NEWARK -- For the last year, the city has celebrated 350 years of its history through art, music and community festivals.
The city's 350th anniversary commemorative quilt hangs in City Hall. (Karen Yi | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com)
There was a play about the funeral business, a Newark restaurant week and a literary festival featuring Newark-centric books.
City officials gathered this week to cap off more than 200 events and to announce that photographs and articles of the celebrations will be archived in the public library for future generations to remember.
"This was not a top down operation, this was a top, middle and bottom approach to celebrate," Junius Williams, chairman of the Newark Celebration 350 said Tuesday. "We had a wonderful birthday party because people bought into it."
Williams said the events served more than 280,000 residents.
A quilt commemorating the city's anniversary and containing fabric from all five wards was also unveiled and now hangs in City Hall.
"It's a culmination of all the culture and the people of the city of Newark," said Central Ward Councilwoman Gayle Chaneyfield Jenkins, who came up with the idea.
She said quilts "were something that was done by our grandparents. Our grandmothers would sow them and it was a right of passage, it made you remember various members of your family."
To help community organizers around the city host events and reach out to residents, $2.7 million was raised, through donors large and small. That helped plant 350 trees in the city and give Newark students grants for college.
"Newark is the heartbeat of this state, it's the pulse of this state. It is actually the coolest thing in the corner of this corridor," Mayor Ras Baraka said. "Where writers were born, where musicians were born. This is a maker town, an inventor town."
The archives of the celebration will be housed at the Newark Public Library. A digital copy will be available at the Rutgers University Dana Center. The archives will also be used in a new Newark schools curriculum on Newark history.
"Newark is a town of immigrants, ex-slaves, which is really what America is ... People try to make us different than everyone else. We are different in our style but we are the same in our situation," Baraka said.
He said the city's anniversary events were a way to celebrate that.
"We wanted to say our name as loud as we can because that is our name. We are saying we were here for 350 years," he said.
Karen Yi may be reached at kyi@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter at @karen_yi or on Facebook.