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Giants Stadium and the Racetrack both opened in the 1970s, and the Meadowlands Arena began construction in the 1970s. This was a decade of urban decay, when our governments divested from cities in favor of suburbs. Governments and developers tried to get things as far away from cities as possible.
Stadiums and other public venues can be anchors of communities. They can create jobs in initial construction and permanent staffing, generate investment in neighborhoods, and fortify communities with the bond of common support for a team.
But the Meadowlands Sports Complex does not support any community, because there is no community it can support. The Meadowlands are a marsh. East Rutherford, with a population of c. ten thousand, is marginally connected to the Complex by a highway. The Complex does not enhance East Rutherford’s community.
The American Dream Mall is the most egregious mistake. Trenton poured money into a massive brick-and-mortar mall and finished it just in time for e-commerce to wipe out most malls and for the pandemic to cripple its opening. I visited the Mall on an evening in January 2022 and it was lightly populated, not seeing crowds anywhere near the size it needs to sustain operations. Reviews for the mall are poor (https://shorturl.at/BFIS8). Last year, the American Dream missed an interest payment on municipal bonds (https://shorturl.at/qruzL). It is a failure.
The problem with the Sports Complex and American Dream is the same – they’re in remote locations, supporting no communities. Until recently, one needed to drive to the Complex to see an event. Now there is the NJ Transit line that runs from Secaucus Junction to the Complex on event days, but it does not run when there is no event taking place.
Imagine what could happen if the Giants or Jets played in Newark, or in Harrison like the Red Bulls. If properly placed and supported by mass transit (a stadium would be a great incentive to expand the Newark Light Rail), fans could walk to the stadium. The stadium would employ hundreds or thousands of Newarkers and North Jerseyans. Restaurants, bars and merchandise shops would sprout up around the stadium. Fans from out the city would take mass transit into Newark – as Devils fans do now – and spend money in the city before and after games. Newarkers and North Jerseyans could rally around a team that is woven into their community, not detached from it. If the football team shared the arena with the Red Bulls or another soccer team, the stadium could host sporting events year-round.
Stadiums should serve communities, not the other way around.
Football Stadiums have a poor record on creating jobs and improving the community.
The Meadowland had always been a disaster and just a pull on NJ taxpayer. NJ doesnt even receive the name recognition and they have destroyed protected lands for the stadiums and parking etc.
Football stadiums have 9 games a year and 18 in the rare case of the Meadowlands with the 2 teams. 95% of the year the area around the stadiums just sit idle and are areas of cold concrete. The jobs in the stadiums are mostly all minimum wage gig work.
If you talk about bringing an MLB baseball team into Newark, now you might be able to pitch something about creating jobs etc. Newark used to have a stadium for minor league baseball which shutdown ~10 years ago.
I agree with the sentiment to an extent, but you are wrong on one critical thing about Metlife Stadium and Giants Stadium before it. Our government did not divest away from cities in favor of suburbs here...the New York Giants did (and later the New York Jets). Read up on the history of Giants Stadium. The Giants used to be play at (the original) Yankee Stadium, and the Jets played at Shea Stadium. Point being, it was not Newark who was kicked to the curb in favor of building on a swamp with no community around it; it was New York City, and that decision was made by the football teams themselves. The Giants tried to make a deal with the NYC government, but they were unhappy with how that was progressing and decided to move to NJ instead. When this was happening in the 1970's, it was in the aftermath of the 1967 Newark Riots, and that city was heading in the wrong direction in every way possible. Do you think they would have thought it was a good idea to move there at the time when instead they had empty land to build on for much cheaper?
And it is not like the Giants and Jets are the only ones who did this. The Patriots play in Foxborough, the Cowboys play in Arlington, the Commanders play in Landover, MD, etc. Look at the South Philadelphia Sports Complex where all four of that city's teams play. Yes, it is within city limits, but it is not wholly embedded within a neighborhood either...it is also kind of isolated. Sports teams have fans all throughout the metropolitan area and not just in the core city itself. Who really got the short end of the stick with the Giants and Jets move to the Meadowlands? People on Long Island and, to a lesser extent, Westchester County, NY and Fairfield County, CT. Now that they have NJ Transit taking people to the Meadowlands, it is not as bad for people in NYC, but it is still a burden for the other suburban fans not in NJ.
