FERRY STREET

 MORE SONGS ABOUT BUILDINGS AND FOOD

“A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all Zaira’s past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.”

— Italo Calvino

At first glance, the neighborhood may look like a jumble of buildings, materials, languages and faces. But history and its processes have left their traces on the landscape. Whether building new structures or altering existing ones, new arrivals have always created their own spaces and inscribed their mark on them, suffusing the neighborhood with untold stories of arrival and departure, determination and resilience, dreams realized or deferred. Like Calvino’s Zaira, Ironbound bears the scratches, indentations and scrolls left by the generations who migrated to and through the neighborhood.

The roots of today’s Ironbound are deeply embedded in the 19th century transformation of the region into one of the country’s first industrial corridors. Shortly after Alexander Hamilton was appointed the United States’ first Secretary of the Treasury he co-founded the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures, which in 1792 purchased 700 acres of land surrounding the largest waterfall in New Jersey. The land was used to establish the city of Paterson, Hamilton’s incubator for a “New National Manufactory” that would provide economic independence for the United States by stimulating the transition from an agricultural to a manufacturing economy.

Hamilton envisioned an industrial future predicated on the waterpower provided by Paterson’s Great Falls, and the immigrant imagination and labor to harness it. In his “Report on Manufacturers,” Hamilton, himself an immigrant from the British West Indies, wrote that to create an industrialized nation would require “the promoting of immigration from foreign countries” and “the furnishings of greater scope for the diversity of talents.” Hamilton’s vision of an immigrant led industrial revolution would be most fully realized eight miles South in Newark, where the Passaic and Hackensack rivers empty into Newark Bay and connect the region to the Atlantic Ocean.

It didn’t take long for Hamilton’s vision to come to fruition. By 1872, Newark was the nation’s 13th largest city with the 3rd highest overall industrial output. At the end of the 19th Century, the steady flow of immigrants into Newark had become a torrent, and by 1910, two-thirds of the city’s 350,000 residents were either foreign born or the children of immigrants. The largest immigrant cluster was in Ironbound, where Irish, Italians, Germans, Slavs, Chinese and Afro-descended Americans formed the labor force that worked in the factories, brewed the beer, and built the seaport, railroad, and airport that made Newark one of the most important cities in the United States.

The anxiety aroused by the turn-of-the century immigrant wave bears mentioning as a reminder that although the scapegoated immigrant groups have changed, today’s xenophobia has deep historical roots. An editorial in the Newark Sunday Call in 1906 wondered, “Will an invasion of ignorant Europeans destroy our republic?” When social worker Willard Price issued a report in 1912 on conditions in the neighborhood, he described it as “a district of industrial uproar, drifting smoke, heavy atmosphere, dangerous acid fumes, and unforgettable odors.” Price was most horrified by the residents, “a hodgepodge of nationalities, speaking many old-world tongues, and making pathetic efforts to adjust to their new and unwholesome American surroundings.” In such a neighborhood, with its unwholesome surroundings and hodgepodge of nationalities, multiple generations of newcomers have made themselves a home.

For the past four decades, Portuguese has been the dominant language in the neighborhood. Portuguese immigrants began arriving in Newark at the beginning of the 20th Century. In 1928, at 88 Ferry Street, Vasco Jardim founded Luso-Americano, the country’s oldest Portuguese-American newspaper. After World War 2, the Portuguese began arriving in larger numbers. By the 1970s — in the wake of Portugal’s “flower revolution” that ended the half-century reign of dictator Antonio Salazar — the Portuguese were the largest ethnic group in Ironbound, which had become a thriving center of Portuguese diaspora in the United States.

The Ironbound today is in the midst of yet another demographic transition. The 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act made it possible for a more globally diverse population to immigrate to the United States. In Ironbound the demographic changes manifested in a sharp rise in Brazilians, drawn to the neighborhood by its cultural familiarity and ease of entry for Portuguese speakers, and other Latin Americans, who have recently surpassed the Portuguese as the majority population in the neighborhood.

