To the nation, he was a superhero with a shovel.

It was 2010 and U.S. Sen. Cory Booker, then Newark’s Mayor, was collecting national headlines for using Twitter to find his constituents and personally dig them out after a brutal snowstorm.

But at home, Booker’s celebrated valiancy was buried amid mounting complaints of snow-covered streets days after the storm.

“The boss should have been in the command center making sure all the routes were open, not out making headlines,” longtime Newark resident Bill Chappel, 78, said, still remembering that winter blizzard. “He was a good cheerleader for Newark but as far as the day-to-day management, that’s a different story.”

Murders and robberies were climbing back up and police officers and sanitation workers had been laid off to plug a massive deficit.

“It’s called the curse of the celebrity mayor,” said Dan O’Flaherty, a Columbia University economist who did a short stint as Booker’s finance director. “He was playing to a national audience not to a local audience … people in San Francisco read about shoveling snow, they don’t read about the budget.”

The realities of running New Jersey’s largest city often collided with Booker’s growing national appeal during his seven-year reign as Newark mayor. Even when Booker lost at home, he continued to endear the national press. And that gamble may have paid off.

Booker last week announced he was running for president. "I try to stay true to the purpose that brought me into politics in the first place,” he told reporters outside his Central Ward home. "To focus on the folks who first took a chance on me and put me into the game.”

Booker built his political resume here – one he’s hoping will help catapult him to the nation’s highest office. Newark was where the Yale-educated Rhodes Scholar polished his persona from a celebrity inner-city mayor known widely for his heroics but often resented at home, to the charismatic senator perpetually swarmed for selfies who cites Newark as a model for urban renaissance.

To his supporters, he helped put Newark on the map and inspired a new generation of politicians to help shake out the old guard and a patronage culture (he was the first mayor in 45 years who didn’t leave under the shadow of an indictment). To his fiercest critics, Booker failed to manage basic city services and wrestle endemic problems, too busy revving up his national status.

Six years after Booker’s time as mayor, the city remains saddled with generational poverty, crime and high absentee rates in schools that long preceded his tenure and endured after his departure. But Booker points to his mark on the changing skyline, new grocery stores in food deserts and an improved public school system with rising graduation rates that are all slowly changing Newark’s perception and reality.

"When I left Newark, for the first time in 60 years our population was growing again,” Booker said last week. "People were moving here because of our schools, moving here because of our arts and entertainment, moving here because they weren’t interested in tearing down this city. They wanted to be a part of this city’s rising.”

So, what exactly is his legacy in the city that started it all?

Development: Growth, with a side of gentrification

Newark now is, in some ways, a different city than the one Booker left in 2013, when he traded in his post as mayor for senator.

The city’s downtown glistens with new construction. Newark was shortlisted as a finalist for one of Amazon’s headquarters. Shaquille O’Neal opened Newark’s first residential tower in 50 years and is building another. Developers say many of the projects coming to fruition now were seeded under Booker.

“It’s unbelievable the one-two punch we had here in Newark,” said Ron Beit, CEO of RBH Group and developer of Teacher’s Village. “We had the great policy created by Cory, the opening up of the markets here and (current Mayor) Ras Baraka has really been able to execute on that and get it done.”

Booker lured Audible’s and Panasonic’s corporate headquarters, helped bring Whole Foods and two hotels, and secured the city’s first ground-up residential development focused on housing teachers, Teacher’s Village.

A former Booker administration official said Booker helped bring a level of professionalism and pragmatism to the process, no longer playing favorites with developers and assets. Part of that was establishing public incentive programs -- and partnering with the state -- to encourage private development.

Standing blocks from the now-demolished housing project, Brick Towers, where he chose to live for eight years, Booker last week said Newark is “perhaps the greatest comeback story for any American city right now.”

Residents, though, worry development is too concentrated in the downtown and will eventually spike their rents and push them out. Median rents have already risen 20 percent since 2000 in a city where 78 percent are renters, according to Rutgers University study that adjusted for inflation.

Louis Shockley, a Newark resident and longtime critic of Booker, said the companies coming to Newark didn’t always hire or retain local workers and raise the question of who is benefitting from the development.

“They are preparing Newark to get rid of us. He put us on the map for gentrification," Shockley said.

Fears of displacement are ballooning in the city and residents say they’re still not seeing much change in the outer wards Booker promised to revitalize.

“As a candidate, particularly in 2002, one of his criticism of then Mayor Sharpe James was there’s a lot of focus on downtown and there wasn’t a focus on neighborhood development,” said Andra Gillespie, author of “The New Black Politician: Cory Booker, Newark and Post-Racial America.”

“I think his legacy is the development of downtown. That’s not what he set out to do but that’s what retained his legacy … when I come back and look at the neighborhoods, they look very much the same to me.”

But Booker also doubled the amount of affordable housing, his administration has said. And renovated public parks and playgrounds.

"It’s probably one of the first places you could see the evidence of Booker’s private-public partnerships,” Gillespie said. “I don’t know how much people appreciate that 10 years later.”

Corruption: Under his nose

One of the bigger blemishes of Booker’s tenure in Newark came after he left as mayor in 2013.

