A history of flooding — and broken promises — in Morristown’s Black community

A 1934 map of Morristown. Although the area has developed over the decades, flooding remains a constant — and a constant subject of study, but little else. Residents want action. (Photo source: NJDEP - NJ Geological Survey)

This story was produced as part of the Northern New Jersey Media Collaborative Project "Stormwater Matters," a project focusing on stormwater management solutions in the state.

Morristown, NJ—Morristown's Second Ward is the historical home of Morristown's Black community and some of the worst flooding in town. During Hurricane Irene in 2011 and Hurricane Ida in 2021, areas in and around Morristown saw significant flooding — but "the Hollow" section of Morristown in the Second Ward saw the worst, with water levels reaching four to five feet high. The Hollow is the lowest-lying part of the watershed and has been prone to flooding since before colonial times. Generations of residents in the Hollow have complained about flooding, and the town has a history of broken promises dating back to the 1960s and the start of the Headquarters Plaza urban renewal project.

Thanks to Bethel Church of Morristown in the Hollow, the first Black church in Morristown, and its pastor, the Rev. Dr. Sidney Williams, the Army Corps of Engineers is conducting a flood impact study to help address flooding — but that's only the first step.

The Army Corps study will take three years to complete, and the final report will provide only possible solutions to help mitigate flooding from the Whippany River and stormwater management. “What will follow will depend on continued funding for these projects, which is another step entirely,” said Siva Jonnada, the Chair of the Whippany River Watershed Action Committee, a local nonprofit that works to protect and maintain the area.

The question of what action follows the report is increasingly urgent: By 2050, annual precipitation in New Jersey could increase by 4% to 11%, leading to more severe weather events and flooding. But the occasional heavy rainfall already shuts down Martin Luther King Boulevard, the main road in the Hollow, for a day or two.

Reverend Elizabeth Cotten of Bethel Church said congregants can't access the church when the area floods. After Hurricane Irene, they couldn't worship there for almost three months because the entire basement flooded, and mold had set in. 

"I mean, water came up to some people, up to their waistline," she said. "A lot of the churches in the area and neighborhood people came out to help us clean it out. I'm grateful that it hasn't flooded again because it gets very costly trying to clean up that kind of flooding."

This map shows the floodplain along the Whippany River near Bethel Church of Morristown, located behind Headquarters Plaza and near a regulatory floodway — a portion of the floodplain that is effective in carrying flow and where the flood hazard is generally highest. The church was established in 1849 and was the only school for Black and Native American children in Morris County. It was moved to its current location, further north on Spring Street, in 1970. Areas in Morristown within floodplains are primarily adjacent to the Whippany River, Speedwell Lake, Lake Pocahontas and Great Brook. Approximately 5% of Morristown is within the 100-year floodplain, and 3% is within the 500-year floodplain. (Photo source: FEMA Maps)

Hurricane Irene cost the church $150,000 in damages, but community members' efforts to clean it up saved the church about $65,000 in repairs. Jonnada said the church sits near a part of the Whippany River known as Horseshoe Bend, where the river and a tributary called Atno Brook converge, doubling the impact when it rains and floods.

Jonnada said Atno Brook is an underground or "hidden river" that begins a mile away at Burnham Pond, running through tunnels under schools, an athletic field, and residential and commercial properties. Hidden underground rivers are common in urban areas. They’re covered or diverted into pipes and culverts during rapid urbanization, and while they contribute to flooding in urban areas, they're often forgotten about.

"We want that church to stand," said Cotten. "It's been here 180 years. And we want it to continue to stand for all the generations to come. There's a lot of history there."

Lobbying for change, and not for the first time

For 10 years after Hurricane Irene in 2011, Williams fought to get the town to take action to mitigate flooding in the Hollow.

"The way our Congress thinks about flood mitigation, if this was a high-dollar area where people have substantial asset ownership, we'd have this fixed in a heartbeat," said Williams. “When Hurricane Sandy came through [in 2012], we fixed all that infrastructure along the shore because people own multi-million-dollar homes there, but given that the Hollow was not a place of high-dollar-value assets, it was ignored — those are poor people."

