The archive you are entering is the first of its kind to address gentrification and erasure of familial histories from Hoboken, New Jersey to offer a re-telling of events that transformed the city from a working class community to one of the wealthiest cities in the state. The histories, photographs, and rendered artifacts presented on this site serve as a (living) archive of this history generated by the peoples’ who witnessed, and or experienced first-hand, the atrocities of violent displacement by means of arson in the Mile-Square. The plight of “urban renewal” or Hoboken’s renaissance, befell the city’s population by the beginning of the 1970’s by incentivizing the revitalization of the city’s dilapidating housing stock. Using monetary grants awarded by the federal government, the city was able to offer lucrative subsidies, home improvement, and mortgage loans, which were largely solicited to families living outside of Hoboken. In the midst of this revitalization, and with the sudden bolstering of property values, the city’s poorer renting population, which overwhelmingly consisted of migrants and communities of color, became the targets of displacement by any means. Within a ten year span, between 1973 and 1983, the city of Hoboken had turned against its own citizens and enabled an arson epidemic by manipulation consistent with biased allocation of Model Cities funds and furthermore by passing damning legislation and variances such as the vacancy decontrol act. These actions would ultimately claim the lives of 56 people, mostly women and children, and would displace thousands of families from their homes. The Fires, as they are referred to locally, was a vicious arson-for-profit campaign employed to seize property as a viable tactic of dispossession. Arson became the means to deliver buildings vacant so that they may then be sold to developers for condominium conversion to make available for better off, well-to-do renters. The success and viability of this campaign of terror was waged by a deeply rooted racism which was overwhelmingly directed towards a once burgeoning Puerto Rican population.

The events of these deaths, and their traumatic aftereffects continue to this day and can be felt in the voices of the witnesses that harbor their terror. The dispossession of entire communities, their stories, and deaths remains largely unknown and unseen amongst the façade of Hoboken’s new class. The apparent overdevelopment of condominiums and single family brownstones in a city that claims low housing stock has effectively veiled its true cost. The sacrifice of thousands of lives for waterfront views, a more convenient commute, and a rebranded urbanity. The perversion of urban cultural appropriation has prevailed resulting in the loss of any community in earnest. Today, the familiar faces of Hoboken’s past are the walking dead along Washington Street’s poshness. Those who remain in the middle and lower class dwell in the city’s ever diminishing affordable housing stock and are relegated to live under the constant threat of displacement by encroaching development. As evidenced by the materials and given testimonies offered in this archive, it becomes abundantly clear that Hoboken has leveraged its housing to build an economy of fear amongst its citizens. A legacy of fear initiated by fire has sustained itself under the threat of being ousted at any moment either by manipulation, coercion, utility and or structural neglect, racially biased rezoning, arbitrary ordinances, and flagrant demolition. Before the arsons, Latinos comprised approximately 40% of the city’s population. Today they comprise about approximately 16% with the vast majority of Latino families and other minority groups living in the city’s last housing projects in the furthest southwest section of the city far removed from the waterfront, public parks, big chain grocery stores, and trending commerce.

This project evidences that the visceral ramifications of gentrification and violent displacement are strewn throughout the living history of Hoboken. Behind every façade reverberates the stories of loss and grief once afflicted upon the city’s most vulnerable citizens. Despite this structural erasure, more than 40 years removed, you would be hard pressed to find a Black, Puerto Rican, or Non-White person who either survived, witnessed, or lost a friend or loved one in an arson fire. This archive stands to witness these atrocities in solidarity with these families towards more accountability in fighting against the ever encroaching inequities of economic and housing injustices which continue to occur here in Hoboken, and throughout the world. The power visibility has in enacting change is something that is being heavily contested and reckoned with in our current times. This archive presents the questions, how do we approach the never before seen, the suddenly made visible? In what ways are we complicit and how do we reclaim our altruism? This body of work retains the belief that acknowledgement is the stepping stone towards actionable change. The individual truths shared in this archive herald knowledge and are the potent affirmations of desire that deserve our attention. These testimonies refute the conciliatory narratives that work to sully the names of the dead, each carrying their individual activisms towards restorative justice. Here, communal storytelling holds the power to restructure unchecked false narratives like, kids playing with matches or people fighting amongst themselves, to reassert facts and lived experiences that exhaustively reiterate that the sheer volume of arsons which occurred here could not be mere coincidence. These newly formed histories of record carry a greater potential to recalibrate the moral, ethical, and civic responsibilities of its audience.

This archive encourages active listening and seeing with intention. Its purpose is to question the moral, ethical, and civic responsibilities of bearing witness. Each oral history is accompanied by a portrait of the storyteller. The portrait offers us insight into the core message of the speaker. Family, memory, love, loss, grief, and longing are some of the things encountered in each. More resoundingly, and above all, is courage. The people seen in these photographs are more than the protagonists of this history. They are activists and collaborators acting in solidarity who demand to be heard as they call for a more just and equitable future. Their courage and vulnerability teaches us the invaluable lesson that the path towards real change is standing your ground for the world to see.

Please take your time with this archive and feel free to write and share your thoughts, kind words, and stories.

– Christopher López