{"id":9657,"date":"2025-09-26T17:05:03","date_gmt":"2025-09-26T21:05:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/localtalkweekly.com\/?p=9657"},"modified":"2025-09-26T17:05:08","modified_gmt":"2025-09-26T21:05:08","slug":"remembering-olympic-park-in-irvington","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/localtalkweekly.com\/index.php\/2025\/09\/26\/remembering-olympic-park-in-irvington\/","title":{"rendered":"Remembering Olympic Park in Irvington"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

TOWN WATCH<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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IRVINGTON<\/strong> – When patrons of Olympic Park left the 40-acre amusement park straddling Irvington and Maplewood Monday – Labor Day – June 6, 1965, many did not know that they would be leaving for the last time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although a $15 million proposal to build 21-story high rise luxury apartment buildings fell through in 1964, many patrons joined in celebrating 50 years of Guenther family ownership in 1965. Owner Robert Guenther, however, made it plain on Sept. 23: the 78-year-old amusement park would not reopen and the land be sold to a new owner for $2 million. He cited competition from more modern amusement parks, changing tastes and demographics and the daily’s fading will to operate for the end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The park opened May 8, 1887 as Becker’s Woods in Hilton Park, a German beer garden that kept adding rides, games and performance stages over time. Its name was changed to “Olympic Park” in 1904 to coincide with the Olympic Games at St. Louis. (This was long before the International Olympic Committee sued Newark’s Olympic Trails bus line to change its name to Olympia Trails in the 1980s.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Olympic Park became known for being the home for “The World’s Largest Merry-Go-Round,” “The Largest Freshwater Swimming Pool on the East Coast” and the birthplace of eastern midget car racing. Joe Basile (1889-1967) conducted a circus brass band there for 37 years. The Public Service No. 25 streetcar line ended its runs at the park’s main gate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Guenthers brought in midget cars – smaller scaled versions of Indianapolis 500 or sprint race cars – June 10, 1934. Although the economy class of race cars ran there for two years, the sport grew to where drivers could compete elsewhere in the Metropolitan New York City area eight times a week before World War Two.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Local Talk” believes that the midget cars ran on a fifth-mile cinder track that literally ran around the bases of a baseball diamond at the park’s southeastern corner. That baseball field was the home to Irvington High School and several semi-pro teams. There were 1909 motorcycle and 1915-17 auto races on the park’s half-mile harness horse racing track – but that track made way for the pool in 1923.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Olympic Park’s attractions were parted out, including the merry-go-round that Disney bought and adapted for Disney World in 1973. The land was converted into a light industrial park in 1979. A monument was placed at the main entrance site in 2012.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NEWARK<\/strong> – The newly-opened Newark School of Architecture and Interior Design is on a second temporary Certificate of Occupancy. A permanent CoO is pending June completion of its new gymnasium and auditorium wing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

City code inspectors first issued a TCoO Aug. 18 so that Newark Public Schools staff could set up shop in the former 1961 St. James Hospital building at 155 Jefferson St. for the 2025-26 school year. The building’s conversion into NPS’ latest magnet high school had been two years overdue in part from a state labor stop order over employee wages and the general contractor’s replacement of a subcontractor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although SAID’s freshman class got an Aug. 29 orientation and Sept. 2 First Day of School thanks to the first TCoO, that permit would expire in 90 days – Oct. 18. It is anticipated that a second temporary permit, barring the unexpected, will be issued for the rest of the school year. Both permits pertain to physical occupation and not school operation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A permanent CoO is pending general contractor Summit Assets and its subcontractors’ completing the school’s gym and auditorium structure. That building, which was a steel skeleton around Sept. 1, is targeted for a June finish.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NPS is meanwhile paying installments to Summit\/155 Jefferson Urban Renewal LLC on a 30-year, $295,900 lease. The school district has the option to buy the completed building for $1,000 at the lease’s end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

EAST ORANGE<\/strong> – Two East Orange brothers are being held in Newark’s Essex County Correctional Facility since their Sept. 16 arrest on suspected heroin and fentanyl trafficking from their residence here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shaheed and Alhaqqah Darling, said Essex County Sheriff Amir Jones that Tuesday, were arrested by his officers with the assistance of Newark Police, the federal DEA REDRUM Task Force and Bergen and Middlesex County SWAT teams. They and Aziz Khawaja, of Saddle Brook, were swept up while search warrants were also served on the following locations:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

