Evicted, Newark’s Mayor Finds Another Blighted Street

NEWARK, Nov. 19 — The magenta “praise the Lord” throw pillows: trash. The Black Santa holiday tie: a keeper. The lime-green dress shirt:

“It’s not mayoral,” said an aide with unconcealed disdain. Into the charity pile it went.

On Mayor Cory A. Booker’s final night at his bachelor-pad apartment in Brick Towers last Monday, there were important sartorial decisions to be made before the movers arrived. After living in one of the city’s most notoriously troubled buildings — where heat, hot water and elevator service were often in short supply — since 1998, Mr. Booker and two dozen other holdouts were being evicted to make way for the bulldozers.

It was a bittersweet moment for Mr. Booker, who earned himself a national reputation, cemented in an Oscar-nominated documentary, as a crusading would-be mayor who took on a negligent landlord and a vindictive City Hall by living alongside some of Newark’s most embattled tenants.

In the end, Mr. Booker and his fellow renters agreed to decamp after Newark’s Housing Authority promised to build a gentler, kinder Brick Towers to replace the forbidding twin slabs that had become magnets for drugs, violence and despair. The holdouts were also given first dibs in the new quarters.

“I like to tell people I got my undergrad degree from Stanford, but I got my Ph.D. in Newark, and some of my best professors were here in Brick Towers,” Mayor Booker said, as he rode down the blackness of an unlighted elevator for the last time. “When I walked in here, I was so innocent. I had no idea where life would take me.”

Life took him July 1 to a walnut-paneled office in City Hall overseeing a municipal work force of 4,000, but neither a fancy title nor a security detail nor his $130,721 salary has persuaded Mr. Booker to give up his self-sacrificial — some would say self-aggrandizing — ways.

Last week, after a search of some of the most menacing corners of this down-and-out city, Mayor Booker began unpacking his Hugo Boss and Custom House suits in his new apartment on Hawthorne Avenue. It is a $1,200-a-month three-bedroom apartment in a building on a browbeaten stretch of Newark’s South Ward, where boarded-up homes outnumber inhabited ones and crack dealers hawk their product outside an elementary school.

There goes the neighborhood. Again.

A decade ago, when Mr. Booker, fresh from Yale Law School, was a headstrong council member, he bedded down beside a drug-drenched housing complex. Excrement and trash rained on his tent, hundreds of supporters joined his cause and the news cameras were quick to follow.

An embarrassed mayor beefed up the police presence, the dealers moved shop and Councilman Booker had himself a nationally televised victory. The next summer, Mr. Booker lived in an R.V. that traveled from one crime hot spot to the next.

“It’s all a romantic fantasy,” said Amiri Baraka, the poet and longtime Newark resident who has been critical of Mr. Booker, seeing him as a patronizing outsider. “It’s politician’s hooey, part of the myth-making.”

Like some other doubters, Mr. Baraka — who lives six blocks from the mayor’s new home on Hawthorne — questioned whether Mr. Booker had truly been living in Brick Towers or just keeping his things there: “All I can say is, it’s a good story, but I don’t believe it.”

Mr. Booker acknowledges that in the past he has slept — and showered — at friends’ places from time to time, but he and many of the former Brick residents say that the mayor, indeed, spent more nights there than not.

Asked about those who view his choice of residence these past eight years as a politically minded stunt, the mayor rolled his eyes. “Stunts are usually short-term,” he said. “They usually don’t last three winters without heat and hot water.”

Indeed, back in 1981, Mayor Jane M. Byrne of Chicago moved into the notorious Cabrini Green housing project to make a statement about crime; she left after three weeks when the violence quickly dropped, but said she would return sporadically.

Mr. Booker, on the other hand, had been living for years in a roomy two-bedroom apartment on the 16th floor of Brick Towers with glittery Manhattan views in the distance and glimpses of deprivation in the foreground. Once a model of middle-class stability, Brick was by then well on its way to wretchedness.

The privately owned complex, which housed many residents who received federal housing aid, was taken over by the Department of Housing and Urban Development twice in the 1990s and then sold to the city’s Housing Authority for a dollar in 2002. By the time Mr. Booker, who paid $575 a month in rent, moved in, many of the 300 units were empty.

“The squatters and the kids just started tearing up the building, and the landlord didn’t do anything about it,” said Elizabeth Brown, a 24-year resident and one of the last to leave. “In the winter, when the heat and hot water went out, it was pure hell.”

