When Ken Walters bought his house on Reynolds Place in Newark’s Ivy Hill neighborhood in 1983, the water barely overtopped the curb even during the worst rainfall. But as time went by, and Seton Hall University, just across the border in South Orange, kept growing, educating more students, and competing as a Big East basketball powerhouse, the retired Verizon training instructor said he noticed the water level gradually rising.
“Every year when we got storms, the water kept getting a little bit higher,” said Walters, 74, noting that Seton Hall’s campus slopes down from west to east toward the low-lying Ivy Hill neighborhood. “And then when Ida came through, we had seven feet of water at Woodbine Avenue and Reynolds Place.”