Whiton Street resident Gloria Graham Felder can’t even remember all the businesses that lined the streets of Lafayette when she was a child. After all, she says, it’s been so long since they’ve moved out.
As Felder walked down Van Horne Street last weekend, she tried to recall the names of the factories that used to employ the residents of the once vibrant community nestled next to Liberty State Park at the lower end of Communipaw Avenue. As she struggled with her faded memories, she glimpsed Lee Somerville, 45, getting out of his car. She called the Orient Avenue resident over and asked him to refresh her memory.
“What was the name of the laundry factory over on Bishop Street?” Felder asked.
“Oh, you mean Standard Laundry?” Somerville, who was born and raised on Lafayette’s Maple Street, responded.
“That’s it! That’s the name,” Felder said. She turned to this reporter and said, “You go ahead and write that down.”
Felder plugged on, asking Somerville to recite the names of the various businesses and city landmarks. The list was long and exhaustive, pointing out buildings that no longer exist or are just a mere shade of their former stature, dilapidated after years of abandonment.
There was the saw mill on Grand Street, the wholesale bakery on Halladay Street, the spike works on Communipaw Avenue and the Ross B. Wax factory on Ash Street. There was Western Electric on Pacific Avenue and the still-standing Whitlock Cordage on Lafayette Street, which will soon become moderate-income housing. Then there was the Communipaw Avenue trolley line and the Boys’ Club at the corner of Ash Street and Pacific Avenue. The Jersey City Police Department also had a strong presence in Lafayette, with its stables on Fairmount Avenue and a police station at Johnston Avenue and Phillips Street.
A steady decline
The neighborhood, however, is a far cry from what it once was, residents said. In the first half of the 20th century, it was a thriving working class section that was home to some of the city’s most prominent African-American denizens, including Dr. Lena Edwards and Dr. George E. Cannon.
Cannon, whose Pacific Avenue manor house was demolished years ago, began the Frederick Douglass Film Company, one of the first African-American film companies established to counteract the racist effect that D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation” had on Americans’ consciousness.
Built as a posh riverside settlement by mid-19th century contractors William Keeney and John Halladay, Lafayette’s streets were lined with elegant brownstones, greystones and mansions that displayed some of the city’s most elegant architecture. As industry grew, Lafayette followed suit. And as industry fell, Lafayette was dragged down with it.
Lafayette’s magnificent churches, whose spires and vaulted ceilings once rose majestically into the sky, now stand with missing stained glass rondels and decaying façades. Old brick is covered by vinyl, and buildings with broken windows lie abandoned next to small bodegas and restaurants.
Factories began closing down in the 1950s, and as the number of jobless increased, crime rose and the residents’ quality of life dwindled. Open-air drug markets grew on highly-trafficked corners like Communipaw and Pacific avenues, and longtime Lafayette residents watched in dismay as their neighborhood fell into the hands of drug dealers.
But residents have had enough.
Through the leadership of a local merchant, a block association was formed to work with existing Lafayette organizations to bring the area back to its feet. Headed by Rosalyn Brown, director of Communipaw Avenue’s Jackson Funeral Residence, the Communipaw Avenue Block Association [CABA] is making alliances and getting City Hall to help them clean up their neighborhood.
“The city has neglected Lafayette for many years and this is the result,” Brown said last week. “It’ll take years to fix up.”
Influx of Latinos
Lafayette was always a mixed community, Brown said. It was populated, in her memory, by railroad workers employed at the nearby Central New Jersey Railroad. Ethnic and racial makeup was across the board, including African-American and Hispanic people with Italian and Polish families.
The majority of the neighborhood now is made up of Latino and African-American people who more likely work in New York, for the Board of Education or at the many nearby hospitals. The jobs in Lafayette, many residents said, have for too long been scarce.
But the commerce that does happen in Lafayette – and it’s continually growing as time goes by – is seen in its many bodegas, auto mechanic shops and restaurants, run mostly by recent Latino newcomers to the area, Dominican community leader Gregory Malave said.
And what caused this influx of Latinos was the same thing that drove a lot of other people out. After the businesses moved out and property values declined, the homes in Lafayette became affordable to people living in other, more expensive parts of the city.
“It’s become a real melting pot for Latinos and other people because, hey, ‘Who can afford a brownstone in Downtown Jersey City?’ ” Malave said.
The influx of Latinos began in the 1980s and has been steadily growing ever since. The community has grown so sizable that part of Johnston Avenue was renamed this year as Juan Pablo Duarte Drive, a former president of the Dominican Republic.
As far as community organization goes, the only two visible Latino groups are the members-only Pollito’s Social Club and the political organization Partido Libertal Dominicano, both on Communipaw Avenue. This is because the Latino residents, as of right now, are more focused on making a living.
“What’s happening is that they are becoming more business-oriented rather than community-oriented,” Malave said. “An example is if a certain man wants to build a restaurant. That’s what they organize: businesses.”
Leading through faith
But where Latino people do get together, like everyone else in Lafayette, is through their churches.
The Fountain of Salvation Church, an Evangelistic Pentecostal congregation at Communipaw Avenue and Pine Street, has been operating in the area since the late 1970s. With a congregation of about 450 people, the Fountain of Salvation church ministers to Latinos from 15 countries in South and Latin America, Associate Pastor Juan Santiago said.
Through the church, its members connect with the community at large, making connections that everyone in the neighborhood says helps to build their communities.
“Two months ago, we had our anniversary celebration and we spoke to the community and ministered to them,” Fountain of Salvation Church member Monse Droz, a Greenville resident, said. “It was really nice. We realized there was a lot of need in the community. We used to have a lot of problems as far as vandalism, but it’s toned down a lot.”
The problems that Droz mentions are the same worries with which other Lafayette congregations struggle. CABA’s Brown, who is also very active with Lafayette’s Monumental Baptist Church, said those same problems are what afflict everyone in Lafayette.
“The one problem we haven’t been able to solve is the illegal drug activity that’s happening in Lafayette,” Brown said. “It’s not appreciated and we’re trying to get rid of it.”
The fact that everyone in the community is on board in putting the neighborhood back on its feet signals the impending success of CABA’s community revitalization efforts.
The most recent example is the creation of a CABA consortium comprised of local church pastors, including Fountain of Salvation’s Rev. Louis Fernandez, Assumption All Saints Church’s Fr. Eugene Squeo, Elder Moses Priester of Cornerstone Church of Christ, Bishop Henry Mays Sr. of Mt. Sinai Gospel Church, and the Rev. Charles McNeil of St. John’s AME Church.
An attempt at harnessing everyone’s energy toward their common goal, the initiative will create a community newsletter created by CABA member Tanya Chauhan to be distributed at all of the participating churches.
This ecclesiastical unification effort, commonly seen in other depressed neighborhoods in cities across America, comes from the fundamental acknowledgement that a community is made by the people within it.
“We live here and we worship here,” Fountain of Salvation member Droz said, “and we respect each other.”