Eric on The Road

Journeys into the offbeat, off the beaten path, overlooked and forgotten - by Eric Model

Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Icon Giant Beer Bottle Comes Down

To many it was a roadside icon of Americana. To others it was an anchor - a comforting reminder of people and events of times passed. In any event it too is now gone.

The famous bottle of Newark New Jersey - described by some as perhaps the World's Largest Bottle -- 60 feet tall, with a capacity of 55,000 gallons -- has been pried loose from its 100+-foot-tall tower in Newark, New Jersey.

The bottle, in fact, was actually a water tank originally built in 1930 to promote Hoffman Pale Dry Ginger Ale.

The bottle achieved fame when the Hoffman plant was taken over by Pabst, which turned the tank into a glossy blue Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer bottle. Six men could stand on its glittering gold stopper, and the bottle was even featured in episodes of The Sopranos. But the plant closed in 1986, and in recent years the bottle, untended, has rusted to a uniform red. Now the old facility is being demolished, and the bottle is in the crosshairs.

Some residents, linking the bottle to the neighborhood's decline, said they don't want it anyway.

But to others the bottle's passing is a loss.

A recent Newark Star-Ledger editorial about the bottle elicited these remembrances:


When a big bottle meant bedtime: "When I was a toddler in the 1930s, I lived near what at the time was the Hoffman soda bottle. My parents had me look out the window every night, and when the bottle was lit up, it was time for me to go to bed -- and I obediently did for a number of years! Whenever I pass by the area now and see that bottle, those memories come to mind. I'll miss it, but hope it will be restored and re-erected." - June Gottas Bruen, Manchester, NJ

A father's story: "....Long before DVD players and handheld video games, there was a crazy landscape for kids to figure out -- a beer bottle towering above a cemetery, the cemetery cut in half by the Parkway, and signs for a place called "The Oranges".
My father said the beer bottle belonged to King Kong, who left it there on his way to fight Mighty Joe Young. The old man must have said it a thousand times, each time as if it were the first. The stories got more elaborate, and before I could appreciate them from a father's point of view, he was gone....The giant beer bottle came to symbolize him and his generation of aging laborers -- city men indifferent to trends, men who hated air conditioning and seat belts and drank whatever was on sale, men who drove big, clunky cars and never once uttered the term "business casual".....The factory hasn't been practical in some time and should be dismantled. But I will miss the bottle as a focal point, a symbol of backseat imagination, childhood summers and my father. - Brian Campbell, Cranford

For now the former bottle is five enormous pieces of steel and copper plate three-eighths of an inch thick, and its fate is far from settled.

Ted Fiore, whose company has been demolishing the 10-acre site of the former Pabst brewery for two years, told the New York Times that he planned to restore the bottle at his warehouse in Newark and then give it a new home.

So far according to the Times, 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.

"It's kind of a sad day," said in the Times article Matthew Gosser, an adjunct professor of architecture at New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark, one of the many lilliputians who filmed and photographed the dismantling of the hulk during a grim, rain-splattered day.

Mr. Gosser told the Times that he had grown so attached to the bottle that he had climbed halfway up the side last year before the police intervened. He had wandered among several of the abandoned buildings on the complex and salvaged remains for an art show, he said.

A few weeks ago, when word got out that the bottle would finally be removed, he downed some sangria, headed for the vacant brewery on a chilly Friday night and camped on the roof.

"I thought I would spend one last quiet moment with the bottle," Mr. Gosser said in the Times article. "One night."


http://www.roadsideamerica.com/tips/getAttraction.php3?tip_AttractionNo==904

http://www.nj.com/search/index.ssf?/base/news-0/1150779392189360.xml?starledger?for&coll=1

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/27/nyregion/27pabst.html

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