Baxter Terrace: A Newark Story

Baxter Terrace: A Newark Story

By Dr. Yusef Ismail

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(Newark, New Jersey) Before the buildings came down, before the doorway was preserved in the Smithsonian, Baxter Terrace had already given Newark something that could not be demolished: generations of people who turned music, faith, performance, and art into a way of telling the world who they were.

There are places that disappear twice. The first time is when the buildings are demolished. The second comes when the stories of the people who lived there begin to fade.

James M. Baxter Terrace, Newark's first public housing development, has escaped that second disappearance.

Its buildings are gone. Its recreation hall is gone. The streets and courtyards where generations of Newark children grew up have been transformed. But the people who came from Baxter Terrace left behind something more durable than brick and mortar. They left music. They left art. They left family. And they left a cultural legacy that reached from the streets of Newark to Broadway, from a neighborhood church to the recording studios of New York, and ultimately to an international audience in Paris.

Baxter Terrace was never simply a housing project. It was a community. And, in many ways, it was a cultural incubator.

A New Beginning in Newark

Opened in August 1941 by the Newark Housing Authority, Baxter Terrace occupied roughly 14 acres and eventually consisted of 21 buildings and more than 500 apartments. The development was named for James M. Baxter, a pioneering Newark educator who became the city's first African American high-school principal.

The project emerged during an era when Newark, like cities across the country, was confronting overcrowding, inadequate housing, and the effects of poverty. Public housing promised something more than shelter: a chance for families to live in safer, more stable surroundings and for children to grow up with opportunities their parents had not always been afforded.

For the families who moved into Baxter Terrace, the development became a world unto itself. There were parents and grandparents, children and cousins, neighbors and elders. There were friendships that lasted decades. There were arguments and celebrations, church services and street-corner conversations.

And there was music. Lots of it.

Where the Music Started

In the 1950s, Newark was becoming one of the nation's important centers of rhythm and blues, gospel, and doo-wop. Baxter Terrace was part of that movement.

Among the young people growing up there were members of a group that would eventually become known around the world as The Monotones. The young singers had connections to the nearby New Hope Baptist Church, where members sang in the choir. They also practiced in the Baxter Terrace recreation hall.

That detail matters. The recreation hall was not a recording studio. It was not Carnegie Hall. It was not Broadway. It was a room in a public housing development.

Yet from that room came the voices that would produce one of the most recognizable songs of the early rock-and-roll era: "The Book of Love."

The song developed from an idea the young men worked on together and was recorded in 1957. Released in 1958, it climbed to No. 5 on the pop chart and No. 3 on the R&B chart. The Monotones went on to tour with major performers including Sam Cooke and Jackie Wilson.

The story has become part of American popular music history. But before "The Book of Love" became a hit record, it was simply music being made by young people in Newark. That may be the most important part of the story.

Talent was not coming to Baxter Terrace. Talent was growing there.

The Other Voices of Baxter Terrace

The Monotones were not the only young singers who emerged from the community.

The Terracetones were another group of Baxter Terrace youths who recorded songs including "Ride of Paul Revere" and "Words of Wisdom." They even traveled with the Monotones.

Their story is less widely known, but perhaps that makes it more important. History often remembers the person who became famous and forgets the neighborhood that produced a generation of people who tried.

Baxter Terrace was filled with young people experimenting with music, performing for one another, dreaming about what might exist beyond Newark. Some became stars. Others did not. But the culture of possibility was there.

The Church Around the Corner

To understand the music of Baxter Terrace, however, you have to walk beyond the recreation hall. You have to go to church.

New Hope Baptist Church, at 106 Sussex Avenue, became one of the central institutions in the cultural life of the neighborhood. The church and Baxter Terrace existed in close proximity, but their relationship was about more than geography. They shared people. They shared voices. They shared generations.

Members of the Monotones sang in the church choir. And within that same musical environment were some of the people who would become major figures in American music.

Among them was Cissy Houston. Houston's connection to New Hope was part of a larger gospel tradition that helped shape her career. She would go on to become a celebrated singer, perform with and back some of the greatest artists of her generation, and become associated with the Sweet Inspirations.

