the staff of the Ridgewood blog
East Rutherford NJ, It’s no wonder the American Dream megamall—dubbed “the ugliest building in the world,” by ex-Gov Chris Christie—is down in the dumps.
The 3 million-square-foot eyesore and retail fiasco is situated where the old NJ Meadowlands dump used to boil and fester fifty years ago. And for those of you who have a nose for remembering, the stinging odor of that swamp on Route 20 in East Rutherford still lingers.
“It smelled like rotting garbage, burning flesh, and a steaming pile of shit,” recalls local celebrity Thomas Giacomaro, who worked fifty yards away from it back in the day.
“It burned day and night, seven days a week. The stink got in your clothes, in your hair, and shoved up your nose so deep you never got rid of it. When I was a kid, people used to say the Mafia dumped dead bodies there after a late-night hit.”
Giacomaro, author of the memoir The King of Con: How a Smooth-Talking Jersey Boy Made and Lost Billions, Baffled the FBI, Eluded the Mob, and Lived to Tell the Crooked Tale, oughta know.
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His job in the summer of ’71 was at the legendary Maislin Transport, one of the largest freight carriers in North America with “clients” like union leader Jimmy Hoffa and crime boss Whitey Bulger. The seven Maislin brothers owned thousands of acres in the area, including the dump site and the location of the current megamall.
The stench is so memorable, says Giacomaro, nothing good can thrive there today.
Doesn’t matter if you build a shiny new Giants Stadium.
Doesn’t matter if you dress it up with a gigantic mall and give it an idyllic, poetic name like “Xanadu.”
Doesn’t matter if you create a wildlife preserve.
Even the over-tanned and buff Jersey Shore celebrity DJ, Pauly D, who just announced he’ll perform his Hip-Hop tunes at the American Dream megamall this April, can’t pretty the place up. Because it is what it is, and to quote the great Bette Davis in one of her oft-repeated film lines, “what a dump!”
It is actually very nice inside and the people who work there quite pleasant. It seems to me that in this country we have the need to always find the bad in things, to set off a poor outcome from the very beginning. The Mall is now a piece of our great state of New Jersey. Isn’t it wise to embrace it and support its success? Those memories you old fellas speak of are dead and buried the area has moved on and maybe you should too..or is your motive to sell a book or a movie. I would encourage everyone to visit The American Dream, take a walk, shop and speak with the nice people who are earning money to feed their families. You may be surprised how nice it is and you may just want to go back again!!!!
It’s not nice that they used pension money to invest at the site. That should’ve been a legal board
They should put up the Alexanders mural to spruce it up !
I smell worse than that every morning, I live a few blocks from the Pollution Plant and Glenrock.