Newark: The City Beer Built

Today, like so many of the industries that built Newark, there are few signs of it. You have to look hard to find it, but it’s there. It’s the liquid that helped to transform Newark from a small town to a bustling city. It’s the fluid that employed tens of thousands of men, helped build families, and brought billions of dollars worth of taxes into the city’s coffers to build courthouses, libraries and schools. It’s the fluid that made Newark famous, and infamous, well into the 1960’s. In fact, the story of the Brick City is so intertwined with it that we forget it also helped forge the Revolutionary War right here in town. Friends, students and fellow history buffs, there is no doubt. Newark was built on…beer.

My talented and curious Arts High Students are also amazed when they hear this story, but it’s one that needs to be told. It’s beyond interesting, and derives directly from the “You Can’t Make This Stuff Up” department of history. Newark’s history is America’s history, and in American history, you cannot underestimate the central position that beer holds in the national epic.

Newark’s important relationship with beer began early, really early. While the city was settled by mostly temperate Puritans in the late 1600’s, within the first few decades thousands of non-Puritan “strangers” migrated to Newark and its bustling port. By the early 1700’s the city had become religiously diverse. But regardless of religion or lack there of, everyone man, woman and child in Newark before the Civil War knew that even on the hottest of days, one of the dumbest things a person could do was chug a large glass of water. Filled with deadly microbes, tiny insects and other invisible enemies, still water lead to disease and death. In the 1700’s and 1800’s, if you were thirsty anywhere in Newark, and you had a brain in your head, you drank beer.

Beer in Newark before the Civil War was different than the urine-colored beverage beloved by so many sports fans today. It was, literally, boiled (during the brewing process) liquid bread. Thick, tasty and filled with nutrients, Newark’s residents gulped gallons of it on a weekly basis. Yes, it had alcohol in it, but less so than today. Not enough to make you drunk right away, but enough to kill nearly every nasty microbe whether it was served up cold, warm or hot (some even drank it like a soup).  

Everyone drank beer, and it powered the city’s population like a supply of electricity. Ever been downtown and marveled at some of Newark’s colonial-era churches built of carefully laid stone and carved wood? Beer helped to do that. Ever catch a glimpse of those cobblestones below the city’s now paved streets? What possible cheap supply of food could have possibly provided the calories for workers to do that? Beer did. But it did much more in Newark, and that was in the realm of Revolutionary politics.

In the years shortly before the Revolution, there were two places where adults could socialize and talk politics. One was at church, but that tended to be a controlled atmosphere where heated, boisterous debate wasn’t readily welcomed. The other was the tavern. The tavern, in fact, was where groups like the Sons of Liberty and the Committees of Correspondence met, openly denounced King George III, and conspired, conspired, conspired. I always remind my students that they should not confuse the concept of the colonial tavern with a modern bar. Intoxication did occur at the tavern, but the first and foremost purpose for it was socialization, especially at night. It was the only place in colonial America where a man could openly address another, regardless of social, military or academic rank. Newark in the 1700’s had plenty of them. They were way stations on the information superhighway of the era. They were open to (nearly) all, usually offered cheap rooms (upstairs) to travelers and a place for the dispersion of newspapers. And, of course, they sold pitchers of cheap, safe, nutritious beer.

Beer would do much more than just power Newark’s industrious citizens in the 1800’s. After the Civil War, the industry established major breweries in the city. Today, the stately Ballantine Mansion at the Newark Museum may be a work of Victorian order and architectural excellence, but the family fortune was rooted in local beer. The city was home to no less than five major breweries that employed thousands. During World War II, while city factories pumped out ammunition and other supplies to fight the fascist menace overseas, the city endured its greatest beer-based crisis. In 1944 beer workers, seeking the higher wages that local factory workers had been enjoying, walked off the job. Coverage in the New York Times was extensive…city residents worried over the lack of supply as prices rose. The situation was so serious that the Federal Government eventually had to step in, on the basis of the strike being a war-related emergency, to halt the crisis.

After the war, the breweries operated by the industry began to falter. Corporate consolidation, foreign competition, local economic conditions and other factors took their toll. By the 1980’s the industry that was once a city hallmark was gone. In 2005 the city’s beer heritage was dealt a final blow when the abandoned and deteriorated 60-foot Pabst Blue Label Beer icon was pulled down near the Newark-Irvington border. The metallic model was once a proud icon of a brewery campus that employed thousands of brewers, bottlers, printers, workers and drivers. No more.

I do tell my kids that they should not drink beer until they’re 21, “and even then,” I remind them, “the beer of today is a pale comparison to the beverage that fueled the city long ago.” But they should, starting now, appreciate it. Before Newark was the Brick City, it was the Beer City.