  * 275 Prospect St., East Orange (Prospect Towers Condominium)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

  * 460 North Midland Ave., Saddle Brook<\/p>\n\n\n\n

   * 175 Quincey Ct., Woodbridge<\/p>\n\n\n\n

   * 2505 Aqueduct Ave., The Bronx, N.Y.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Officers found from S. Darling’s residence here 188 suspected heroin bricks weighing an overall 470 grams. The bricks, said sheriff’s officers, were packaged for street sale and were stamped with brand names “Sexy Red,” “Black Caesar” and “No Diddy.” Also recovered was a Springfield Armory XD-9 handgun – reported as stolen from Matthews, CC – and 69 rounds of 9mm. ammunition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Fordham Heights, Bronx location yielded “more than eight kilograms of heroin and fentanyl,” 62 different heroin stamps and $61,350 “in suspected drug proceeds.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The brothers and Khawaja are accused of running a “multi-million dollar” heroin packaging and distribution ring that authorities began investigating earlier this year. They are being held on charges of controlled dangerous substance possession, possession thereof with intent to distribute, CDS distribution within 500 feet of a school (East Orange Campus High School), distribution thereof on or near public property and money laundering.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ORANGE<\/strong> – A North Ward man’s visitation, funeral and burial have been set for Sept. 27 here while investigators probe the circumstances of his Sept. 14 death on Interstate 280 in Livingston.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Woody’s Home for Services here will hold last rites Friday for Joel Sterling, followed by burial that day at Bloomfield’s Glendale Cemetery. New Jersey State Police spokesman St. Jeffrey Lebrn said that Sterling, 79, was driving a Honda SUV east when it went off the road at about 12:57 a.m. that Sunday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Responding state troopers and local first responders found him and the Honda at Milepost 6.5, past Exit 6 for Laurel Avenue and just short of the West Orange border. Sterling’s SUV had struck a sand mound, overturned and crashed into two trees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Emergency responders declared Sterling dead at the scene from fatal injuries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Woody’s, who listed Sterling’s birthdate as March 26, 1946, did not post a full obituary as of press time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

WEST ORANGE<\/strong> – Township administrators and Essex County Roads and Bridges officials may be huddling to resolve a Sept. 8 complaint of speeding along Mount Pleasant Avenue and particularly past the new Senior Citizen Housing Center at 46 Mt. Pleasant Ave.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mayor Susan McCartney and Assistant Business Administrator Peter Smeraldo said to resident Jackie Parisi that Monday that they will talk with Police Chief Jim Abbott and most likely the county about speed enforcement along the avenue’s easternmost block.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Parisi said that she began to notice and track speeding vehicles past her apartment during her summer vacation from teaching. She said that about “eight school buses going down, one after another, at 2:35 p.m.; at least 10 dump trucks, big propane tankers, very low trucks with big truck ramps” speed past.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was after an elderly woman exiting the center’s parking lot who was almost hit by a vehicle that she began talking with the WOPD the last three months.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

46 Mt. Pleasant Ave., – the former West Orange Public Library – was reopened as the township’s latest affordable senior housing on May 15. Its 65 units sit along the avenue’s eastbound lanes – on the same side with the Municipal Building, a house and an office.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eastbound Mt. Prospect is the base of the First Orange Mountain. Downhill traffic, including those coming from Interstate 280, feeds Main and White streets. It is also known as County Route 577 and New Jersey Highway Route 10 with a 25 mph speed limit at that block.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Unfortunately, enforcement is typically the only way we can curtail this,” said Smeraldo. “We can contact the Board of Education and let them know to investigate.  We can reach out to the county to maybe help out with signs.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SOUTH ORANGE<\/strong> – Village elders got both good and bad news from two separate state agencies over its Fourth Round Affordable Housing Element and Fair Share Plan earlier this month.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The good news from Sept. 9 was that the state Department of Community Affairs had approved the village’s housing plan. The bad news is that decade-long negotiations with NJTransit on selling the agency’s South Orange Station parking lot have seemingly stalled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

