Amy S. Rosenberg is a staff writer with the Philadelphia Inquirer.

NEWARK, N.J. — This is the city where the myth of Cory Booker, Super Mayor, was born. It was in the Upper Clinton Hill neighborhood that the Stanford- and Yale-educated Booker ran into a burning building to save a young woman. That was only a mile from the steps where, years before as a young city councilman, he had cradled a dying gunshot victim. No mission was too small for Booker—once he even delivered diapers to a snowbound mother of five.

In Newark, Booker established himself as one of the nation’s most celebrated African-American politicians, turning a deeply troubled city into a model of urban revival. While it certainly doesn’t hurt his résumé to be halfway through his first term as the junior senator from New Jersey, it’s his experience in Newark that made Booker look like a real contender to be Hillary Clinton’s vice presidential pick.


As mayor, Booker was a whirlwind of activity, his feet and his texting thumbs always in frenetic motion. He helped remake the downtown with its vast Prudential business campus, lured corporate headquarters, hotels and supermarkets, forged strategic partnerships with philanthropists and venture capitalists, improved the tone and professionalism of Newark’s city government, slashed budgets and midwifed a valiant but ultimately ineffective infusion of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s wealth into the troubled school system.

In a presidential campaign cycle dominated by a Republican candidate who has alienated minorities and drawn angry protests from the of Black Lives Matter movement, Booker offers Clinton’s ticket urban credibility, executive experience and more than 1.5 million Twitter followers who hang on his every hopeful, optimistic, vegan-loving tweet. And he is young, at 47, a whole generation separated from the nominee at the top of the Democratic ticket.

But a closer look at Booker’s seven-year tenure as mayor here reveals plenty of people ready to tell the other side of the gauzy stories repeated in adoring magazine profiles. Yes, he transformed the city’s downtown Central Ward and put a dent, at least for a time, in Newark’s infamously high crime rate, but he also left behind bruised feelings in the neighborhoods where residents wanted jobs more than cheerleading. And to the residents who forked over big increases in fees and taxes, there remains a gnawing suspicion that Booker cared more about the optics of a social media moment than actually delivering on basic city services.

Barbara Byers is one of them. Remember that emergency diaper delivery? That was her.

“He did come and bring me Pampers,” Byers told me recently on Highland Avenue. Back in 2010, her brother had tweeted at Booker three days after a massive snowstorm that Byers could not get out and was running out of diapers. Booker, as he was fond of saying on his Twitter feed, was “on it.”

Byers laughed at the memory and thinks everyone missed the point: Booker, she said, focused on the individual heroics because the larger task of managing city services eluded him.

“The only reason he brought me Pampers was that it had been three days and our street hadn’t been plowed,” she said. “I have five kids and, trust me, I don’t just run out of Pampers. All we wanted was for him to plow our streets. It’s about knowing how to manage a city.”

***

He was an outsider, an Ivy League educated, 6-foot-3, green-eyed All-American who arrived in town with a mission and set out to operate right from its gritty center. He didn’t sound like he came from the city—he grew up in the suburbs 20 miles away—so he always pronounced it “NEWark,” like an Amtrak conductor, instead of the more indigenous Nork, a fact not lost on natives. But he lived in Brick Towers, a subsidized housing development, went on a hunger strike to wrest power away from drug dealers operating in the open and in 1998, at age 29, got himself elected to City Council. In 2002, he ran for mayor against powerful incumbent Sharpe James but lost. He tried again in 2006 and won.

Booker’s administration ushered in billions in development, “the largest economic development boom in 50 years,” as Booker reminded his followers in a Facebook post on July 1, the 10th anniversary of his being sworn into office. As mayor, two of Booker’s biggest gets were corporations Panasonic and Manischewitz, which he encouraged to relocate their headquarters from Secaucus to Newark.