A scathing February 2014 state comptroller report found rampant abuse of public funds at the Newark Watershed Conservation and Development Corporation (NWCDC), the agency tasked with treating and delivering water to North Jersey. The report said the agency operated free of meaningful oversight despite $10 million in annual service contracts from the city to manage water assets.

Indictments soon followed and the widening scandal swept up consultants, contractors and the head of the agency, Linda Watkins-Brashear, a Booker ally. Watkins-Brashear, who ran the water utility from 2007 to 2013, admitted to soliciting bribes in exchange for no-work or over-inflated contracts.

At least nine individuals have been indicted or sentenced in the $1 million corruption scheme that eventually toppled the agency.

Booker, who served as an ex-officio chairman of the Watershed’s Board of Trustees but never attended a meeting, was not charged in the scandal and his name was dropped from a lawsuit alleging he failed to oversee the agency.

“This is a guy who came in and preached transparency and accountability. On both of these fronts in the watershed issue, he failed and he failed dismally,” said Guy Sterling, a member of the Newark Water Watch group that helped expose corruption at the agency, and a former Star-Ledger reporter. “If not the most glaring black mark on his records, it’s certainly one of them.”

The watershed corporation declared bankruptcy in 2013 and the city’s department of water and sewer assumed its duties.

Now, the city is dealing with a different type of crisis. Since 2017, there have been lead levels in the drinking water due to old lead pipes and a problems at one of the city’s water treatment plants.

Schools: Remember the Facebook money?

When a young Booker ran for Central Ward Councilman in 1998 as a political newcomer, he ousted four-term councilman George Branch.

“As a councilman, you could see he was onto something bigger,” said Charles Love, 42, a Newark resident and education consultant, who worked on Booker’s early local campaigns. “He was at every community event, he was at every cookout, he won us over.”

Love admits there are plenty of issues he’s clashed with Booker on, but credits him with reimagining Newark as a “global city” and inspiring young leaders to challenge the political establishment.

“There was an internal fight between the indigenous Newark community and the outside community,” Love said. “He was an ambitious leader and he had a lot of foresight of what Newark could potentially become.”

Booker was an early evangelist of the education reform movement, pushing privately-managed charter schools, advocating for the closure of low-performing public schools and tying teacher pay to performance. He worked with then Gov. Chris Christie to gain more power over the schools when he was mayor and secured a matching $100 million contribution from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg -- although the benefit of that money is hotly debated.

A Harvard study found the reforms spurred by the donation caused the rate of student achievement to decline in the first few years of the reforms in math and English, before improving by 2014.

Still, the way the changes were implemented were turbulent for the community who felt left out of the decisions.

Baraka, a former high school principal, was one of Booker’s fiercest critics on school reform, and ran his 2014 mayoral campaign largely as the anti-Booker candidate. He’s now a vocal backer and is presiding over the city as the schools show marked improvements.

After 22 years of state reign, the city’s school system returned to local control in 2018. The graduation rate is 78 percent, a 27 percentage point rise from 2011. More than a third of students are enrolled in charter schools, some of which rank top in the state.

Crime and money: Ups and downs

Once known as the country’s carjacking capital, crime in Newark has hit a 50-year low.

But the numbers don’t mean much to victims of ongoing violent crime. Many still don’t feel safe and say the city continues reeling from Booker’s deep cuts to the police force. In 2010, he cut more than 800 employees, including 163 police officers, citing a fiscal crisis and the recession.

“When (Booker) was mayor, crime and schools were not good,” said Novi Carter-Branch, 75, whose grandson was shot and killed last Christmas Eve. “There’s not enough policemen.”

Early on in Booker’s first term as mayor, however, crime plunged dramatically. Uniform crime reporting statistics show 69 homicides in 2008 compared to 107 in 2006 and drops in overall crime.

But the results were mixed. In subsequent years, homicides trickled back up, reaching a high of 112 in 2013 – the highest since the 1990s. Booker’s administration, though, said shootings declined since he took office.

Taxes rose at least 20 percent under Booker as he faced ongoing budget woes and union battles over furloughs and layoffs. Booker left the city in 2013 with a balanced budget for the first time in a decade but was forced to take emergency aid from the state in 2011 and 2012 and allow a state monitor to oversee city finances.

As the public fights brewed, Booker’s fundraising prowess continued to clinch commitments from philanthropic donors for city projects. The contrast illustrates one of Booker’s lasting legacies: he was often more popular outside of Newark than in it.

His national platform, however, is starting to change that.

Carter-Branch said while she might not have liked Booker as a mayor, she thinks he’d be a good president.

“He stands up for us. He’s a fighter for us, not just for Newark but for all Afro-Americans.”

A former Booker administrator said Booker implemented structural changes to Newark that were often hard to measure.

“Solving all problems for all people is not a practical metric for urban and community development,” the administrator said. “Some of that is longstanding and if people think that any one mayor is going to solve that is not realistic.”

Karen Yi may be reached at kyi@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter at @karen_yi or on Facebook. Get the latest updates right in your inbox. Subscribe to NJ.com’s newsletters.