Today I trekked out of the Ironbound and into Downtown Newark in search of a cafe I found online called The Coffee Cave.
I crossed over McCarter Highway (which is only sort of a highway) and onto Broad St., which is a street I’ve driven down plenty of times to get to Newark Penn Station, but have only once before actually set foot on. It was a clear change from the decidedly European aesthetic of the Ironbound only a few blocks away; the people around me stopped being primarily Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian and it quickly became apparent this was a predominantly Black neighborhood.
It felt a lot more like a bustling city, too, as everything was a lot more hectic and noisy and walking around required zig-zagging and circumnavigating other pedestrians. But it also, quite frankly, felt more like a ghetto with giant, colorful, somehow cheap-looking signs over 99-cent and clothing stores and nail salons. I think if you have a picture of what an American ghetto (or at least an East Coast American ghetto) looks like in your mind, it looks like Broad Street in Newark.