Indeed, 20% of Morristown’s 19,000 residents have incomes of only two times the poverty level — and its population is 43.1% minority, compared with 12.1% in Morris County and 22.1% in the state.

After Hurricane Ida in 2021, Williams approached Congresswoman Mikie Sherrill for help. And in 2021, Congress revived the practice of allowing members to request federal funding for specific projects in their communities, establishing a Community Project Program. Under this program, state or local governments, government-adjacent organizations and nonprofits could submit projects to their members of Congress for consideration.

The $300,000 U.S. Army Corps of Engineers study was one of the Community Projects Sherrill secured federal funding for. In December 2021, after Williams reached out, Sherrill brought the Army Corps to do a field visit — in the Spring Street area around Bethel Church — to see what could be done.

"With this federal funding, we are addressing the major issue of flooding,” said Sherrill, thanking Williams for “his fierce advocacy.”

The problem is, other studies have been conducted throughout the years, with no further action. 

When Williams joined Bethel Church in December 2010 and experienced Hurricane Irene in 2011, he said he was unaware of the area's history and asked one simple question: What's going to be done?

In 2011, the Watershed Action Committee and Bethel Church secured a company to do a Hydrologic and Hydraulic study to evaluate and assess the flooding in the area. The study was a means to an end: Williams didn’t only want to protect the church from future flooding; he also wanted to revive plans for a 73-unit affordable housing complex. “The area has to be livable. And if it’s livable, why not build affordable housing?” he told local news outlet Morristown Green, but the town never followed through on the study’s findings.

The county gave them a grant for the study, Williams said, which resulted in a three-phased solution. “I presented that to the mayor of Morristown, who promptly threw it in the trash, in our faces,” Williams said, “and said, ‘nothing's going to get done about this.’"

Morristown Mayor Tim Dougherty and the Morristown Council did not immediately respond to requests for comment for this story.

In 2011, Morristown Green reported that Dougherty welcomed the study and shared William’s passion for affordable housing but wanted to await the study’s findings before considering any development for affordable housing in a flood area. The town planner, Phil Abramson, said that even if the study found that flooding could be managed, it would be an engineering issue and a question of public perception. "You need to be convinced beyond all reasonable doubt that people will be safe when you build," he told Morristown Green.

Now, more than a decade later, multiple apartment buildings are going up in the Hollow — with only 15% of apartment units and 20% of for-sale housing developments designated for affordable housing as mandated by Fair Share Housing — and there is still a flooding issue, said Williams. However, the state requires new development and redevelopment projects to mitigate stormwater runoff, ensuring there is no increase in peak stormwater runoff rates.

A map of the Whippany River Watershed: The Whippany River flows East-North-East and is a major tributary of the Rockaway River. It rises in Mendham Township in the west and flows east to East Hanover until it joins the Rockaway River in Hatfield Swamp, just above the confluence of the Passaic River. Many towns in the watershed are flooded by the Whippany River. (Photo courtesy of the Whippany River Watershed Action Committee)

Morristown is one of six towns in Morris County on the Whippany River — along with Morris Plains, Parsippany, East Hanover, Hanover and Florham Park — that formed the Whippany-Passaic Rivers Flood Mitigation Task Force. In 2022, the six mayors and their professional engineers met with Sherrill to develop a federally funded Community Project, and in 2023, secured $1.5 million for the Whippany River Regional Improvement Initiative: A multi-year, multi-phase project that will focus on clearing major obstructions, removing sediment, stabilizing portions of the river bank, and reestablishing and replanting vegetation along stream banks to reduce erosion and improve river flow.

Although officials in East Hanover, Hanover Township, Parsippany and Florham Park proposed the regional improvement project to mitigate flooding, changes in river flow patterns, such as from river obstructions, can significantly impact water and sediment quality and cause upstream flooding — and Morristown is upstream.

With urban renewal came displacement, not flood remediation

Williams and Cotten said a lot of challenges in the Hollow date back to Headquarters Plaza — the 1960s urban renewal project that displaced Black residents who were never able to find another home in Morristown, or even Morris County.

