Four Corners: The Grid Begins in 1666
Listen at the stop, then read the transcript and follow the sources behind the story.
Listen
Transcript
Broad and Market is the kind of intersection cities stop noticing precisely because it has been important for so long.
Newark's settlement history begins in 1666, when Puritan families from Connecticut led by Robert Treat established a town here after negotiations and land transactions with Lenape people.
That sentence needs two perspectives.
For the settlers, this was the founding of Newark.
For the Lenape, it was not the beginning of human history on the Passaic.
They had lived across this region for generations beyond European record.
Colonial property law converted Indigenous landscapes into parcels and municipal boundaries in ways that would steadily dispossess Native communities.
The early town was organized around broad common spaces and roads.
Broad Street and Market Street became the central crossing.
By the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Four Corners had transformed from colonial center into one of the busiest commercial intersections in the United States.
Department stores, offices, theaters and streetcars brought enormous crowds downtown.
That transformation is the Newark story in miniature.
A religious agricultural settlement became an industrial city.
An industrial city became a retail metropolis.
Then suburbanization, highways and changing shopping patterns weakened the downtown commercial system.
Buildings remained while economic functions moved elsewhere.
For locals, “Broad and Market” can carry memories very different from the historic photographs.
That is normal.
Downtowns are not single eras.
The important thing is continuity of location.
For more than three centuries, people have used this crossing to trade, travel, govern, protest and meet.
The architecture changed.
The reason the intersection matters did not:
routes concentrate people, and concentrated people create a city.