Booker still crows that the production of affordable housing doubled to 2,500 units under his watch. For the first time in 60 years, the population of Newark rose instead of fell. Unemployment spiked in 2010 at 15.1 percent in Newark, but had dropped by the time he left for the Senate in 2013 to 11.7 percent. Still more than double the national average, but headed in the right direction.

And most importantly, crime went down in the first couple of years of his administration. A city that experienced 105 murders in 2006 had 67 reported in 2008. No wonder Booker’s stock rose and the amount of favorable attention from national news outlets with it. Time magazine, particularly enamored of his super mayor heroics, called him the “Chuck Norris of U.S. mayors,” and detailed his rescue of a shivering dog.

Daring runs into burning buildings captured headlines, but his stated mission when he came into office was far less sexy: rescue the city’s neediest neighborhoods, which were plagued by high crime rates, high unemployment and underperforming schools.

In that mission, some argue, he was less successful.

Sure, some neighborhoods have flourished, like downtown, and the Ironbound, a Portuguese stronghold, where whole eels and sardines were served up on paper plates from stands on Portugal Day last month, and hip restaurants flung open doors and windows to serve sangria by the bucket.

But there’s a widely held perception that Booker was more interested in remaking the more visible and higher-profile downtown, which he had represented as a council member, than areas farther from the city center. He might have attracted corporations like Audible, whose CEO, Don Katz, a friend of Booker’s, says relocating was one of the best things he’s ever done for the company. But of the 850 employees Audible now employs in Newark, only 12 percent live there. “I think you can’t wave a wand and put up the kind of housing that my folks would want to live in,” Katz says. “That’s the kind of conversation I’m having now.”

Booker’s highest-profile project was one that he had opposed as a councilmember—the building of the Prudential Center arena. But as mayor, realizing the wheels already were in motion, he arranged for about $200 million from a settlement with the Port Authority to help fund the construction. That decision prevented tax dollars from being used, but some still wondered whether the money might have been better spent elsewhere.

“Newark’s landscape looks much different,” says political scientist Andra Gillespie of Emory University, author of the 2012 book, The New Black Politician: Cory Booker, Newark and Post-Racial America. “The restaurant scene, the area around [the] arena. Some would have opened after he left office, but those things take time. Things that emerged in the past couple years [like a new Prudential tower] likely started during the Booker administration.

“There are certain neighborhoods that the Prudential campus borders, those places look very different. It’s important to look at the economic development of downtown Newark. Does that live up to the ideals of Booker’s 2002 campaign of neighborhood development? Do people in the neighborhoods see that the same way that they benefit from it?”

Modia Butler, who served as Booker’s chief of staff for five-and-a-half years, said his boss’ record in Newark should be seen in light of the larger economic forces at work.

“We were caught in one of the deepest economic downturns,” he said. “When the economy is like that, there’s a flu in inner cities like Newark. But even with that as the backdrop, all this stuff you see now, it wasn’t there. It was barren. There wasn’t talk about Whole Foods. There wasn’t talk about Panasonic. There wasn’t talk about Prudential building a second tower.”

He said Booker’s development went beyond the central business core. “We built veterans housing on Clinton Avenue in the South Ward, that’s not a downtown neighborhood. We built Teacher’s Village, created a village where there was no neighborhood.”

But the budget deficits forced him to make deep cuts in the city’s payroll, which ended with the layoffs of about 1,000 municipal workers, 163 of them police officers. In the city’s poorer neighborhoods, where many of those workers lived, the cuts hit especially hard.

Former councilman Darrin Sharif, who represented the Central Ward when Booker was mayor and also worked in his council office, said development there went beyond just catering to big business. He pointed to the reopening of a ShopRite on Springfield Avenue in the central district that was destroyed during the 1967 riots, or as they are known in Newark, the Rebellion.

“It’s important to me, a lot of the projects, like the ShopRite in the Central Ward that got obliterated during the 1967 rebellion. If you’re the mayor, you get blamed for the bad,” said Sharif, who lost reelection in 2014. Booker has called Sharif’s late father, Carl, his political sensei.

