Dear HUUB family and friends,

This week, I would like to speak more on The HUUB’s inception a decade ago. I believe this story will speak to a profoundly simple truth: whether we know it or not, we all have a hand in the future of our beloved city.

When I started my work with what would become The HUUB, I had never heard of the First UU of Essex County or known there was such a church in Orange. The building at 35 Cleveland was across the imaginary boundary that Main Street represented in my head as a kid raised on the other side of town. It was just a stone’s throw away from the lively heart of Orange, where my young, immigrant mother brought the three of us every Saturday while she paid bills, ran errands, and made us pick up our weekly books from the library. It was even within sight of the Midtown Direct train to NYC, which I would sometimes catch for my classes at NYU.

Well before my parents immigrated to this country and settled in Orange, this historic building proudly graced our community. Yet, somehow, I had never had a reason to visit and never even knew it existed until ten years ago. But no other timing could have been as significant as meeting the Church right as it committed to its transformation and emerged anew from its cocoon.

After joining previous Unitarian and Universalist groups in the area, The First Unitarian Universalist Church of Essex County was formally founded in 1890. The young Church would witness a country, young in its own right, stitch itself together after the Civil War. Over the following century, the Church would see our world replace lanterns and lamps with electric lighting and horse drawn carriages and cable cars with buses and trains. It would witness the US and the world be torn apart by two World Wars, the rise of heated domestic suspicions and incarcerations, the waves of social revolutions through the 1960s and 70s, rapid and devastating urban renewal and deindustrialization, and the looming cloud of the Wars on Drugs and Terror.

The Church would survive all these changes and upheavals, but not without enduring its own scars. By 2015, it was an isolated patch of land in a shifting landscape that showed no signs of slowing down; the Church’s physical infrastructure was failing, and its congregation dwindled.

Many of these cultural and political shifts affected the surrounding city of Orange, decimating a once-profitable industrial town. But not everyone was willing to see homes and history be trampled on. This was especially true of Black Americans/African Americans from the South who fled to Orange or left Newark after 1967. These community members were committed to staying. They chose to make Orange their home even as disinvestment in the city reached a fever pitch in the 1980s and 1990s, which was when my family migrated to the city. 

As the Church was dwindling around 2015, the tides of change rose again to challenge the community. This time, the old, neglected buildings and vacant land that had defined my childhood in Orange were being bought up by developers. Business took advantage to build new, luxury market-rate housing and exploit Orange’s easy access to Manhattan. Considering the century of rich life the Church had experienced, the storms it had weathered, and the dilemma the building and congregation found themselves facing, they had a choice to make: sell and leave, or stay and transform.

They chose to stay, as we continue to do now, and their radical transformation birthed The HUUB.

Sincerely,

Khemani Gibson, Mubarika Syed, and The HUUB Team