NEWARK -- The Gateway office complex in New Jersey's largest city is like a glass and steel fortress in an empty no-man's land. There are no storefronts on the sidewalks, where few pedestrians can be found. Even the entrances to the complex are hard to find.

It was built in a climate of anxiety just a few years after the 1967 Newark riots, when lives were lost, buildings burned and the governor declared a state of emergency, directing the police and National Guard "to take any and all measures" to quell the violence. The urban strife unfolded against a national backdrop of racial and political unrest from that era.

Gateway, along with its enclosed concourses, was aimed at letting office workers commute in and out of Newark without ever setting foot on city streets.

Flash-forward 50 years, a few blocks to the west, to where the atrium at the Hahne & Company mixed-used development on Broad Street opened this past January.

A street-level, block-long space that incorporates a vast skylight from the old Hahne & Company department store, the sunlit passage marking a different approach to urban renewal: one that embraces preservation of existing structures rather than demolition and new construction -- encouraging commercial and civic activity at the base of city buildings as a way of enhancing safety and security, economic activity, and overall quality of life.

Like Gateway's walkway, the Hahne's atrium is also enclosed. But rather than insulating Hahne's residents, visitors and workers from the surrounding neighborhood, the walkway provides a direct link to it, said Jon Cortell, a vice president at L+M Development Partners, the project's developer. "Ultimately, Hahne's capitalizes on the reaffirmation that the city center is Broad Street," he said.

To some, the Hahne's project is a marker as a milestone in Newark's resurgence -- not only because of its design, but because of the importance of the Hahne & Company department store to the city's self-image and its commercial and cultural life. The project was all the more significant because of the old store's presence as a highly visible an eyesore on the city's main thoroughfare for three decades, since it closed in 1987.

"It's taken a long time for Newark to turn a corner, but I think that corner has been turned," Junius Williams, the civil rights lawyer, author, activist and Newark native, said in a recent interview.

FOSTERING CHANGE

Indeed, Hahne's is just one of several high-profile projects fostering a feeling that Newark is at last shaking off the image of a depressed, crime-ridden city, an image the riots of 1967 helped burn into the city's own consciousness and the broader public's.

Recently, a groundbreaking was held for the conversion of a 108-year-old warehouse by Edison Properties into 456,000 square feet of retail and commercial loft space.

The redeveloped warehouse will overlook a new park known as Mulberry Commons, which will anchor a $100 million residential and commercial development of a long-vacant area just south of the Prudential Center arena, a venture involving Edison, J&L Properties and Prudential. Like other mixed-used projects, including Hahne's, the idea is to allow people to live, work and play in the same neighborhood.

Edison is receiving a 30-year property tax abatement worth $1 million for the warehouse project.

Other projects helping to change the face of Newark include:

Prudential Financial's $44 million, 20-story office tower on Broad Street, completed in 2015, reaffirmed the commitment of Prudential, Newark's best-known corporate citizen, to the city of its birth.

Teacher's Village, a $150 million mixed- use project largely completed by the RBH Group and designed by renowned architect and Newark native Richard Meier, which includes apartments, retail space and charter school buildings, integrated into the downtown Newark street grid.

The proposed redevelopment of the Bears and Eagles Stadium site by Lotus Equity Group, which would build a 2.3-million-square-foot residential, commercial and cultural complex.

Audible.com's transformation of the Second Presbyterian Church on Washington Street into company office space near its Newark headquarters..

540 Broad St., a proposed redevelopment of Bell Telephone's 1929 art deco headquarters by the Hahne's project firm, L+M, into 260-unit apartment tower.

One Theater Square, a 22-story, 245-unit apartment tower by Dranoff Properties and the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, across the street from NJPAC.

There were 2,000 housing units under construction in the city, with the investment in residential, commercial and public projects totaling $2 billion, the Newark Community Economic Development Corporation recently reported.

SETTING A PRECEDENT

Kevin Riordan, executive director of the Rutgers Business School's Center for Real Estate, said that for better or worse, Gateway set a precedent for development in the surrounding area, where subsequent buildings are similarly bereft of ground-floor shops or other businesses to invite the public and generate economic activity for people other than the building's owners or the workers inside.