“He was a very effective advocate for Newark as, ‘This is a place that you should invest in, despite what you read in the paper.’” Sharif said. “That’s not a small thing.”

Booker's people say he remained popular in Newark, where he still lives, despite the naysayers. They point to a 2012 poll—commissioned by his opponents and taken before he announced he was running for Senator—that found a 70 percent favorability rating and 58 percent of those polled said they would vote for him for a third term.

Booker’s self-congratulatory Facebook post on the 10th anniversary of his election as mayor received 1.3 thousand likes and comments from Cleveland, Texas and Newark.

The negative comments mostly came from people in Newark.

***

Talk to people in Newark, and it’s not hard to find someone who sensed that the running-addicted Booker was racing to get somewhere else, and it wasn’t just across town.

“It seemed like he was mayor for two minutes, and then he was in the Senate,” said Jeanette Vargas, who lives next door to Barbara Byers. Unlike voters in Ohio and Florida, she had never heard the story of the diaper delivery, though she remembered the lack of plowing.

“I don’t think he was truly connected with the people,” said Alfred Dill, an admissions counselor for a technical school who lives in Vailsburg section of Newark’s West Ward and who attended Howard University.

“If you’re talking about Ivy League education vs. HBCU [Historically Black College and University], it gave him more of a national view,” said Dill, interviewed on Sanford Avenue on his way home from work. “It’s valuable to Cory. People look at it for exactly what it is: publicity ops.”

Joe Manze, a lifelong resident of the more affluent Forest Hills, the neighborhood that once was home to Ballantines and Tiffanies, saw his taxes grow to a whopping $21,000 in property taxes. “Booker came here and the taxes went through the roof,” Manze, a finance manager for Chrysler, said. “Taxes are astronomical. There should have been more services.”

People questioned who he was really serving. Residents saw Booker as catering to his pals and donors from New York, creating jobs for reverse commuters, while city jobs dried up. Meanwhile, tax incentives, abatements went to corporations.

“Booker could seem like he was detached from his job,” said Gillespie, the political scientist at Emory University. “People were raising the question, ‘Are you black enough? Do you hold the interests of this community or are you helping your friends from New York who might view Newark as a place to invest and push residents out?’ He was getting money from bankers, lawyers.

“On Twitter, he would say, ‘I’m on it.’ But it turned out he was in California. Now ‘on it’ could mean forwarding it to a responsible person, it’s not necessarily an abdication of leadership. But it was extra evidence of the ways they thought he was disengaged.”

The criticism that Booker was not focused on his day job stuck. The Newark-based Star-Ledger tracked the days Booker was out of the city 118 days in one 18-month stretch, often earning lucrative fees for speaking gigs. (The newspaper later did the same for Gov. Chris Christie, who shared a similar reputation for being an absentee executive.)

That reputation for detachment didn’t help when the bad headlines hit.

There was a corruption scandal at the Newark Watershed Conservation Development Authority that centered on Booker’s friend and ally, Linda Watkins-Brashear. One watchdog group said the authority had gone “Hog Wild,” while overseeing Newark’s water and sewer infrastructure. Top officials were convicted of taking millions in bribes, kickbacks and engaging in other misuse of public money. Booker had to distance himself with the sheepish, yet accurate, excuse he had not been paying attention, had not been to meetings.

The water authority has since gone into bankruptcy. In June, a federal judge dismissed Booker as a defendant in a lawsuit filed by the Authority against Booker and 27 other board members and city officials, claiming their neglect of their oversight duty led to the mismanagement.

And many felt that the education money from Mark Zuckerberg was mismanaged by another of Booker’s friends and allies, Cami Anderson, who resigned last year.

Crime rates, which were, in fact, falling before Booker was elected, began to creep back up. By 2013, with Newark’s population at 278,246, there were 3,516 violent crimes and 112 killings, both figures higher than when he took office. The city’s murder rate put it behind only Detroit and New Orleans.