New Hope was also part of the musical upbringing of Dionne Warwick and Dee Dee Warwick. Whitney Houston, Cissy's daughter, grew up attending and singing at the church as well.

The result was extraordinary. A church beside a Newark housing development became part of a musical lineage that extended from local gospel to the national and international music industry.

This is why the story of Baxter Terrace cannot be confined to its buildings. The recreation hall mattered. The church mattered. The street corners mattered. The families mattered. Together, they formed a creative ecosystem.

Bryon Onque and the Journey Beyond Newark

The Baxter Terrace story continued long after the heyday of the Monotones.

One of those stories belongs to Bryon Onque, a Baxter Terrace native and a member of the Onque family. Bryon was a professional musician and performer whose career eventually carried him far beyond Newark. He appeared in the 1983 Broadway revival of Porgy and Bess at Radio City Music Hall, serving in the ensemble and as an understudy for the role of Jim.

But Broadway was only part of his story. Bryon also performed under the direction of legendary composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein in Rome for Pope Paul VI in 1984.

For a boy from Baxter Terrace, the journey was remarkable. Newark. Broadway. Rome. The stages changed, but the foundation remained the same: a young person from a Newark community discovering that the boundaries of his neighborhood did not have to become the boundaries of his life.

And Bryon's story carries another significance. He was not an isolated artist who emerged from nowhere. He came from a family. He came from Newark. And he was part of a larger tradition of Onque family creativity that would continue into the next generation.

From Bryon to 3-The-Art-Way

The story of the Onque family did not end with Bryon. It changed mediums.

His sister, Yvonne Onque, a graduate of Newark Arts High School, continued the family's artistic tradition. Her sons, Samad and Suliman Onque, also became Arts High School alumni. Together, Yvonne, Samad, and Suliman formed 3-The-Art-Way, a family artistic collective whose work carries Newark's creative tradition into the present.

Their story is particularly important because it demonstrates that the legacy of communities like Baxter Terrace does not have to remain trapped in nostalgia. The past can become a foundation for something new.

3-The-Art-Way works across gallery art, comic-book illustration, wearable art, murals, and community-based projects. Their work addresses African American history, cultural identity, social justice, empowerment, trauma, and healing.

In other words, the medium changed. The mission did not.

The Monotones used their voices. Byron used his voice and his presence on the stage. Yvonne, Samad, and Suliman use visual art. All are forms of storytelling. All are ways of saying: We are here. This is where we come from. This is what we have seen. And this is what we want the world to understand.

Newark Goes to Paris

In 2024, that story traveled thousands of miles from Newark.

3-The-Art-Way was selected to showcase its work at Africa Station in Paris during the 2024 Summer Olympics, placing the Newark family's art before an international audience.

The significance of that moment goes beyond the Olympics. Think about the journey. A family rooted in Newark. A mother who attended Arts High School. Two sons who followed her into the same institution. An uncle whose performing career reached Broadway and Rome. And now a new generation of Onque artists exhibiting work in Paris.

That is not simply a family biography. It is a Newark story. And it is a Baxter Terrace story.

On Royal Soil: The Exhibit

That testimony now has a home.

On October 7, 2026, 3-The-Art-Way will open On Royal Soil, an art exhibit at the Newark Museum of Art's Makers Space, located at 49 Washington Street. The exhibit is a special tribute to the Baxter Terrace community—a formal recognition of the neighborhood that shaped generations of artists, musicians, and storytellers.

The opening reception will be held October 10 from 12 to 5 p.m. The exhibit is part of the 2026 Newark Arts Festival, which celebrates 25 years of artistic excellence in the city. The festival's Silver Ball will be held October 8.

On Royal Soil is curated by 3-The-Art-Way and represents the culmination of a family's artistic journey and a community's enduring legacy. It is, in every sense, a homecoming.

Beyond the Famous Names

There is a danger in telling neighborhood history through famous people alone.

