Walking Around Newark...

So for my Urban Education classes final community inquiry project, one of the things we needed to do was create our own map of Newark. Or a portion of Newark, at least. Mapping out locations that were relevant to our project topic. As I've mentioned previously, my topic is looking at adolescent alcohol and drug use. It's starting to look like it'll really focus on abuse, not use (Yes, there is a difference!), largely because I understand abuse, but I really can't wrap my head around the idea of casual alcohol and/or drug use.

So anyways, I decided to map the area near Barringer High School. My north border was Lake St., East border was 2nd Ave., South border was Broadway and West border was Park St. I actually think this area was smaller than what we were supposed to do (instructions was to do 10 square blocks, but blocks there aren't really square) but it was still an afternoon on foot with this stupid flu bug everyone has had, which was quite enough for me!

I picked this area because A) I knew where it was and where to park, B) Barringer is right next to the Cathedral, which made finding where I parked much easier (I'm geographically challenged, see my previous posts), C) I knew there was at least one High School in my area, D) the area was mostly residential, but contained a couple major commercial strips (Bloomfield Ave., Park St., Broadway).

I was mostly looking for liquor stores and bars, but I also noted schools (Barringer and Technology HS's and Ben Franklin and something-Brook Elementaries were in my area). There was also one obvious substance-abuse treatment center that I noted as well.

What did I find? Not nearly as many alcohol sources as I thought I'd find. Sadly my explicit notes are at home right now, but in the entire area there were less than a dozen liquor stores and bars. Maybe it was the area I was in, but my perception from driving through Newark was that there would be more than that. I will say that based on my personal experience the liquor stores were doing a lot of business for a Sunday afternoon. There was also one disturbing moment when I saw a kid (8-10 years old) walking down the street by himself away from a liquor store (I did *not* see him leave the store itself) carrying two opaque plastic bags that I'm certain contained booze.

Every school had a bar or liquor store within a 3 minute walk. Bar/club across from Barringer. Liquor store across from Tech. Liquor store around the corner from the elementary schools.

The other thing that *seriously* jumped out at me were the sheer volume of empty beer and liquor bottles scattered all over the place. Throughout my entire mapped area, I couldn't go 10 feet without seeing an empty alcoholic container of some kind. Actually, it was worse in the residential areas than on the commercial roads, some of the major roads (Bloomfield Ave., Broadway) were fairly clean. And these were fairly nice neighborhoods in my estimation. In hindsight I probably picked one of the more affluent areas of Newark to survey, or so it seems to me. The houses were nice and well-maintained. Vehicles were well cared for (several people were out front washing their cars in 40 degree weather) and quite a bit nicer than what I drive. Most of the neighborhoods I walked through were nicer than where I live, in my opinion. But there was a huge ammount of litter, and a big percentage of the litter were beer and liquor bottles. (Mostly Corona and Heineken, if anyone was wondering).

So right now I'm willing to speculate that alcohol use is highly prevalent in Newark, even if there weren't as many sources in my area as I expected. From a student perspective, most of these kids likely pass liquor stores or bars going to/from school, and are walking on sidewalks covered in empty beer and liquor bottles (plus the occasional dead cat, which made me sad). Based on my experience and the people I've talked with in Alcoholics Anonymous, that is definitely the kind of environment conducive to kids drinking or at least being willing totry drinking.