Author: Thoughts On The Dead (Page 123 of 1031)

Stadium shows sucked before the Jumbotron was invented.

OR

This was the old Giants Stadium. Metlife Stadium, built in the parking lot while they tore down the old place, has Korean food, and gluten-free options, and matcha stands. At Giants, you could get a hot dog, or a pretzel, or a punch in the mouth (if the Jets were playing). If you were thirsty, you could have a beer or a Coke. Then you pissed in a trough. And we were grateful for what we had.

OR

As I’ve mentioned, Giants Stadium was located in a swamp. That Springsteen line about being stuck in the mud somewhere in the swamps of Jersey? He wasn’t being poetic: most of New Jersey is a fetid bog. (The Garden State has other micro-climes: mountains with bitchin’, twisty roads running through ’em; the Shore; Newark; the green-as-fuck bit where Princeton is; horse country; and an actual, honest-to-God haunted forest where a monster lives.) This particular swamp is called the Meadowlands; it’s where the Hackensack and Passaic Rivers empty into Newark Bay. No one ever lived there. Not the Lenni-Lenape, and not the Dutch, and not the English, and not the Americans. It was a swamp.

BUT it was a swamp within spitting distance of New York City and the Turnpike.

This was my Meadowlands. Ominous and desolate, like Nick Cave’s sock drawer. That’s the Brendan Byrne Arena, where the Dead used to play in the winter, up front; and that’s Giants Stadium, where they played in the summer, behind and to the left; and that’s the racetrack, where Billy used to get drunk and punch jockeys, off to the right.

And you had to drive. See any rail lines in that photo? Public transportation is considered both communistic and blasphemous in New Jersey, so anyone who wanted to watch Lawrence Taylor cripple opponents in a cocaine-fueled rage needed a ride.You sat in traffic trying to get to the event, evented, and then sat in traffic trying to get out of the parking lot. My father would regularly force our family to leave games during the National Anthem just to beat the rush.

It’s better now:

No, I lied to you: it’s just as shitty, but in new and updated (but still totally Jersey) ways.

(AN ASIDE: You didn’t realize how enormous a horse track was, did you? I certainly didn’t.)

So, obviously, that’s the racetrack where they still run the trotters. At its peak, 25,000 gamblers would crowd in on a Saturday night, but it hasn’t made money in decades, and the state sold the venue to a French company in 2010.

The stadium is the new one, Metlife. It was going to be Allianz Stadium, but it turns out that Allianz did a lot of business with the Nazis during the war, and so the naming rights went to Metlife, a company I’m sure is unimpeachable in its morality and history.

The arena is no longer the Brendan Byrne Arena. (He was one of New Jersey’s long list of despised idiot governors; almost immediately after taking office, he was nicknamed OTB, which stood for One Term Byrne.) The former home of the Nets and Devils had a number of name changes–such as the Izod Center, the Continental Airlines Arena, and The Turdcuttery–but is now known simply as Meadowlands Arena. The reason for the simple sobriquet is that no one will pay for the naming rights anymore, as the venue has no tenants and is essentially an abandoned structure.

See that bullshit surrounding the arena? That’s Xanadu.

That’s the view from the highway.

It’s called The American Dream Mall now, but most Jerseyans will always know it as Xanadu. (You will note, please, that Xanadu can refer to either: A, a location that does not exist; or B, an enormous financial disaster.) In 2003, business leaders and elected officials put their heads together and this is the KONK sound it made. Not joking, either: they’ve been building this fucker since 2003 and it hasn’t opened yet. It is Alaska’s Road to Nowhere, or Boston’s Big Dig, but uglier and far more expensive.

Guess. C’mon, guess. Guess how much money this building–which is not an international airport or a particle accelerator–cost. GUESS!

…

Nah, you were way off: $5 billion. FOR A MALL! Sure, it’s got a massive food court, but still: a mall shouldn’t cost $5 billion.

Oh, and that angled section to the left? It’s an indoor ski slope. First one in America, as a matter of fact. It might not be able to accommodate the schussers and snowplowers when American Dream (tentatively) opens in late October, though. Engineers are worried about the structure’s integrity after it was damaged in–wait for it–a snow storm.

Oh, my old New Jersey home:
It’s a death trap;
It’s a suicide rap.
We gotta get out while we’re young