As crowds cheered when the four Memorial Homes buildings collapsed into dust on Aug. 18, 2001, Linda Fogle Davis remembers crying.
“They were laughing. I was crying,” Davis said. “I was hurt. That was my home being demolished.”
Twenty-five years later, former residents of the longtime New Brunswick public housing complex are telling a different story than the one many remember.
Through photographs, oral histories, personal artifacts and original artwork featured in a new Rutgers University exhibition, they are sharing memories of a community they say survived long after the buildings disappeared.
It is their lived experience that now fills the rooms and walls of “We Mean Something to Each Other: Life in Memorial Homes,” an exhibit on display at Rutgers University’s Mason Gross Galleries through Aug. 4. The exhibition features research by Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy urban planning students, original artwork by Mason Gross School of the Arts graduate students, artifacts and oral histories from community members, and photographs by Rutgers graduates Ben Gest and Phil Buehler.
For former residents such as Davis, Sheila Jasmin and Louise Seawright Jackson, the exhibit is more than a history lesson.
It’s a chance to reclaim a story they feel has too often been told without them.
“Even though they were demolished, our memory is still there,” Jackson said. “Walking back in there to see the exhibit was happy, but bittersweet to me. At least, we finally could express what we never had the opportunity to do. They tried to shut our voices up, but here, we were given our voices back.”
More than ‘the projects’
Located between Route 18 and New Street, Memorial Homes opened in 1958. That same year, Jackson and Jasmin moved in. Davis arrived decades later in 1990 and eventually became a member of the Residents Council.
Jackson was 11 years old when she arrived. Jasmin was 4.
All three would spend decades there. All three raised children there.
“We were safe there,” Jasmin said. “We looked out for each other. We knew where all the kids were. We used to keep our doors unlocked.”
Some called it Memorial Homes. Others called it New Brunswick Homes. Residents themselves often used a different name.
“We never called it Memorial Homes. It was ‘the projects,'” Jasmin said. “That was our nickname for it. What we always called it.”
Whatever it was called, residents describe a close-knit community built over generations.
“When I go by there, I still see my buildings there,” Jasmin said. “I want that picture for everybody.”
The sense of place remains so strong that residents still recite their former addresses from memory.
“My address was 176 Memorial Parkway, Building 4, Apartment 3A, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 08901,” Jasmin said. “That’s what we had to learn in school.”
The exhibit captures those memories through interviews, photographs, newspapers, artifacts and handwritten reflections.
According to Jasmin, it “caught the essence of everything in the projects.”
Telling the story
Visitors entering the exhibit encounter a large landscape photograph of Memorial Homes and reunion shirts bearing the phrase, “We Mean Something to Each Other.”
Nearby, oral histories collected from former residents can be viewed and heard. A timeline traces the story of affordable housing in New Brunswick and the broader history of public housing in America.
Artifacts include family photographs, newspapers, a brick from one of the buildings and personal keepsakes donated by former residents.
Additional galleries feature Gest’s black-and-white portraits from 1998, original student artwork inspired by the community’s stories, and Buehler’s photographs documenting Memorial Homes before, during and after the 2001 implosion.
One room surrounds visitors with resident voices. Another displays footage of the demolition accompanied by commentary from people who witnessed it.
For Davis, Jackson and Jasmin, seeing their stories represented publicly has been powerful.
“It was family,” Jasmin said of the community that once lived there.
The day everything changed
The destruction of Memorial Homes did more than alter New Brunswick’s skyline.
While four apartment buildings were erased, residents say an entire community was displaced.
As early as the 1970s, discussions began about demolishing the complex. Residents spent decades living with uncertainty about whether they would eventually lose their homes.
Once demolition plans moved forward, families were relocated throughout New Brunswick and beyond. Some moved to Franklin, North Brunswick, Perth Amboy and other communities. Others moved out of state.
A number of former residents eventually returned to live in new Hope VI developments built on or near the former site.
But many did not.
Though Davis, Jackson and Jasmin applied, none received apartments in the replacement developments.
“We were even presented with the check for the Hope VI,” Davis said. “Then, they got rid of us.”
Despite the disruption, residents maintained connections.
“The building may have imploded, but the community didn’t,” said Sean Connaughton, a rising Bloustein School junior who participated in the project. “This was more than the buildings. This was a very deeply knit, tight-knit community.”
Why revisit Memorial Homes now?
The exhibit was born from a collaboration between Rutgers’ Mason Gross School of the Arts and the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy.
The idea began when Buehler reached out about showing photographs he took in 2001 documenting Memorial Homes and its demolition.
From there, faculty members developed linked courses in which four Mason Gross and 12 Bloustein students used art and research to create the exhibit. This experience brought together the students with residents, Gest and Buehler.
Chat Travieso, the Tepper Chair of Mason Gross and co-faculty lead on the project, said it quickly became clear that community voices needed to be at the center of the effort.
“We knew that if we were going to do anything about Memorial Homes, we needed to make sure that the community was involved in both telling the story and defining that narrative,” Travieso said.
Students spent months researching archives, conducting interviews and gathering oral histories.
“It wasn’t going to be a conventional class,” said David Listokin, professor and director of the Center for Urban Policy Research. “A critical part of it was the community engagement and making sure that we foregrounded community voices.”
Connaughton said that mission resonated with students.
“We can’t bring the homes back, but we can amplify the voices who once lived there,” he said.
A story that still matters
For Travieso, Memorial Homes is not simply a story about the past.
Questions surrounding affordable housing, redevelopment and displacement continue to shape New Brunswick.
The site once occupied by Memorial Homes is now part of the larger Hope VI redevelopment effort. More recently, city officials unveiled plans for Fourward Hill, a $1.5 billion transit-oriented redevelopment project that would replace Schwartz Homes and Robeson Village with new mixed-income housing.
“There is an ongoing housing crisis everywhere,” Travieso said.
He argues Memorial Homes demonstrates both the need for affordable housing and the importance of listening to residents affected by redevelopment decisions.
Memorial Homes wasn’t idyllic. It wasn’t perfection,” he said. “There were issues there, as there are in any community. But the residents looked out for each other.”
Even during difficult conversations about crime, poverty and demolition, Travieso said students worked to avoid repeating stereotypes that have long defined public housing communities.
Instead, the goal was to tell a fuller story.
‘Because we mean something to each other’
Every summer since 2010, former residents have gathered for a reunion.
This year’s event is scheduled for Aug. 29 at Boyd Park, directly across Route 18 from where Memorial Homes once stood.
The reunions are now organized by the children of former residents. Attendees wear shirts bearing a simple message:
“Because we mean something to each other.”
Jackson said she’s already preparing her contribution.
“I’m bringing my potato salad,” she said. “They’ve been after me about making my potato salad.”
For the women who once called Memorial Homes home, the annual gathering is proof of something the exhibit also seeks to demonstrate.
The buildings may be gone.
The community is not.
“They tore down the buildings,” Jackson said, “but they couldn’t tear our feelings down.”