***

“Ask Cory Booker about Fathers Now,” Rabin Muhammed said. It was about 10 p.m., and the banks of lights around the basketball court in this North Ward neighborhood were shutting down one by one. Branch Brook is a neighborhood where two things are lit up at night: the Cathedral and the basketball courts.

“Ask him what happened to the program.”

Muhammed’s voice was pained. This was a program—Muhammed graduated in the 17th class—for men in Newark trying to remake their lives after serving prison terms. It was supposed to be something that lasted, both as a program and in the changes it nurtured in the men. But it fell by the wayside, lost its funding.

“He didn’t come back to us,” said Muhammed, who works at the Port Newark. “That was one of the best programs in Newark. Ask him about it. He don’t mention us no more.”

As mayor, Booker helped raise money to fund the program, about $500,000 per year, according to his staff. But as senator, he is prohibited from doing so, and the program “fell by the wayside,” said a source close to Booker.

Despite Booker’s national rise and popularity, there remains vast dissatisfaction in the various wards of Newark, black and white, relatively wealthy and relatively not, where people wonder if their part of Newark would be better off gated, and wards where the opening of summer basketball league draws hundreds of contented spectators with folding chairs.

“[Being mayor] helped him out a lot,” says Victor Robinson, 61, at the edge of the basketball court. “At least he started something before he graduated, but he wasn’t the best.”

Robinson’s friend Malik Jones is more blunt: “He didn’t give a f--- about us,” Jones said. “He brought in people from Cumberland County”—in South Jersey, far from Newark—“Cumberland County! I’ve been here 35 years of my life, and he’s bringing in someone from Cumberland County. He never gave nobody no jobs.”

Those complaining about a lack of city jobs under Booker do not see the bigger picture, Butler, his former chief of staff, said. “The idea is not to have city jobs, it’s to expand the universe of possible employment opportunities.”

***

On a recent evening, Newark’s current Mayor Ras Baraka walked up Lanark Avenue and down Lanark Avenue, west of downtown. He stopped at some houses, not all, talked with some residents, but not all. No cameras trailed him, though the ghost of his predecessor seemed to hover close by.

Baraka does not run through neighborhoods like his predecessor, but neither does he linger for effect. A man sat on a front step with a bandaged leg—a gunshot wound, he said—and told members of Baraka’s staff who were buzzing around the mayor that he had been let go from a job because of a prison record. It was a scene just waiting for Cory Booker to show up, you might say, but Baraka passed him by with just a glance.

Detective Kevin Johnson was on Lanark as well, deployed in his new role as a 4th Precinct community police officer at one of current Baraka’s “Occupy the Block” events. Under Booker’s austerity program, the department laid off 163 officers, and Johnson was on patrol.

“I see positive things now,” Johnson said, as he went door to door to speak with residents about their concerns. “I have new access to things.”

Johnson is a small piece of evidence of how Baraka is quietly remaking the city on his own terms. He has sworn in 80 new officers and recently welcomed a new recruiting class of 135. And he has sent officers like Johnson out into the neighborhoods to promote his commitment to community policing. Crime is still high, but unemployment has continued to drop, holding now at just under 8 percent.

“People are getting jobs with the city of Newark in all wards,” assured Ali Sawab, assistant director of Baraka’s Economic Development and Housing Reentry Program.

The mayor wasn’t interested in comparing himself to the man who might be a week or two away from the most important job decision of his political career. Baraka unleashed on his ambitious mayor plenty of times while Baraka was a councilman. “The only way you can see the mayor is if you turn on Meet the Press,” was one of his more memorable lines. Now, the mention of Booker just irritates him. Newark, he makes it clear, is not glued to Periscope watching Senator Booker joining a sit-in on the House floor. Newark is not monitoring the Twitterverse for speculation of Booker’s vice presidential chances.

“You guys are obsessed with Cory Booker,” Baraka says. “I’m not staying up all night thinking about Cory Booker. People in this city are ready to move on.”