Wednesday, June 5, 1918, broke crystal clear and cold in Newark, N.J., the early morning sun raking over this city of 414,000. The thermometer read 66 degrees at dawn.

It was a glorious morning for Carl and Helen Viard. The couple had married the previous afternoon in the dining room of the Bronx, N.Y., home of Helen’s parents, James and Elizabeth Davis.

The wedding had been small — 14 people, including the bride and groom and the Rev. Richard H. Weevill, who married them. Helen’s 21-year-old cousin, Lester Robertson, played the wedding march on the family’s piano. The guests then feasted on food prepared by Helen’s father.

Years later, Helen would write that she had planned a small wedding because the South Bronx had no proper hotel at the time and because other people were showing a patriotic restraint during World War I, which the United States had just joined. Perhaps, though, it was a fact that the bride’s family was not wealthy. On her long walks as far north as Tarrytown, N.Y., Helen had been known to have lunch on the lawn of one estate or another, but her father was a postal service supervisor and his wages, enough to sustain his family, were probably modest. In any event, the wedding was small.

Broad Street cut a long and meandering path through Newark in 1918, stretching from Mount Pleasant Cemetery, at the city’s northernmost end, to Mount Olivet Cemetery, at the city’s southern end, just yards from the Elizabeth city line.

In 1995, the street still shows hints of its former grandeur: fading signs on the sides of the magnificent old department stores, an occasional Greek revival portico, a few parks left from the days when people flocked to them for a taste of the rural life that most U.S. residents still lived at the time.

The neighborhood where Helen and Carl lived — the northernmost block of Broad Street, not far from the cemetery — is changed from their time there. The homes on that block are gone, replaced by a stark brick complex built by the federal government to house Newark’s poor. There are no gardens now, nor flower boxes. Instead, the windows are armored: covered with steel grates, shades pulled. On a sunny Friday afternoon in September, a few people sit outside, and they eye a visitor warily on what is now a dead end block.

All around the complex now — Mount Pleasant Avenue, Oriental Street, Broadway — are larger, slightly older buildings that are sealed shut with security gates and grates, or empty and gaping with the wounds of fire and vandalism.

Wednesday, March 5, 1930, the four 595-foot-high steel lattice towers of the George Washington Bridge dominated every view from the south- and west-facing windows of the 15-story Harkness Pavilion at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center.

Work on the bridge had begun in 1928, the year the Harkness Pavilion was completed and dedicated. Now, workers were just beginning to stretch steel wire across the 3,500 feet of Hudson River between Fort Lee, N.J., and 157th Street in New York City’s central borough, Manhattan.

In time, there would be four main cables attached to huge anchors in the rock at both shores of the river and slung between the towers; each cable was to be twisted in place, made up of nearly 2,500 individual steel wires. From those cables, each about three feet across, other cables would be hung straight down to hold up the steel frame onto which would be poured concrete and asphalt to make the road surface that would carry eight lanes of vehicles: up to 8,000 vehicles per hour. Until now, the lone tunnel and all the ferries that shuttled back and forth across the Hudson could barely manage one-quarter to one-third that volume.

The bridge would give new dimension to the relationship between New York, where Helen and Carl had both grown up, and New Jersey, where they lived now. In short time it would become another artery in the growing metropolitan transportation system, straddling the river that had previously served as an almost effective barrier between the shores. Tens of thousands of suburbanites could travel in their cars to work in Manhattan’s brick and granite office buildings.

It is tempting to believe that winter weather in New Jersey begins at Christmas and that, by January, one is immersed in the coldest season. But really, December is just as likely to be mild, especially among the rolling hills and lakes of north-central New Jersey. And in some years, even January does not hold the knife’s-edge cold of true winter.

1932 was such a year. Only occasional snow had fallen by mid-January and each snowfall had been minor: enough to pique the interest of Kenneth Viard, who was four and a half, and his baby sister Grace, who would turn two in about six weeks, but not enough for sledding or snowmen or forts or even very serious snowball fights.

And although Wednesday, Jan. 13 was cloudy, the chance of snow was slim, with the high temperature hovering in the mid-40s. Rain was predicted for the afternoon and night, as well as for Thursday. And Thursday was predicted to be even warmer, perhaps as warm as the low-50s.

In a colder year, the Viards might have walked through Grace Lord Park to enjoy the sights of the frozen falls, and the ice along the shores of the Rockaway River, which flowed southwest at the bottom of the wooded bank just behind their home. Small foot bridges led across the river into Grace Lord Park proper. The whole area around the Viards’ home – from the park south across the river, past Rockaway Avenue and several blocks farther south, closer to the neighboring borough of Mountain Lakes – was referred to as “The Park.” Anyone living on Rockaway or Essex avenues, on Reserve Street, Fairview Avenue, on the tiny spurs, North and South streets, which crossed between Rockaway and Reserve like rungs on a crooked ladder, or within a short walk of those streets, could legitimately claim residence in The Park.

By the time the Gotham Silk Hosiery Co. Inc. in Dover, N.J., told its 500 employees on March 17, 1932, that it was shutting down for at least three weeks due to a lack of business, such news was hardly news at all.

Thirty days into Lent, the Christian season of penitence and fasting, Gotham Hosiery became just one more of dozens of local companies – tens of thousands nationally – parched by the economic drought now known as The Great Depression.

By the end of the last day of February in this leap year, unemployment in the United States was estimated at around 20 percent. One in five — some 12 million to 15 million workers — had no regular job to go to each day. As their savings were used up, they stopped paying their bills. With fewer paying customer, stores closed, restaurants closed, businesses folded, banks went out of business.

The economy, generally, was shriveling.

Since 1929, nearly 11,000 U.S. banks had failed; their $2 billion in mostly uninsured deposits and investments had evaporated.

Since 1929, the industrial stocks – considered an indicator of the health of this solidly industrial nation – had been drying up; the stocks that survived at all might be worth just half their pre-Crash value.

(In progress.)