Newark’s Jackie Onassis – Preservationist Liz Del Tufo Retires After 50 Years

Liz Del Tufo had no idea what kind of turn out she would receive on the night she announced her retirement from Newark Landmarks.

Perhaps it is difficult for preservationists to gauge the impact they’ve had during their career. Most will say there is a growing resistance to the work they do and a dismantling of the protections they fought for.

It is also the sort of work that tends to aggravate those in positions of power. And yet, those who appreciate the work of preservationists are so eternally grateful for the communities it creates, the beauty it protects, and the history it enshrines.

It was the latter group, more than hundred people, who gathered at the Newark Public Library to hear Del Tufo reflect on her 50-year career. What people have come to admire about the 91-year-old is her fearlessness. A good preservationist has to be because the work they do is inherently political.

It was, after all, her refusal to buckle to political pressure that led former Mayor Sharpe James to fire her in 2006 as the inaugural chair of the city’s Landmarks & Historic Preservation Commission.

She refused to cast a vote allowing James’s friend to demolish a home in the Forest Hill Historic District. A clipping of the Star-Ledger article detailing this public row was in a glass case on the second floor of the museum – there is an ongoing exhibit about Newark Landmarks – indicating that the organization took pride in this firing.

Del Tufo had an impressive career before she became known as the Jackie Onassis of Newark – leading both the county’s cultural affairs department and serving as the Newark Boys Chorus. But it was her role as a preservationist that she is best known for.

Despite her ouster from the commission, Del Tufo continued fighting to save the city’s landmarks from outside the walls of City Hall. How many preservationists can boast that they’ve had a hand in landmarking all of their city’s historic districts and a long list of individual buildings?

Last year, Newark Landmarks scored another victory when Weequahic High School was listed on the National Register. However, Del Tufo was not as celebratory as might be expected – it was an effort that dragged unnecessarily for 13 years and cost the nonprofit $30,000. Preservation, she claims, is being stifled by bureaucracy.

“Why do the instruction pages have to be 170 pages long? Does more paper make a building more historic?” she asked those in attendance. “I don’t think so.”

The other challenge preservation faces lately is ideological. Today, Newark is a Black-majority city that is still reckoning with a past that wasn’t always equal. In 2019, Mayor Ras Baraka, the poet-politician, penned a verse called “What We Want,” in which he detailed a desire to topple monuments of “genocide” and replace them with images of women with his own skin color.

The following year, the social upheaval that happened in the wake of George Floyd’s death gave Baraka a window to deliver his promises, tearing down a statue of Christopher Columbus and scratching the name of slave-holding President George Washington from a park in the James Street Commons Historic District. He replaced them both with the name and likeness of Harriet Tubman.

The problem was that he did so without appearing before the local Landmarks Commission, which approves alterations to local historic districts. It is a game plan the city has repeated since then in the case of a pedestrian bridge and a puritan monument on NJPAC’s property.

“He’s destroying the history of the city,” Del Tufo.

Del Tufo has long claimed Baraka’s view of historical figures who helped make Newark what it is lacks nuance or leaves out important details, such as the fact that the nation’s first president eventually freed his slaves; or that the city’s Puritan settlers had a peaceful negotiations with the indigenous tribe that originally lived here; or that the city has a tradition of White abolitionists like Benjamin Coe, the Reverend Moses Combs, and the Reverend Samuel Cornish.

In turn, the city’s Business Administrator Eric Pennington accused her of “whitewashing” history. “It’s a shame that he says that – it makes me cringe,” she said after a deep, contemplative sigh. “That is so far from my nature.”

One might assume that Del Tufo, the fair-haired preservationist, has Puritan blood running through her veins or perhaps is a Daughter of the Revolution. Not so. She was a first-generation immigrant from Ireland and has no ancestors living in the United States.

Del Tufo moved to Newark in 1960 when she and her husband Judge Raymond Del Tufo, another first-generation immigrant, built a one-story home in the Forest Hill neighborhood to accommodate her husband’s multiple sclerosis. She remained in Newark after the 1967 riots, when others fled, long enough to see her neighborhood designated a historic district.

Today, Forest Hill, where she lives in the same home, continues to flourish with one home recently selling for $1 million for the first time in its history. It is, to her, a testament to the power of what landmark designation and the right political leadership can do for the cause of preservation. Ironically, she has the most gratitude for the late mayor that fired her.

“When Sharpe James was mayor he brought this energy to the city,” Del Tufo said. “He loved Newark’s history and took pride that it was the third oldest city in the nation.”