How Newark Pictured Itself on 100th Birthday as City


by Nat Bodian

On March 13, 1836, the townspeople of Newark went to the polls and voted to incorporate into a city so that elected officials could conduct business and levy taxes. The final result was 1,870 voting for incorporating Newark as a city and 325 against.

The City of Newark was born one month later.

One hundred years later, in 1936, the Newark Sunday Call newspaper commemorated the City of Newark's centennial with a special "Newark Centennial Supplement."

A Sunday Call editorial from its December 1, 1935 issue, was reproduced in the Centennial Supplement

"In the 100 years since then," the editorial stated, the quaint little village on the banks of the curving Passaic has become one of our nation's centers of population."

"It is fitting," the editorial of 1935 continued, "that Newark should tell...something about itself on its completion of a century as a city.

"The flicker of the motion picture on the screens of the world was made possible by the invention by Goodwin here of the photographic film.

"In a laboratory on a Newark street, Edison planned some of his greatest inventions, and from here such inventors as he, Boyden, Hyatt, Weston, and others came the ideas that made the United States outstanding in mechanical science...in the furtherance of transportation of all kinds, and in the development of our country's basic heavy industries.

"...Newark has plowed ahead to a performance that touches all angles of human endeavor, whether it be religion, culture, industry, commerce, social service, banking and finance, science, recreational efforts, or education.

"In the centennial, for which the preparatory time is all too short, we have the chance to proclaim Newark to the nation."

Sunday Call
Newark Centennial Supplement

Click on image to enlarge

 


Email this memory to a friend.
Enter recipient's e-mail: