Barbara Bromirski, 67, recalls a time when she would take walks from her home on Warren Street to the corner hardware store.
“The neighbors would have been sitting outside on the stoops. The kids would have been playing. Some of the adults would have been keeping an eye on the kids. Just friends. Everybody knew everybody else that lived in the neighborhood,” she said. “It would take me an hour and a half to walk back and forth to the store because you stop, you talk to this neighbor, you talk to that neighbor. It’s just the way it was. It was warm, it was friendly.”
And when did that charming scene take place? The ’40s? The ’50s?
Try 1974.
The decade that Bromirski and quite a few other longtime residents remember so fondly is at the center of what is often considered the worst era in the city’s history.
Back then, embarrassing stories about vandalism, stray dog packs, and joblessness filled the pages of national newspapers. The city was in the middle of a population freefall in which nearly one-third of its residents fled by the end of the decade. And a federally funded study released in 1975 named Jersey City “the worst large American city to live in.”Good ol’ days
This is the Jersey City that most outsiders imagine when they hear its name today: the period when the city seemed to slide into the abyss. It’s an image the city continues to struggle to rise above.
Yet many locals who are still around to recall those days said the image is an unfair one. In more than a dozen interviews, these longtime residents described a city that – despite having its share of problems – was never as bad as it has been portrayed.
Out of privacy concerns, some of those who spoke with the Reporter asked for their names to be withheld. “It was not a jungle,” said one Mercer Street resident of his neighborhood in the 1970s. “You’re going to hear that this was a ghetto of the worst sort. It wasn’t. It was like any urban area in the ’70s: a little rough, a little tough, but it was not a ghetto.”
A former Greenville resident agreed: “The 1970s were a low point, but not as bad as what some may tell you. It wasn’t a crime-ridden city. It had its bad locations, but it never became Newark.” The stats are telling…
This view is in direct contrast with the popular conception that Jersey City in the 1970s was crime-ridden – a conception that official statistics do little to dispute.
In the late 1960s, crime in Jersey City began a climb that continued through the 1980s, according to the state’s Uniform Crime Reports. It would not drop below 1970s levels until the turn of the millennium.
At the same time, thousands of residents left the city. The city’s population had been falling since 1930, but the drop from 1970 to 1980 was the single largest in the city’s history.
Worse, statistics show that those who bucked the trend by moving into the city were, as a whole, less educated and earned lower incomes than the people they replaced.
The press was quick to announce the city’s perceived downturn. In 1968, as the ’70s loomed, one stark headline in The New York Times read simply: “Trouble in Jersey City.” …but do they tell all?
Several longtime residents said the statistics don’t give the whole story. They said there was a sense of community in the 1970s that transcended the problems of that decade.
“The people were all very, very nice. They were hard-working people, they were honest people, and they were a lot of fun,” Bromirski said. “Our area down here was mixed. We were Polish, Irish, Italian, we were black, we were Hispanic, Russian, German. Any nationality you can name, they’ve been through Downtown Jersey City, and they’re all a part of Jersey City.”
The former Greenville resident likewise recalled his neighborhood’s diversity.
“We had a complete melting pot of an older neighborhood, with Italians, Irish, Polish, German – all races and backgrounds,” he said. “It was amazing.”
Lifelong Jersey City resident Jeni Branum said she always felt comfortable in her Downtown neighborhood in the 1970s.
“I thought nothing of walking the dog at 2 a.m.,” she said. Even as Jersey City was seen as hitting its lowest point, residents were organizing to lift it up. Neighborhood associations were formed to patrol and beautify their corners of the city; waterfront properties became ground zero for renewed interest in the city’s real estate market and were consolidated; and open-space advocates won the battle for Liberty State Park – all in the 1970s.
Sam Pesin – whose father, Morris Pesin, took the lead in advocating for the park – summered in Jersey City while living out of state in the 1970s. He said the national rise of grassroots activism in the 1960s motivated people to “get involved in bettering their communities.”
“That was another positive thing that was going on in Jersey City in the early ’70s,” Pesin said.
But for Bromirski, the most compelling evidence that Jersey City was never as bad off as it’s said to have been is the presence of longtime residents like her.
“You’ve got a lot of people here who never did move out, and a lot of people who weathered whatever storms Jersey City had to throw at us,” she said. “We’ve been here through the good and the bad. And it’s always been a great place to live, in my opinion. It’s always been a great place to live. I’ve always loved Jersey City.” Comments on the story can be sent to jcmag@hudsonreporter.com.