These days, Mr. Booker’s speeches are flecked with references to people he encountered during his tenure at Brick Towers: T-Bone, the drug dealer who threatened his life but later sobbed as he asked Mr. Booker for help going straight; Wassan Miller, the teenager felled by gunfire who died in his arms; and the 12-year-old girl who was excelling in math until her belly started showing signs of motherhood.

Then there is Virginia Jones, 78 years old, who has been the tenants’ association president for nearly all of the 36 years she has lived in Brick Towers. Miss Jones, as Mr. Booker calls her, is frequently quoted by the mayor, who credits her salty, no-nonsense bits of wisdom with helping him weather the rough days of his first, unsuccessful mayoral campaign and the nights he had to climb 16 flights.

For Miss Jones, a former correction officer who now works as a clerk in the Essex County prosecutor’s office, her life at Brick was particularly nightmarish: In 1980, her 37-year-old son, Charles, just back from a stint in the Air Force, was shot and killed by robbers in the building’s lobby while she was working as a security guard in another part of the complex.

Stubborn and self-assured, Miss Jones could have relocated to a safer area but said she stayed at Brick Towers as a matter of principle, even after people she claims were city workers disabled the boilers and vandalized the community rooms that once provided computer instruction and other wholesome distractions to local children.

“I didn’t want them to think they were going to get away with it,” she said, sitting in the three-bedroom town house that will be her home until the Housing Authority opens the new Brick Towers.

Miss Jones, Mr. Booker and the other tenants agreed to leave only after several lawsuits and a federal investigation — which earned the owner prison time for tax evasion — led to a plan to replace the complex with a collection of richly appointed buildings that, on paper at least, would look at home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. This transformation is part of the larger move by Newark’s Housing Authority, which manages 8,800 units, to trade nearly all the city’s high-rise projects for town house-style developments, following a national trend in public housing.

Modia Butler, the Housing Authority chairman, said the new Brick Towers would have grand public spaces, a farmer’s market and a mix of 250 condominiums and rental apartments. When it is completed in 2008, tenants who stayed until the end will have the right to move back in; some of the units will be rented at market rates, and others will be subsidized.

Mr. Booker has no plans to return.

Convinced that his very presence can have catalytic effects on a neighborhood, he said he would spend a year or so on Hawthorne Avenue. His new home, on the top floor of a three-unit building, looks out onto an elementary school. Eventually, he said, he would like to build his own house, ideally in another trouble spot. “I want to live in a place where I can leverage myself in the best possible way, where I can be part of the struggle for deeper justice in an urban community,” he said.

For his security staff, Mr. Booker’s living arrangements are especially unnerving. The mayor, who has received death threats in the past, has a round-the-clock retinue of bodyguards who vetoed several prospective homes, saying they would have exposed him to unacceptable levels of danger.

Mr. Booker’s parents find his housing choices a bit harrowing, too.

“I always tell Cory he keeps me humble because he keeps me on my knees praying,” his mother, Carolyn, said in a telephone interview from her home in North Carolina. “If I had my druthers I would see him living in a place that complements him being mayor of the city.”

Down on Hawthorne Avenue, Elario Rodriguez, who owns New 8 Brothers Supermarket with his small army of siblings, was ecstatic to learn the mayor was moving in two doors down. He looked heavenward and said, “Now I finally have some protection.”

Craig C. Browne, the principal of Hawthorne Avenue Elementary School, whose office looks out on Mr. Booker’s apartment, said he had already noticed a difference since the mayor’s moving truck arrived on Wednesday with a police escort: the young men who usually clot the corners up and down the avenue had suddenly vanished.

By Friday, the news had yet to reach Manuela Carvalho, whose company, All Jersey Realty, is desperately trying to sell seven houses within a few blocks of Mr. Booker’s building, and who said many frustrated owners had boarded up new homes rather than risk their sitting empty and vulnerable to squatters.

“We had an open house three weeks ago for a beautiful year-old house, and no one even came,” she said glumly. “It’s really become a no-go area for home buyers.”

When she was told the mayor had arrived in the neighborhood, Ms. Carvalho’s mood changed to one that might be described as giddy. She said she could imagine advertising her unsold homes with tag lines like “Live near the mayor” or “If it’s good enough for the mayor ...”

Then she had another idea: Maybe she would just buy one or more of the properties on her own as an investment.