Still, the neighborhood is today as it has been for much of its history: a palimpsest of ethnic identities and cultural traditions and an incubator for learning how to co-exist in a multicultural society. Ironbound is still often referred to as Little Portugal. The alternative name of Ferry Street — Portugal Avenue — is emblazoned on street signs and the Portugal Day parade, which recently celebrated its 40th anniversary, is still the largest festival in the neighborhood. However, many established and second-generation Portuguese have left the neighborhood. The most recent American Community Survey shows an outflow of Portuguese from Ironbound to the nearby towns of Elizabeth, Kearny and South River, and majority Portuguese enclaves in Hillside, Clark and Mountainside.

Portuguese out-migration has opened up space for the new arrivals. Over the past decade the top country of origin for immigrants in Newark is not Portugal, or even Brazil, but Ecuador. Ecuadorians are at the vanguard of a Latin American migration to Newark that has seen their number in Ironbound grow from 31% of the residents in 2000 to 51% in 2017. Like their predecessors, Latin American immigrants have been quick to leave their mark on the landscape of Ferry Street. New faces, sounds and signs are everywhere. Spanish now competes with Portuguese for linguistic primacy, buildings swell with the next wave of immigrant entrepreneurs, and from the restaurants the smell of new tastes is in the air.

What is Patriotism if not the love of the food one ate as a child? As for international understanding, I feel that macaroni has done more for our appreciation of Italy than Mussolini...in food, as in death, we feel the essential brotherhood of mankind.

— Lin Yutang

Food spaces have always heralded the arrival of newcomers in Ironbound as they do elsewhere. New arrivals make their presence known by working in restaurants, introducing new food in the kitchen and new dishes to the neighborhood. New smells, wafting through windows and into the street, enter the senses and sensibility of the neighborhood. When newcomers arrive in sufficient numbers their culinary presence permeates the neighborhood, often lingering long after they have departed. Few traces remain of the small early 20th century Chinese community that lived along the railroad tracks at Ironbound’s northern border, but more than half a century after Italians began leaving Ironbound, Nasto’s Ice Cream still serves “Old World Desserts” from its original 1939 location at the intersection of East Kinney and Jefferson Street. Nasto’s is among the last remnants of the Italian mom and pop food establishments that played an integral role in establishing the Italian presence in Ironbound in the 1930s. The Spanish, who began arriving in the 1930s and 40s fleeing the Franco dictatorship are still well represented along Ferry Street, where Iberia (est. 1940s) and Fornos of Spain (est. 1960s) still draw locals and tourists from around the region.

Steven Iglesias, the founder of Mompou (est. 2007), a more contemporary Barcelona-style tapas restaurant on Ferry, grew up in the neighborhood during the 1960s and remembers a flavorful and diverse foodscape, made up of Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, Polish, and Cuban cuisine.

The most recent wave of migration to Ironbound is a product of the current development boom in Newark. As Newark’s recent “Renaissance” generates jobs and investment downtown, the population of the city is growing for the first time since the end of World War II. Bordering downtown Newark along the railroad tracks, Ironbound’s restaurants, proximity to Penn Station, and urban village vibe have made it a port of entry for young urban professionals in search of the new Jerusalem, or at the very least the next Brooklyn or Jersey City. Residential development in Ironbound is transforming the neighborhood’s built environment and median income at the same time that new arrivals from Latin America strive to build businesses and lives in a new land.

Every day, Ironbound embraces new arrivals from around the world. Whether escaping turbulent conditions in Latin America or arriving in Newark to pursue an education or professional opportunity, these new residents introduce new tastes and culinary habits to Ironbound’s foodscape. The constant churn of migration has made Ironbound a dynamic hub of cultural multiplicity, hybridity, adaptation, and innovation. The struggle to reconcile these forces with the sometimes contradictory demands of community, tradition and religion is also the struggle of memory against forgetting. The residue of this struggle lingers in the foodscape. So we share these songs about buildings and food. While the singers and the languages in which they sing keep changing, the song itself remains uncannily familiar. In Ironbound, it has been ever so.

With this virtual tour we invite you to explore the history and cuisine of the neighborhood through the buildings inhabited by five restaurants, Mompou, Nova Aliança, Sabor Unido, La Guayaca and Bocaditos Colombianos.