The Fires: Hoboken’s History of Gentrification & Arson for Profit is a long-form historical project that began in January of 2021. Initially, my interest was to understand how cities come to be gentrified and so I began by looking at the areas around me that I sort of knew were gentrified places.
Hoboken Is Burning: Yuppies, Arson, and Displacement in the
Postindustrial City
By Dylan Gottlieb, PhD
Between 1978 and 1983, nearly five hundred fires ripped through tenements and rooming houses in the square-mile city of Hoboken, New Jersey. The blazes killed fifty-five people and left more than eight thousand homeless. Almost all of the displaced residents were Puerto Rican; most never returned to Hoboken. Nearly every fire, investigators determined, had been the result of arson.
This rash of destruction, dislocation, and death occurred alongside another dramatic story: a transformation the local and national press hailed as the “Hoboken Renaissance.” Beginning in the late 1960s, the traditionally working-class city of 45,000, located just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, experienced a sudden influx of middle-income people. Homesteaders looking for historic brownstones made up the first wave of the “Renaissance.” By the end of the 1970s, thousands of young professionals joined them, attracted to Hoboken more for its proximity to Wall Street and corporate headquarters than for its distinctive architecture.
Christopher López’s Hoboken Fires: From Ashes, a Counter-Archive Emerges
By Tamara Cedré
In his series, The Fires, Puerto Rican photographer Christopher López mines this painful history to address the deadly scourge and cover-up which paved the way for Hoboken’s “renaissance.” López, who was born in the Bronx during the 80s and raised between New York and New Jersey, has felt this displacement intimately. It is through this close lens that he retells the story of the fires, a generation later, piecing together a fragmented past of those lost through found and constructed photographs, interviews from relatives and rescued personal effects.
The Hoboken Fires is a multidisciplinary show that surfaces the living histories of the fires and arsons that transformed the city of Hoboken from the 1970s-1980s. Through a violent cocktail of intimidation, greed, corruption, and indifference, over 50 Hoboken residents, mostly children, lost their lives in fires that ravaged the city during the era of post-industrial urban renewal. Arriving four decades after the apex of the fires, photographer Chris Lopez, a Bronx native of Puerto Rican parentage, critically engages the afterlives of arson, displacement, and dispossession.
Kin Work from the Ashes: Repair and Re/Memory in Christopher López’s The Fires
By Jaden A. Morales
The photographs and objects in Coastal Relations are part of López’s current project The Fires: Hoboken’s History of Gentrification & Arsons for Profit. This visual archive meditates on the entanglements between displacement and estrangement; re/memory and mourning; and historical reckoning and affective reparations.