By Jorge Santos

There are many iconic buildings in Newark. The Paramount Theater, National Newark Building, Prudential’s 1960 tower, the Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart and many more. Some are as grand as when they were built and others have fallen into disrepair. Perhaps no building mirrors the history of our city and points to its future more than the Krueger-Scott Mansion. 

There is never just one history of a place. Newark is home to hundreds of thousands of people. It is a complex, living and breathing thing where everyone’s lives intertwine not just with each other but with our neighbors outside the city. We can tell dozens of stories that tie different threads of the past to the present and try to predict the future. We can look at the history of the change in our politics, economics, or race, but of course all those things are connected. They affect each other and never sit still. 

Newark’s history is like that of many post-industrial cities. Rapid population growth first fueled by immigrants and then by the Great Migration which led to a major economic boom and significant influence in the state and region. Then rapid decline and stagnation. Broken promises and false starts. But today there is significant hope. Not just that the city is rising and restoring itself but doing so in a way that protects and honors the different aspects of its past and present while looking towards a new future. 

Newark’s growth in the 19^th Century was rapid. It grew ten times larger in the century between 1850 and 1950 adding 400,000 residents. One of those residents was Gottfried Krueger who came to the United States to learn the beer trade at the request of his uncle. Krueger’s entire life story is fascinating and deserving of your time and attention but here we want to note that he came to Newark a poor immigrant (albeit one with a job waiting for him) and became one of the country’s most successful beer barons. In 1888 at the age of 49, he had achieved incredible success and built a mansion on High Street that was specifically designed to outshine the Ballantine House. 

The Germans of High Street were wealthy and successful and they wanted everyone to know it. The mansions were grand and Newark was booming. The year of Krueger’s death, the mansion was sold to the Newark Scottish Rite Freemasons who would maintain it until 1958 when it was purchased by Louise Scott. The initial construction cost was $250,000 and the Masons purchased it for $100,000 before Scott acquired it for $85,000 in the 1950s. The value of the building continued to fall as High Street failed to compete with the allure of suburban living and white flight and disinvestment set in. 

Louise Scott is widely considered to be the first Black woman millionaire from Newark having built her fortune running a beauty company catering to Black women. (There is perhaps another story to tell here about how there is economic demand and money to be made catering to the needs and wants of the local community that so many from outside the City fail to see.)  Scott came to Newark from South Carolina in the 1930s in the middle of the Great Migration. Eventually, Scott would lose the home to the City in the early 1980s the same time the City changed High Street’s name to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, Blvd and just over a decade after the City elected its first Black mayor. 

At this point, Newark was clearly in decline. Its population had fallen by a quarter from its peak and would continue to fall until the year 2000 when it would be at its lowest point in a hundred years. The City did little with the mansion for years but eventually tried to rehabilitate it and create a museum to African-American history. This effort failed as so many promises of a Newark Renaissance also failed to bear fruit. Millions were spent and politicians angrily demanded to know where the money went. 

This is where so any stories of the Krueger-Scott mansion ended. Tales of Newark’s decline and stagnation and full of misinformation. Even the New York Times had this to say: In many ways, the fortunes and misfortunes of the Krueger-Scott Mansion mirror those of this battered city, which was one of the nation’s wealthiest until the riots of 1967 and the ensuing depopulation drained Newark of its prosperity. It does not take a crack team of researchers to see that Newark, like many similar cities, saw depopulation, disinvestment and white flight happen well before the Rebellion with the rise of the automobile and cheap suburban housing.

Even though the mansion wasn’t restored then in the 1990s, the work did stabilize and save the building for a new day. The roof was repaired and shell stabilized and without that work, it almost surely would have collapsed. There again were many ideas and proposals for how to restore, renovate, gut and rebuild the mansion. No proposal penciled out and no proposal was worthy of its history.

That is until now. 

The City and its economic development team at Invest Newark (then called Newark CEDC and my former employer though I did not work directly on this project), found a partner with a vision for the site. Avi Telyas has taken on the development of the mansion and is building 66 new units in multi-family housing behind it. There will be maker spaces designed to help entrepreneurs and the mansion itself will be programmed with supportive business services for them – fitting for a building that was built and inhabited by two of the City’s most successful and famous entrepreneurs. Newark is and always has been for hustlers. 

Those that have waited for the Krueger-Scott Mansion to be restored and have waited for the Newark Renaissance to finally arrive are seeing both happen now. And of course, they would come in tandem. Newark rose in the late 19^th Century with Gottfried Krueger and the City changed with Louise Scott. It suffered disinvestment in the latter 20^th Century but we are now seeing it rise again. New housing developments and new businesses are being built bringing new residents and workers to the city and the city’s population rose above 300,000 for the first time since the 1980s. 

The Krueger-Scott Mansion, the Castle on High Street, built by Newark’s German immigrant beer baron and inhabited by a Black millionaire. Abandoned. Disinvested and full of broken promises. It’s finally being restored not exactly to its former glory, but for a new future that honors its past. That is the story of Newark. That is our story.

Jorge Santos is a Newark resident who works in economic development for the State of New Jersey.

_{Featured photo by @newarknjblog}