Now, the American Dream is a different story altogether. Punch away at that all you want; you won't hear any objections from me there.
Football Stadiums have a poor record on creating jobs and improving the community.
The Meadowland had always been a disaster and just a pull on NJ taxpayer. NJ doesnt even receive the name recognition and they have destroyed protected lands for the stadiums and parking etc.
Football stadiums have 9 games a year and 18 in the rare case of the Meadowlands with the 2 teams. 95% of the year the area around the stadiums just sit idle and are areas of cold concrete. The jobs in the stadiums are mostly all minimum wage gig work.
If you talk about bringing an MLB baseball team into Newark, now you might be able to pitch something about creating jobs etc. Newark used to have a stadium for minor league baseball which shutdown ~10 years ago.
You're correct about the short NFL season limiting a stadium's usage. It seems best practice for football stadiums to host soccer teams, because the MLS season has little overlap with the NFL's. In a Newark football stadium's case, it could host the NY Red Bulls, who currently play in Harrison. The Red Bulls posted an average attendance of c. 17K fans in the 2022 season (https://shorturl.at/jwHL5). Replacing the Red Bull Arena with a stadium that can host football and soccer would solve the question of where to put a football stadium in the Newark area.
As you pointed out, MetLife hosts two football teams, meaning a future Newark NFL stadium could host eighteen regular season NFL games rather than nine.
And a stadium would host events, namely concerts, throughout the year.
The folding of the Newark Bears and the demolition of their stadium is a tragedy. Newark and the state should have fought hard to keep the team and stadium there. Instead, we got a patch of dirt.
I agree with the sentiment to an extent, but you are wrong on one critical thing about Metlife Stadium and Giants Stadium before it. Our government did not divest away from cities in favor of suburbs here...the New York Giants did (and later the New York Jets). Read up on the history of Giants Stadium. The Giants used to be play at (the original) Yankee Stadium, and the Jets played at Shea Stadium. Point being, it was not Newark who was kicked to the curb in favor of building on a swamp with no community around it; it was New York City, and that decision was made by the football teams themselves. The Giants tried to make a deal with the NYC government, but they were unhappy with how that was progressing and decided to move to NJ instead. When this was happening in the 1970's, it was in the aftermath of the 1967 Newark Riots, and that city was heading in the wrong direction in every way possible. Do you think they would have thought it was a good idea to move there at the time when instead they had empty land to build on for much cheaper?
And it is not like the Giants and Jets are the only ones who did this. The Patriots play in Foxborough, the Cowboys play in Arlington, the Commanders play in Landover, MD, etc. Look at the South Philadelphia Sports Complex where all four of that city's teams play. Yes, it is within city limits, but it is not wholly embedded within a neighborhood either...it is also kind of isolated. Sports teams have fans all throughout the metropolitan area and not just in the core city itself. Who really got the short end of the stick with the Giants and Jets move to the Meadowlands? People on Long Island and, to a lesser extent, Westchester County, NY and Fairfield County, CT. Now that they have NJ Transit taking people to the Meadowlands, it is not as bad for people in NYC, but it is still a burden for the other suburban fans not in NJ.
Now, the American Dream is a different story altogether. Punch away at that all you want; you won't hear any objections from me there.
You're correct in that it was the teams that decided to move away from NYC and avoid any other city in the region. But part of their rationale for doing so was because governments had divested from cities, making them worse places to live. Governments subsidized developers to construct suburbs, then built freeways leading to the suburbs, bleeding cities of jobs, population and cash. New York City almost declared bankruptcy in the 1970s. Crime was rampant, and the NYC Subway hit the nadir of its usefulness.
At the time, moving to the suburbs, or an empty marsh, may have made sense to the teams, if they thought NYC and other cities in the region were all going to continue their downwards trajectory.
One would think that decades later, we could recognize the harm that divesting from our cities did to our social fabric. We need cities. But Trenton's decision to build American Dream, and the decision of the state-created NJ Hall of Fame to place their permanent home in American Dream, tells me our state leadership is still living in the 1970s.
You're correct about the short NFL season limiting a stadium's usage. It seems best practice for football stadiums to host soccer teams, because the MLS season has little overlap with the NFL's. In a Newark football stadium's case, it could host the NY Red Bulls, who currently play in Harrison. The Red Bulls posted an average attendance of c. 17K fans in the 2022 season (https://shorturl.at/jwHL5). Replacing the Red Bull Arena with a stadium that can host football and soccer would solve the question of where to put a football stadium in the Newark area.
