Blog — Ryan Rosati

One of Newark’s first low income housing projects

It has been awhile since my last blog post, but I have recently been presented with an opportunity to share some historical information about a place, once teeming with life, eventually forgotten and now, for many, just a distant memory.

I would like to preface this post by discussing a frustrating predicament I find myself in when it comes to exploring and documenting forgotten places. Part of what I enjoy, beyond the photographic documentation of these locations is researching their back story; the, sometimes rich, history that defines their presence.

However, I also have a personal guideline that I do not publicly share location information. The unfortunate limitation that this places upon me is that I cannot share historical information regarding an existing location without also compromising its secrecy. Ultimately, it is not up to me to decide who should explore these places, but I will also not be responsible for turning them into tourist attractions.

Recently, I was presented with a bittersweet opportunity to finally share the backstory of one of these fascinating locations; the Seth Boyden Terrace housing projects in Newark, NJ.

I happened to be in Elizabeth, NJ one morning in early August of 2022 and I decided that, while I waited for my wife to get her nails done, I would take a walk to the Seth Boyden Terrace housing projects a few blocks away. I had originally visited the site a year earlier and, as I sometimes do, I wanted to go back to take another look.

Upon my arrival, I discovered the site undergoing active demolition. Its a moment of mixed emotion. As an explorer, you are sad to see a location and all of its history reduced to a pile of bricks. However, we also know that these places, at least by societies standards, cannot rightfully exist in their current state and it provides us with an opportunity to both reflect upon and share their history.

Seth Boyden Terrace, 1941. Newark Housing Authority.

Seth Boyden Terrace was a public housing complex originally built in 1938 and opened in 1941 in the Weequahic neighborhood of Newark, NJ. Consisting of 530 apartment units divided among 12 three story brick buildings, the ‘Dayton Street Houses’ (as it was known by locals) would become the first of many low income housing projects built after the Great Depression in Newark.

The Seth Boyden Court apartments were contracted by the Newark Housing Authority which was created by the Federal Housing Act of 1937. Newark’s Housing Authority sought to provide extensive affordable housing for low-income and poor families throughout the city, and Seth Boyden Terrace was just the first of a handful of similar complexes that would contribute to Newark becoming known, colloquially, as ‘Brick City.’

In 1942, the entire complex and its residents were placed under quarantine after three of the children living there suffered bouts of paralysis.

Originally approved for demolition in 2014, the complex had begun to decline as many residents relocated and public safety issues became a concern. Rising maintenance costs became unsustainable leading to the official closure of Seth Boyden Terrace in 2015. The site has sat abandoned ever since, haunting Frelinghuysen Avenue and becoming a hotspot for drug activity, graffiti and homelessness.

In early 2022, it was announced that demolition plans for the site were underway. The property is slated to be developed into a complex of film and television studios for Lionsgate Newark and the city hopes that the revitalization of this property will also benefit the struggling Weequahic neighborhood and Newark’s South Ward as a whole.

Seven years after the official closure of Seth Boyden Terrace housing projects, former residents gathered to witness the start of the demolition, share stories of their time living there and gather bricks as final mementos of a place lost to time. I witnessed it for myself that morning in August as I came across the vacant landscape populated by piles of debris and remnants of foundations.

I would be lying if I said the explorer in me wasn’t sad it see it go. I don’t have many photos from this location because of it’s nature, but I am glad I was able to see it, however briefly and for just a moment in time.

A Look Back at Summer 2020

For my first blog post, I thought it would be fitting to tell the backstory behind a photo collection I am now referring to as the “Dust & Scrawl” collection. This collection of photographs is from the Summer of 2020 and they were taken predominantly in South and Southwest Philadelphia, particularly the neighborhood of Kingsessing.

To preface this story, we have to go back to May of 2020 when I acquired the Fujifilm x100V, the most recent in the Fuji x100 line and a camera which I had been eager to get my hands on. One very exciting aspect of the x100V is that, while being a digital camera, it offers a number of features that provide an experience meant to simulate photographing with a traditional film camera.

In the early stages of testing the camera, I wanted my photos to have that film quality look to them and as such, I quickly developed a lightroom film simulation preset that I began using as the basis for editing my photographs.

At the time I began this project, I had already photographed Philadelphia extensively, although predominantly in and around center city and focused more on cityscapes and the urban environment. I worked at a vape shop in South Philadelphia at the time, so I was frequently in the area and I used that as the branching out point for my explorations into some of the smaller outlying neighborhoods of the city.

One such neighborhood that ended up providing me the wealth of my content for the summer was a neighborhood known as Kingsessing, which is in Southwest Philadelphia, just across the Gray’s Ferry Bridge. By the end of the summer I knew Kingsessing like the back of my hand. This collection also includes a small number of photos from South Philadelphia and Central New Jersey.

My focus for this project was to document everyday scenes and locations within the smaller outlying neighborhoods of the city; to capture part of the character of the city that might otherwise be missed by those who don’t take the time to truly explore. Urban decay is featured prominently in this collection, an unfortunate by-product of Philadelphia’s history of de-industrialization.

In the process of putting together this photo project, I began developing a sub-collection of photographs of various abandoned trucks I began to encounter in my explorations. It began with an abandoned school bus, then an old ice cream truck, and eventually it seemed like everywhere I turned I would find another gem of an abandoned vehicle, always heavily tagged and each more unexpected than the last. It became a scavenger hunt of sorts for me.

I took my final batch of photographs for the collection in late August and decided to wrap up the series having put together a decent sized body of work and as my focus was beginning to shift to abandonments. I had the idea of having these photos printed up as a small coffee table photo book that could be available for purchase, and I still have intentions of making that happen. I am also considering the idea of revisiting the project this upcoming summer and doing a continuation, Dust & Scrawl Pt. 2, Summer 2021. Who knows?

View the full Dust & Scrawl collection below:

Gallery