The Monotones matter. Cissy Houston matters. Byron Onque matters. 3-The-Art-Way matters. But Baxter Terrace was never made extraordinary only by the people whose names eventually appeared in newspapers.

It was made extraordinary by everybody else. The mothers who raised children there. The fathers who went to work. The grandparents who watched neighborhood children. The teenagers who sang on street corners. The neighbors who opened their doors. The people who attended church together. The residents who looked after one another.

Former residents have described Baxter Terrace as a village—a place where people knew each other and where generations grew up together. That is the part of public-housing history that is too often lost.

When people look backward at communities such as Baxter Terrace, the story is frequently reduced to poverty, crime, deterioration, and decline. Those things were real. But they were not the whole story. A community cannot be understood only by the conditions that eventually damaged it. It must also be understood by what its people created despite those conditions.

When the Buildings Came Down

By the later decades of its existence, Baxter Terrace had suffered from serious deterioration, inadequate maintenance, and social and financial neglect. The complex closed in 2009 and was subsequently demolished.

The physical community disappeared. But something unexpected happened after the demolition. Part of Baxter Terrace came back. Not as a building. As an artifact.

An original entrance façade was carefully dismantled and preserved. Today, that piece of Newark history is part of the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., displayed in the museum's A Changing America: 1968 and Beyond exhibition.

A doorway. It is an unusual monument. But perhaps it is the perfect one. Because a doorway is about transition. It is about leaving one place and entering another. And that is what Baxter Terrace's story has always been about.

The Legacy Is Still Moving

The Monotones walked through that doorway carrying songs. Cissy Houston walked through it carrying gospel. Byron Onque walked through it carrying performance to Broadway and Rome. Yvonne Onque and her sons walked through it carrying visual art to Paris—and now, to the Newark Museum of Art.

Different generations. Different mediums. Different stages. One continuing story.

The physical Baxter Terrace is gone, but the creative DNA of the community continues to surface in Newark—in its musicians, artists, educators, performers, entrepreneurs, families, and young people who continue to imagine lives larger than the circumstances around them.

Perhaps that is the most important lesson of Baxter Terrace. A neighborhood does not have to survive physically to survive culturally. Buildings can be demolished. Walls can come down. Streets can be redesigned. But what people create—and what they teach their children to create—can travel. It can cross generations. It can cross oceans. It can arrive in Paris. And sometimes, it can end up preserved in the Smithsonian.

What Baxter Terrace Gave Newark

There is a tendency to ask what was lost when Baxter Terrace disappeared.

The buildings were lost. The physical community was lost. A particular way of life was lost. Those losses deserve to be remembered.

But there is another question worth asking: What did Baxter Terrace give us?

It gave Newark the Monotones. It gave Newark another generation of singers and performers. It helped nurture a musical culture connected to New Hope Baptist Church and to figures such as Cissy Houston, Dionne Warwick, and Dee Dee Warwick. It gave Bryon Onque a place from which to begin a journey that would take him to Broadway and, according to his family's history, to Rome under Leonard Bernstein's direction. And through the Onque family, its artistic story continues in the work of Yvonne, Samad, and Suliman Onque and 3-The-Art-Way—now honored in On Royal Soil at the Newark Museum of Art.

The neighborhood's legacy is therefore not frozen in the 1950s. It is still being written. That may be the most beautiful thing about Baxter Terrace.

It was never really about the buildings. It was about what happened inside them. It was about what happened between them. It was about the people who grew up there and carried something of the community wherever they went.

Baxter Terrace was demolished. Its people were not. Its music was not. Its art was not. Its memory was not.

And if the story is told correctly, Baxter Terrace will never simply be remembered as a Newark housing project that disappeared. It will be remembered for what it gave the city—and what the people who came from there gave the world.

On Royal Soil opens October 7, 2026, at the Newark Museum of Art Makers Space, 49 Washington Street, Newark, NJ. Reception: October 10, 12–5 p.m. Part of the 2026 Newark Arts Festival. For information: Yvonne Onque, 973-289-5553 or Suliman Onque, 973-280-2893.