I remember it as a Hoffman bottle in the 1950s. By 1965, when I worked there the summer after I got out of Seton Hall while waiting to go in the army, it was Pabst. The thing I recall most, and I've probably posted this before, was the "beer breaks" and liquid lunches of the employees. I am to this day amazed that anyone walked out of there sober, or was able to drive home.
I will be sorry to see the bottle go, as I won't be able to tell that story for the thousandth time as I drive past there with some hapless "Newark story" victim in the car. :-)
As a kid, I remember visiting a friend's top floor apartment at 533 West Market St. Looking out the window, you could see across the city the big green "Hoffman" soda bottle. Then later it became a "Pabst" bottle. Wasn't there another beer trademark somewhere in the city? Maybe it was Knickerbocker or Krueger?
I have a responce for the above two posts. When I was a young detective in the Newark Police Department I was assigned to the West Detective Squad. The brewry was part of the area I had. My partner took me for a lunch break one day. It was great. Guys were coming and going. They would have a few pints and then go back to work. Sometimes the breaks were long, other times they were short. I think it had to do with the phase they were in at their job. From that day on I made this one of my business visits. As for Kurger Beer. Their brewry was located on Belmont Avenue(now called I. Turner Blvd.)near the West Police District Station House. About two stories up was a statue of a King with a pint of beer in his hand. That was there many years.I think around 1995 or 96 or a little eariler the city was going to imploied(?) the old brewry building. Well the explosives were set and fired. Guess what! The building didn't come down. They tried two more times. No go. They had to use the wrecking ball.Things were made to stay when Newark was built.
My grandparents are buried across the street from the Bottle. I can remember going there a few times every year to visit their grave. There would always be a man outside the cemetery selling pretzels. The big soft ones. My Dad would always buy one for me. He knew that I had a weakness for those pretzels. Hope they do make good on the promise to move the bottle and restore it to its former ''beauty."
There must be pictures of that bottle around, in both its Hoffmann and Pabst versions. As for Dan Daly, let me guess who your partner was back then with those beer breaks. I don't want to give up his name, but his initials are Louie LeFrancis.
You could smell the brewery for miles around.
the trucks that hauled the sludge headed south on grove street to take to hog farms in pa , or so I was told....What I miss the most beer wise from those days, were the paper quart containers for 50 cents that we slurped down as we hung on the avenue....
Ah yes, cardboard container draft beer. I remember it well. You had to drink it before it went flat or leaked all over you. :-)
Containers went great with Jimmy Buff sausage and hot dog doubles after a touch football game. We used to get Buffs at the WO location and containers from an Irish gin mill around the corner in the fall of 1965. The perfect end to a year and an era.
I think it was Jerry O'Connor SENIOR, who retired as a lieutenant around the time I was starting, in the early 1970's. That year in print looks almost antique, doesn't it?
Thanks for the link, Rich. This is a very bad thing. It won't be the same riding past So. Orange Avenue on the Parkway without that bottle. What a fickle and faithless generation this is.
Strong before our birth are the Sons of the Garden State.
I feel like the kid in the movie, "Empire of the Sun"...
By a strange twist of fate I had to drive the Parkway TWICE today and I had a chance to see the Hoffman bottle come down... first halfway down at about 2PM and then almost totally gone at about 5. Please, no jokes about "half empty or half full"
That bottle was like a compass, especially when it was foggy or you didn't know which way was north or south, all you had to do was look up. At least the Budweiser bird is still flying around!!!
Drove past S.O. Avenue on the Parkway this evening, and it was very disconcerting not to see the ol' bottle. Very sad. I still say there's some way they could have kept it up (as Mae West said to the bishop).
"Ted Fiore, whose company has been demolishing the 10-acre site of the former Pabst brewery for two years, said he planned to restore the bottle at his warehouse in Newark and then give it a new home.
So far, Mr. Fiore said, "several alcoholic-beverage companies" have expressed interest. It might end up in Newark, he said, or perhaps along the Jersey Shore in Dover Township, where a nightclub could take it." excerpt from the NYTimes
