ABSTRACT
During the 1960s and 1970s, violence, environmental toxicity, cultural decline and physical decay colored Newark, New Jersey's reputation in journalism, art and popular culture alike. The idea of "the wasteland," in physical and cultural dimensions, came to characterize Newark's post–World War II image. The bleakness in T. S. Eliot's 1922 poem "The Waste Land" describes a world strikingly similar to Robert Smithson's 1967 depiction of suburban New Jersey in A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey. In characterization of the wasteland, dirt represents a ground in flux, a natural substance harboring opposing potentials: cultivation and decomposition. Dirt either roots growth, or acts as sediment burying the expired. The category of "wasteland" slipped between describing the "natural" state of a landscape incapable of grounding urban development, to the post-industrial city in ruins; the category of the ugly shifted from the natural to the man-made.