Headquarters Plaza was Morristown’s most ambitious urban renewal project in the 1960s and 70s and originally proposed two 15-story office towers, a 285-room hotel, a tennis court, a movie theater and a two-story shopping center. Along with Headquarters Plaza came the promise of affordable housing, economic revitalization and $12 million to mitigate stormwater.

“It should have brought the renewal of housing infrastructure, but that never happened,” said Williams. “It was supposed to be a flood remediation program. That never happened.”

An image of Headquarters Plaza. As of February 2024, the plaza has 650,000 square feet of Class A office space in three towers; 100,000 square feet of retail space; a 40,000-square-foot Crunch health club; a 256-room Hyatt Regency Morristown hotel; a 10-screen AMC theater; and several restaurants — all on top of a 3,000-space parking garage. (Photo source: Google Earth) 

Urban renewal was a controversial federal policy that resulted in displacement and gentrification across the country. It demolished blighted housing and buildings in inner cities and often permanently displaced lower-income households, many of them Black. The policy began in 1949 and ended in 1973. But by the late 1960s, the urban renewal projects in Morristown had displaced an estimated 110 families — 54% of which were families of color.

Now, more than 50 years later, flooding has been and continues to be an issue in the Hollow, and, Williams said, many Black families who fought hard to maintain their residences in the Hollow have been displaced, and their homes torn down.

Redevelopment in the 60s and 70s for Headquarters Plaza specifically targeted the Hollow, which included Speedwell Avenue, Flagler Street, Spring Street and Water Street. It demolished numerous residential and commercial buildings.

In “Setting Up Our Own City: The Black Community in Morristown,” author Cheryl C. Turkington relates that small businesses in that area were thriving in the 1950s, and Black-owned enterprises provided economic security to residents and served the community's needs.

“Morristown's expansive urban renewal projects, which wiped out entire neighborhoods and created new ones, profoundly changed the nature of longtime black settlements,” wrote Turkington.

Leslie Turner was a resident of Morristown in the 1950s. In Turkington's book, Turner said Water Street had homes and businesses, "three or four cold-water houses, families of houses, and most of the people there were Christian people, church-going people,” he said. "You had saloons there, and places of joy, people enjoyed themselves — it has always been the Hollow, has always been the mainstay of Morristown."

Turkington said most of Water Street was lost to urban renewal and plans for Headquarters Plaza, which became known in some circles as "the Wall" — its back turned to the neighborhood with its parking garage, contributing to a retail “dead-zone” and physical separation between the Second Ward and the rest of town.

"People loved this area," said Cotten, of Bethel Church. "You could talk to people who had to move out, and they start reminiscing about what things were like when they lived here. And they start naming off the families. They loved it. They loved it. They wouldn't just move just for the sake of moving. If they had built affordable housing, people would have definitely come back and moved in."

According to Jeffrey V. Moy from the North Jersey History and Genealogy Center, the Cory Road project provided relief for displaced low-income residents by providing housing for 60 affected families and selling units to another 100 families. However, the planned second phase of the affordable housing initiative, which would have created additional units in the Hollow, was never completed after the Nixon Administration cut federal funding to the program.

Williams said Morristown is providing the minimum requirement for affordable housing that the state demands — 15% of apartment units. He said they should have stuck to the original redevelopment plan, which promised the majority of affordable housing in the Hollow. Due to the demand for market-rate housing, Morristown has added new affordable units across town at a faster rate than the rest of the county.

Just as there wasn't affordable housing then, Cotten said there's not enough now. "If there were, I wouldn't have moved to Dover," she said. “I would've bought something right here, but you can't afford it.”

Williams said that while affordable housing is a Black-and-Brown issue when it comes to displacement, affordability affects where all low-to-moderate-income workers live and work:  nurses, teachers, emergency responders, police officers, and firefighters. When towns limit affordability, he said, they're working against their own self-interests.

"This isn't just the Black pastor's fight,” Williams said. “Everybody should be in this fight to create an inclusive community, where people of all income levels can afford to live."

In the end, Williams believes they’ve lost the fight for more affordable housing. But with the Army Corps study underway, there is hope of reviving a flood remediation program for a neighborhood where it is decades overdue.