No Minor Accomplishment: The Revival of New Jersey Professional Baseball

Chapter 7: Newark and the Bears: Combining the Past and the Present

T he present was not living up to the past. After an absence of fifty years, the Bears returned to the city of Newark in 1999 amid great fanfare and expectations. It did not matter that it was no longer the 1940s, that venerable, old Ruppert Stadium was torn down in 1967, or that the Bears were an independent professional team instead of the Triple-A affiliate of the New York Yankees. None of this mattered to Bears owner Rick Cerone or to Newark and Essex County officials. The history of baseball in Newark made it appear only logical to them that “if we build it, they will come”—meaning fans, by the thousands. Tales of the old Newark Bears, the Yankees farm club from 1932 through 1950, 105 7 Newark and the Bears Combining the Past and the Present Bears and Eagles Riverfront Stadium, Newark. Photograph by Bob Golon, 2005. became bigger than life over the years, as did the expectations for the successful return of their new namesake. In 2003, it became obvious that there must have been some kind of miscalculation. The politicians came through, even though they had a tough time finding a suitable site for the new ballpark. Besides having its own population of 275,000 (according to the 2000 census), Newark was surrounded by the heavily populated towns of Kearny, Elizabeth, Irvington, and East Orange. The demographics looked good. Or did they? In reality, what Cerone and Newark officials experienced was more in a series of predictable growing pains of a city and an area struggling to establish a new identity. These growing pains are evident everywhere in Newark as the past gives way to the present , and not just at the new Bears and Eagles Riverfront Stadium. Establishing a new identity often takes time. One simply has to travel through the area to see how Newark is seeking to reinvent itself by combining tangible investment and intangible hope in forging this new identity. Traveling north on Broad Street after exiting Interstate 78 brings me feelings of nostalgia for Old Newark. These feelings are embodied in the buildings and landmarks that I pass. I move north from Lincoln Park, so named because Abraham Lincoln once made a speech at the South Park Presbyterian Church there. Newark Symphony Hall is on the right, a neoclassical auditorium that was originally built to be a Shriner’s temple in the 1920s. Benny Goodman, Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, and Mick Jagger all performed there when it was known as the Mosque Theater.1 Farther down on the right is Newark City Hall, the magnificent stone structure that opened in 1908, currently encased in scaffolding as it undergoes a major renovation. The City Hall facelift is not the only big construction site in the area, as one block to the north, just beyond Lafayette Street, the imposing steel skeleton of a 700,000-square-foot indoor arena rises above the neighboring buildings. The 17,000-seat arena will become home to the New Jersey Devils National Hockey League team in late 2007 and will host other sporting and entertainment events. Beyond the arena site is the famous Four Corners Historic District, at the intersection of Broad and Market Streets. The Four Corners was the original business and retail crossroads of Newark. Prior to the 1967 race riots, an event that devastated the economy of the city, big department stores named Bamberger’s, Hahnes, Orbach’s, and S. Klein’s dominated Broad Street from Market Street to Central Avenue. Shopping in downtown Newark was a “happening.” The riots changed all of that, as both residents and visiting shoppers fled the center of Newark, leaving it to de106 No Minor Accomplishment cades of decay that the city is still recovering from. The big retailers left, too. You can still see the “S. Klein on the Square” sign hanging from its old former storefront at Broad Street across from Military Park. Across from Klein’s is a public plaza where the massive Public Service Electric and Gas Company bus and streetcar terminal once stood. After the terminal was demolished in 1981, a modern headquarters for the utility was built on the land behind it as part of the Gateway Center business district . This complex of office buildings was the first post-riot initiative designed to start the revitalization of Newark’s economy. Farther north...