough to even receive a response from a commercial landlord, they will often ask for both high rent and complete shouldering of the buildout on the part of the tenant. Most small businesses know that such an agreement can easily put you underwater in your first few operating years, and unless you’re printing money, this can put a very firm expiration date on your business.

I chalk this up to two things. First, I think the landlord class has deluded itself into thinking that Newark is a city with residents who have more discretionary income than they actually do—or that they spend that income locally if they have it. To these landlords, Newark’s market is one of perpetually unrestrained growth, one that can support the rents they ask for. Rather than work with the market they have and take risks with businesses that need more runway to develop a clientele, they’d rather wait for commercial tenants to meet these exorbitant rents.

Also affecting this market is the institutional backing that some businesses come with. This is something I’ve indirectly benefited from. In an effort to help the town, organizations and institutions such as Prudential or the Newark Alliance provide grants and loans to businesses to help them secure spaces and conduct buildout. I suspect that landlords know this and price it into their rents.

Lastly, much of the institutional heft of the town has been focused on attracting major corporate entities and keeping the ones already here. I’m not denigrating existing efforts by nonprofit and corporate actors in helping small businesses get up and running. I find it strange, however, how much energy has been expended in bringing large corporations to this town. I had a front-seat view of these efforts for a substantial period of my life, both helping pursue them and watching them unfold to sometimes spectacular failure. (Mars-Wrigley’s announcement that they would wind down their Newark operations within a year.) Thinking about how to attract corporations over residents puts the cart before the horse. Corporations largely follow people, not the other way around. This order matters because many people with influence and power in this town spend too much time thinking about what Newark needs to attract corporations that will then attract people. Rather, they should ask a very personal question: “What would make me want to live my life in this town?”

I ask this question because way too often, the people in the driver’s seat of these decisions often don’t live in this town. They have voted with their feet, making the same decision that countless other people have made, choosing a reliably consistent life in a bordering suburb. By not living here, Newark becomes more of an abstraction than a real place. A “destination” rather than a home. They don’t have to bear the very real costs of the decisions that are made. They don’t have to walk around on a Saturday and wonder why everything is closed.

This may be a harsh critique, and one that I don’t level lightly, as I know a whole host of factors are considered when deciding where to live. In my experience, though, more often than not when someone is an executive and their work focuses on the development and bettering of downtown, they don’t live in this city. To do their best work, they really need to have some skin in the game.

There is no panacea. Newark is going through shifts in development and demographics, both positive and negative. But I cannot be shaken from my belief that we don’t talk openly enough about the serious challenges this city faces regarding the sustainability of what we’re trying to build here. This includes municipal government, the political class, the developer class, corporations, the nonprofit sector, and all institutions that dedicate themselves to helping this city flourish. At the end of the day, it’s us—the current residents of this city—who bear the responsibility of holding all those mentioned to account and asking those hard questions about what all this work is for. It is through ourselves and supporting these institutions that we can stem the Halsey Street Recession and bring about the neighborhood’s flourishing.

mantunes is a resident of Newark who writes about the city (and wonders at what point he should’ve given up on it).