Weequahic Park: Newark's Olmsted Landscape

Newark is one of America's oldest and most underestimated cities, and at its southwestern edge sits a park that reveals a quieter, more carefully designed layer of its history. Weequahic Park takes its name from the Lenni-Lenape language, meaning roughly head of the cove. Tradition holds that the spring-fed lake at the park's center once served as the boundary between two bands of Lenape people, the Raritan and the Hackensack, who had lived and traded along these wetlands for thousands of years before European contact.

By the late nineteenth century the land had become a swampy, mosquito-ridden nuisance at the edge of a rapidly industrializing city. Essex County hired the Olmsted Brothers firm, the sons and successors of Frederick Law Olmsted, to transform it. Their plan called for broad lawns, forested groves, and a redesigned eighty-acre lake, a naturalistic English-style landscape that would give working-class Newark families a place to breathe. The result is a three-hundred-and-eleven-acre park that still feels, on a summer afternoon, like a genuine escape.

In nineteen twenty-three, Weequahic Park hosted the first American Track and Field Championships for women, a significant moment in the early history of women's athletics in this country.

But the park's most lasting cultural imprint came through literature. Philip Roth, one of the towering American novelists of the twentieth century, grew up in the Weequahic neighborhood directly adjacent to this park, and its lake, its harness-racing track, and its golf course thread through his fiction. The neighborhood itself appears in novels including American Pastoral, The Plot Against America, and the Zuckerman books as a kind of lost Eden, the Jewish Newark of the nineteen forties and fifties before urban renewal and highway construction reshaped the city.

The park is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and remains one of the finest examples of Olmsted Brothers landscape design in the northeastern United States.