Those Gateway-like buildings include the PSE&G headquarters, a dark glass monolith completed in 1980 with an adjacent plaza but no shops, restaurants or anything else on its ground-floor level; One Newark Center, a 1991 office tower whose base is partially occupied by Seton Hall Law School but no commercial uses; the Newark Legal Center, a vertical island of law offices completed in 2000 across Raymond Boulevard from Gateway and connected to the complex by its own elevated walkway; and the 12-story building completed in 2013 that houses the headquarters of Panasonic Corporation of North America.

The Gateway model of architecture is just one way the riots have had an impact on some of the city's development that persists to this day, Riordan said.

"Whether it was consciously done that way, or 'Well, look what's been done, let's continue it this way,' that's why there's no foot traffic," Riordan said, noting that foot traffic is precisely what "creates the vitality of the urban experience."

A NEW DOWNTOWN

Most of Newark's recent development has been downtown, a section of the city made attractive by publicly financed institutions and services including Newark Penn Station, NJPAC and the Prudential Center arena. Observers say the more difficult challenge for Mayor Ras Baraka and the city is development in other areas.

"So things are improving now," Williams said. "The question is, will that reach into the neighborhoods?"

There are at least some signs that it has. Of particular note in the context of the rioting's anniversary are recent projects in the Central Ward, on the very site of some of that fiery July's worst violence.

In October 2015, a ShopRite supermarket opened as the anchor of the Springfield Marketplace shopping plaza on Springfield Avenue, between Prince and Jones streets, where stores were looted and burned 50 years ago this week. For fast foods, a Taco Bell and a McDonald's are more recent additions to Springfield Marketplace, while an Ashley Stewart store opened there in April.

Making sure that all of Newark's neighborhoods benefit from redevelopment is one of Baraka's biggest challenges.

"We've got to make sure that when we bring wealth to the city that we spread it out," the mayor said recently, carrying a sledgehammer he had used during a ceremonial wall-breaking for the Edison warehouse project. "The idea is to have wealth to spread. If you don't have anything to spread out, then you're just talking."

The mayor is a Newark native and former Central High School principal, whose late father was the poet and activist Amiri Baraka. Supporters say he has managed to align the goals of developers with those of city residents, at least in terms of job creation and economic growth.

Passion for the community, an activist spirit and the belief that you can take care of everybody are essentials for that task, he said.

"But," he added, "you also have to understand that you have to allow business the room to grow, to invest, to develop in the city."

Richard Cammarieri, a Newark native and longtime activist, who is trustee of the non-profit New Community Corporation, chaired a working group on the city's current master plan put together by the mayor.

"Ras is a mayor that gets it," Cammarieri said.

Baraka's Newark 2020 initiative, for example, enlisted some of the city's biggest employers to help provide jobs for 2,020 unemployed residents by the year 2020. The mayor's Newark 3.0 initiative seeks to create job opportunities though policies that encourage Newark's development as a tech center, and his administration is a member of the Newark Venture Partners tech incubator.

OPENING A FORTRESS

Meanwhile, CBRE, the leasing agent for the Two Gateway tower, has acknowledged the criticism that the complex hasn't exactly woven itself into the fabric of the city. But operators are now trying to bring the imposing complex into the post-riot era.

"That's no easy task in the Gateway buildings, which are connected by pedestrian concourses and linked to Newark Penn Station, a target for critics who have long argued that its design discourages pedestrian traffic in downtown Newark," the real estate firm said in a blog posted by CBRE in November 2015.

To bring the community into the complex and the complex out to the community, CBRE said shaded tables and chairs have been set up just outside Gateway's Mulberry Street entrance. A gallery and program known as the Project for Empty Space Artist in Residence Program was also created.

Drawn to the Gateway gallery recently was Bara Qudah, a sophomore engineering major at NJIT. He was impressed by the works of artist-in-residence Richard Hart, whose wall installations combined traditional South African blankets with working stereo speakers.

Rather than seeing Gateway as a fortress isolated from Newark, Qudah said, "It's like a connection," between his NJIT neighborhood and the broader world, via Penn Station and its trains to Manhattan.

After a year studying in Newark, Qudah was already feeling some affection for the city, and he said he could see himself living there after college, if conditions were ripe.

"There are some nice places in Newark, so I would probably consider it," he said. "It depends where I get a job."

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