As you pointed out, MetLife hosts two football teams, meaning a future Newark NFL stadium could host eighteen regular season NFL games rather than nine.
And a stadium would host events, namely concerts, throughout the year.
The folding of the Newark Bears and the demolition of their stadium is a tragedy. Newark and the state should have fought hard to keep the team and stadium there. Instead, we got a patch of dirt.
Soccer teams don’t want to play in football stadiums. Red Bull Arena is a state of the art soccer-specific stadium.
For whatever reason, NJ has been devoid of leaders with vision. They leave a trail of boondoggles and ops for some players to get rich quick and get out.
Pontificate all you want about what could be, leave it to NJ 'leadership' to twist it in failure, as the sound of taxpayer cash circles the drain.
Leave the meadowlands to the muskrats, waterfowl and mink. They are the most efficient care takers of that flood control wetland.
Make Nj livable, not the cash cow of shysters selling false dreams.
Revitalize the cities first..... ie Newark, the taxpayer cash sucking center of the vortex circling the drain...ooops that has been declared a success...not even with Zuckerberg money distributed over Newark's 26 sq miles!
Large capital projects won't help Newark, or create some type gentrification movement. There's a cultural issue in the city which the government handouts are responsible for creating, but also lack of family, missing fathers, missing religion/faith and lack of pride/ownership in the community. The politicians and businessmen have been taking advantage of this system for many decades now. The only way Newark will ever improve is a grassroots revival back to family and God.
NJ should never build another stadium for any billionaire sports team owners. The NFL Washington Commanders are selling for over $6 billion. What does that say about the value of the Giants and the Jets? NJ had to rollover the leftover debt from the first unprofitable Giants Stadium into the current stadium. If the Jets and the Giants want a new stadium at some point in the future, let then build it.
This nonsense is happening right now in Buffalo. The Buffalo Bills, whose owners (Terry and Kim Pegula) are worth $6.7 BILLION, have wrangled $850 million in public money – $600 million from NYS and $250 million from Erie County(Buffalo) for a stadium that costs $1.54billion. The Bills and the NFL are paying the balance. This is one of the worst stadium deals in history.
100% agree about driving investment to our cities and that the investment in the Meadowlands has mostly been a waste. I wouldn't entirely give up on the Meadowlands though - I just wouldn't funnel anymore taxpayer dollars to it or even give away more tax breaks.
This part I disagree with though.
Quote:
Originally Posted by PortsAndRail
Giants Stadium and the Racetrack both opened in the 1970s, and the Meadowlands Arena began construction in the 1970s. This was a decade of urban decay, when our governments divested from cities in favor of suburbs. Governments and developers tried to get things as far away from cities as possible.
Newark is 26 square miles and it's been the same size since the 1920s. It was also completely built out back then. There was nowhere to build anything new in the 60s and 70s without tearing something else down. Which is expensive. The only places that could really be redeveloped back then were old industrial sites but no one wanted to touch them because of the liability. It wasn't until the Superfund legislation in the 80s offered some protection to redevelopers that you saw some movement on cleaning those properties up. So it wasn't really until the 90s that you saw real redevelopment start on the JC waterfront. But Superfund was a massive investment in urban areas. It still is. There's a lot more state and federal funding that goes to cities and it's been that way basically since the 60s.
It's also not true that there was some conspiracy to get things far away from cities. The problem was that the infrastructure was old and it wasn't always possible to squeeze new stuff into old cities. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. The reason that Port Elizabeth/Newark is what it is today is partly because the water is deeper and so it can handle bigger ships but mostly because it had lots of room to grow and direct rail access to the rest of the continent. The Brooklyn waterfront couldn't compete with that.
Manufacturing and warehousing went through big changes with the invention of the hydraulic forklift in the 1930s. Containerization (shipping containers) were standardized in the 1960s. All of this changed where manufacturing and warehouses could be and how they could be organized. Modern warehouses were on one level with dozens of loading docks, often with direct rail spurs and/or direct highway access. No one had to be on expensive land in the city anymore so they moved to where it was cheaper.
NJ has always been suburban with a lot of our suburbs going back to the 1880s and 1890s the difference was that in the 60s jobs started to move there too. Once that happened the retail followed.
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