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Newark, New Jersey: Beer Bottle Water Tower (Gone)

Visitor Tips and News About Beer Bottle Water Tower

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Large Brown Bottle

Take a good look at the bottle while you can for it's days are numbered! A demolition crew has been taking down the Hoffman/Pabst plant for the last month, working around the three-story building that serves as the bottle's base. The plant site, I believe, is making way for a needed housing development. Articles in the Newark Star-Ledger indicate the bottle is in too bad a condition to be saved; some residents, linking the bottle to the neighborhood's decline, said they don't want it anyway. Visit and/or take pictures at a safe distance. I don't know how close the demolisher will let you get, and the neighborhood's on the rough side.

[walter elliott, 07/29/2005]

Beer bottle water tower.

Pabst Blue Ribbon beer bottle water tower

After a strike at the Newark Pabst Brewing plant in the 1970s, Pabst closed the plant down. The equipment and piping could not survive inactivity without declining. The beer in the Brewery was dumped into the Newark City Sewers.

[Mary Ellen Coghlan, 11/27/2003]

This was originally a 60-ft. tall soda bottle water tower for the Hoffman Company. A Pabst label was painted on it when the business changed hands, which explains why the shape doesn't seem quite correct for a 1960s beer bottle.... Update - April 2004 - a developer has purchased the property and plans to demolish everything to make way for shops and housing. Local preservationists hope to devise a plan to save the bottle....

Large brown bottle

I am a long-time resident of the area, and can trace the bottle's history. It started out as a functioning water tank for Hoffman Beverages (soft drinks - they used to make a decent ginger ale), a long-gone NJ company. Hoffman sold the property to the Pabst Brewing Company, which erected an immense stockhouse/brewery on the site (1960s). Beer companies have been merged, beer sales have been flat (pardon me, I'm really sorry for that one) and this complex is, I believe, inactive.

[Mark Heter, 04/05/2001]
Large brown bottle

Large brown bottle off the Garden State Parkway. This was actually a water tower, designed as part of the Hoffman soda bottling plant, which later became a storehouse for the Pabst brewery. I remember it used to be painted as a bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer. About 10 years ago, the facility fell into disuse, and the paint was stripped from the bottle. The bottle is actually located just north of mile marker 145.

[Jeff Dunne, 01/10/1998]
Large brown glass bottle

On the Garden State parkway, NJ, or GSP as known by Jerseyans, up around mile marker 150 or so, there is a cemetery. It's not the cemetery that's strange but the industry behind it. A GIANT smoke stack from a bottling or drink company (might even be a beer company) stands in the shape of a HUGE brown glass bottle. An appropriate place to be buried, for a drunk.

[Larry Russo, 10/31/1997]

Beer Bottle Water Tower

Hours:
Gone, dismantled.
Status:
Gone

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