Yesterday the 60 foot tall, 25 ton bottle of Pabst beer - a defining part the Newark cityscape - was dismantled to make way for a shopping complex. The landmark stood 185 feet high over the city for 75 years. From the New York Times:
For many who gathered here on Monday, the day marked the passing of yet one more piece of New Jersey lore, an urban monument for drivers on the Garden State Parkway. It had been the subject of a popular song and even had a role in a recent episode of "The Sopranos."Seen through mist and rain, the reddish 60-foot-tall water tank and Pabst bottle was cut into five sections Monday and trucked away to a warehouse.
Work on demolishing the buildings and clearing the 10-acre Pabst site started in 2004 and is expected to be finished by year's end.
It was the toast of a town whose bustling industrial past was awash in breweries, from Ballantine and Krueger to Hensler and Feigenspan.But on Monday, after a lengthy struggle, the rusted bottle — which was actually a 55,000-gallon water tank — came down piece by piece over seven hours. For now it 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, 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.
The tank was built for Hoffman Pale Dry Ginger Ale in the early 1930's, and when Pabst bought the plant in 1945, it changed the label and painted the bottle blue. Later it turned reddish, either from paint or rust.When the plans to demolish the plant and bottle were announced in 2004, local preservation groups tried to have the bottle designated a landmark, but removing the bottle from its original site would have made it ineligible for landmark status, according to state law, and so they dropped their effort.
"It's kind of a sad day," said 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.
Photo courtesy of the New York Times.
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BUMMER!