NEWARK -- The first phase of the Gateway Center was completed just five years after Newark's deadly civil unrest of 1967, and the design of the office complex reflected a perception that Newark was a dangerous place to live or work.

The complex's first pair of office towers, 1 and 2 Gateway Center opened in 1972, designed by Victor Gruen Associates, where Cesar Pelli was a partner at the time. They were followed by 3 and 4 Gateway, designed by Grad Associates, which opened in 1985 and 1988 respectively.

In all of its phases, the complex was built with limited access to and from Raymond Boulevard, Mulberry, Market and other surrounding streets. Compounding Gateway's isolation, there are no exterior street-level shops or restaurants that might attract people who don't work inside the complex.

And for the people who do work there, an elevated, enclosed walkway -- also known as a "skywalk," or "concourse" -- links the complex directly to Newark Penn Station, letting those workers commute to and from Gateway without ever having to set foot on a Newark sidewalk.

But things have changed in New Jersey's biggest city, thanks to the passage of time, a recent building boom, and the embrace of street life as commercially and socially desirable.

The center is a huge part of Newark's financial heart. Apart from payroll taxes paid by the building's tenants on the salaries of their employees, annual property taxes paid by C&K on 2 Gateway alone in 2016 came to $3,335,800, in addition to an annual Special Improvement District (SID) assessment of $182,476.

It plans to stay that way, as Gateway's owners are now trying to altar perceptions of the office complex as a fortress-like holdover from a violent, anxious period of Newark's past.

"The concourse was built at a time, for a place that, thankfully, doesn't exist any longer," said Kevin Collins of C&K Properties, which acquired the 800,000-square- foot 2 Gateway building 11 years ago.

The focal point of 2 Gateway's transformation effort is its pedestrian concourse, where 15,000 workers in the Gateway complex's four buildings walk to and from their jobs every day.

The effort to make the concourse into a public thoroughfare is not just a business strategy for insuring that 2 Gateway remains attractive to tenants, but is also true to its official designation as a public street, Collins said.

One recent addition is the Agnes Varis NJTV Studio, home of New Jersey's public television newscasts, where passersby can look through a glass wall at anchor Mary Alice Williams and correspondents doing their work.

Just down the indoor block, there is Public SPACE, a new work and educational area that hosts lectures, round table discussions, product demonstrations and workshops focused on technological innovation, which dovetails with Newark's growth as a technology hub. 2 Gateway is a participant in that trend, as the first client of the city's Newark Fiber low-cost, high speed internet service, which C&K offers to its tenants.

Just across the concourse from the Public SPACE, is the Project for an Empty Space, an art gallery open to the public with adjacent artist studios visible to passersby along the concourse through glass walls.

"I like to say we interrupt people's day with art," said Dudley Ryan of CBRE, C&K's leasing agent for 2 Gateway.

One of the artists at Gateway, David Antonio Cruz, who takes the PATH train to his studio from his home in New York, said he likes the fact that artist studios are not what most people would expect in an office complex.

"The outside doesn't match the inside," Cruz said.

A nook in the concourse between Empty Space and Public SPACE is the venue for regular lunchtime jazz concerts staged by WBGO, Newark's public radio station. A recent performance by singer and WBGO announcer Lezlie Harrison drew a crowd of several dozen listeners who bopped to the music as they sat on folding chairs.

Near the elevators up to 2 Gateway's office floors, the Cotidiano Cafe, with its Italian espresso machine, offers an alternative to the Dunkin' Donuts, sandwich and pizza shops that line much of the concourse.

The owners of 2 Gateway aren't alone in their thinking.

At 1 Gateway, the bulding's owner, Advance Realty, has also taken steps to make its stretch of concourse friendlier to tenants' employees and the general public alike, said Barry Quiner, the Bridgewater-based company's director of asset management.

Those steps include: recently signing a lease with Smitty and Mo's Chicken Kitchen, which serves cage-free chicken from local farms; actively recruiting "experiential and service-oriented businesses" to fill retail space; and teaming with the Prudential Center to place "ambassadors" inside the Gateway concourse to guide visitors from Penn Station to downtown events.

The owners of Gateway's two other buildings, Rugby Realty and Lichter Gateway IV LLC, did not comment.

At Public SPACE in 2 Gateway, 20-year-old Nana Appria-Kubi, and 18-year-old Malimah Chance and Isaac Milton, college students from Newark, shared a table while putting together an online calendar of events for the Newark-oriented BrickCityLive.com website.

The young trio agreed that 2 Gateway's stretch of the concourse seemed more lively than elsewhere in the complex, and they applauded the deliberate effort to make it more inviting to the public. Appiah-Kubi, a DelBarton School graduate who's now a student at Boston College, even had a kind word about Gateway's exterior.

"It looks beautiful," he said, "from the outside and the inside."

Steve Strunsky may be reached at sstrunsky@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @SteveStrunsky. Find NJ.com on Facebook.