In my role of sometime NJ historian, I received this Roseville question. Other than being aware that Conger was an old Newark name and that back in the late 1940s a man named Foster, mayhap the gentleman mentioned or a relative, owned the small apartment house located on the corner of 9th Street and 6th Avenue, I was unable to help him. I did tell him I would post here in hopes someone would know more on the topic than I did. At any rate, his research sheds a little more light on the old neighborhood.
Joe Bilby
Dear Mr. Bilby,
A few years ago I noticed the coat of arms on the
south façade of the former F&M / Whelan / Rexall
drugstore at 503 Orange St in Newark (NE corner of
Orange St and Roseville Ave). Do you know anything of
its history?
Here is what I’ve been able to find out about the
building itself:
A brick structure existed at 503 Orange St before
1889, as shown by the Scarlett & Scarlett atlas
published in that year. The owner of the property in
1889 was Theodore Conger, butcher, and a Theodore
Conger is found at that address in the Newark city
directory of 1876-77.
Druggists operated at 503 Orange, apparently without
interruption, from 1890 through at least 1965. The
1918 city directory gives the name of the druggist as
John B. Foster, and lists a “Foster Laboratory” at 95
Roseville Avenue (probably the same building).
According to newspaper clippings at the Newark Public
Library, John B. Foster was elected chairman of the
Community Chest in 1925, retired as a head pharmacist
in 1926 (remaining president of Foster Laboratories)
and that year became a vice-president of Fidelity
Union Title & Mortgage Guaranty Company. In 1925 a
clipping records that Foster leased the building to
the Whelan-Cassidy company, having purchased it
fifteen years previously, and that he had operated a
drugstore at the northwest corner of Roseville and
Seventh Avenues for about ten years before that.
The coat of arms, inscribed ANIMO ET FIDES, shows
every sign of being associated with a pharmaceutical
concern: its four quadrants, beginning in the upper
left, depict a caduceus, an open book, a cross, and a
retort, and, in the field above, a mortar and pestle.
I would like to learn whatever I can about the
emblem’s origins and the approximate date when it was
placed. Please forward this to anyone you think might
be able to shed some light. Since Moy Bing’s Chinese
restaurant once operated on the second floor of the
building, there may be some interesting anecdotes as
well!
With thanks,
Greg Guderian
New Jersey Latin Inscriptions Project
Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum
quae in Civitate Nova Caesarea exstant
cil_nj@yahoo.com
(973) 650-1190
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