South Orange, in its housing plan, intends to by the commuter parking lot on the station’s west side and NJPAC’s south-southwest side. An apartment building partially satisfying the state’s immediate and projected 2025-35 housing needs for the village would be constructed there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While the building is currently conceptual, Mayor Sheena Collum, in a Sept. 20 letter to a news outlet editor, said that there will be “an activated ground floor and plaza and a critical advancement of the River Greenway.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Collum added that the building will be constructed with an eye towards moving its municipal offices from space at 79 South Orange Ave. The village has been paying rent to the Haberman Realty-owned office building after leasing out Village Hall across the street.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Responding to whether building on the lot would aggravate village parking demand, the mayor cited data from the village’s current Master Plan: “Only one percent of traffic ism internal, whereas 70 percent is pass-through traffic.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NJTransit had inherited Delaware, Lackwanna & Western Railroad-era commuter station parking lots when its Rail Operations division absorbed the Morris & Essex Line Jan. 1, 1983.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MAPLEWOOD<\/strong> – The Maplewood Village Alliance, since Sept. 16, has been asking the Township Committee to implement a one-year paid parking pilot program here in Maplewood’s Jefferson Village.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The MVA, through its Strategic Planning & Parking Committee, and Township Committeeman Dean Dafis, outlined its trial program before the Township Committee that Wednesday and an online memo. The Maplewood Village Special Improvement District manager is saying that the village center’s longstanding free curbside and mostly permit-free parking lots are too much of a good thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“At the end of the day, free parking costs us,” said Dafis at the Township Committee meeting. “Tonight is now how the pilot will happen but why.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Paid parking, said MVA chairwoman Amy Howlett, would allow faster space turnover, eliminate space campers and reduce drivers circling blocks to park. Howlett cited The 2018 International Downtown Association Study that paid parking spaces turn over four times more than free spaces – benefiting business, improving parking enforcement and contributing to the spaces’ maintenance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Howell and Dafis noted that there had been village center parking complaints going back to 2000. Paid parking was incorporated as a feature in the township’s 2023 Master Plan. Howell, when asked by Committeewoman Deborah Engel on how the pilot would work without a parking authority or assigned personnel, Howell said that a parking app company can administer the pilot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Local Talk” presumes that the pilot would include Maplewood Avenue and at least one municipal lot; details, including whether side streets will be included, are questions for a later day. The Township Committee is presently examining the MVA’s proposal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BLOOMFIELD<\/strong> – What is commonly called the Bloomfield Children’s Library looks a little denuded after contractors had removed trees and brush from around the 1927 structure as of Sept. 12.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The uprooting of what official documents call “invasive species” was the start of a yearlong project to renovate the older part of 90 Broad St. The landscaping will help workers access windows, stonework and masonry, moulding and trimming and the roof.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bloomfield’s pre-1967 building will have its roof rehabilitated and any weather-related damage replaced. BPL Director Holly Belli, Mayor Jenny Mundell and other officials stress that the work will adhere to the Standards for Treatment of Historic Properties as set by the U.S. Department of the Interior. (The building is set within the Bloomfield Green Historic District.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The work – conducted by Cypreco and overseen by Netta Architects – is to be completed on or by August 2026.  It is being funded from a reappropriation of the township’s 2025 Calendar Year municipal capital budget.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MONTCLAIR<\/strong> – The Township’s public district, by approving its part of a three-year teachers contract with the Montclair Education Association Sept. 18, resolved one crisis while grappling with a now-$18 million 2024-25 school budget deficit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All that is left to have the July 1, 2025-June 30, 2028 contract to take effect is a to-be-announced ratification vote by MEA’s rank and file members. The Board of Education approved the pact’s memorandum of agreement at their Sept. 18 meeting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MEA members are to receive a retroactive three percent base salary increase from July 1. That rate is to rise to 3.7 percent July 1, 2026 and to 3.8 percent July 1, 2027. Details include the starting salary going up to $64,000 and 187 maximum days of instruction with three “snow days” built in. Chaperoning teachers will see their overnight stipends rising $25 to $125 Mondays-Thursdays and by $25 to $175 on Fridays-Sundays.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Montclair Schools Superintendent Ruth B. Turner, who started work here July 1, Board President Mfreke “Monk” Inyang and MEA President Danny Marcketta each hailed the new collective bargaining agreement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Turner, on Sept. 22, announced that the $11 million 2024-25 school year deficit she and interim School Business Administrator Dana Sullivan had discovered in late July is now approaching $18 million. The extra $7 million came from what Turner and Sullivan call “bad accounting” and “incompetence;” unpaid bills from prior years that remained unpaid and buried.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MPS has curtailed staff travel and filed a Corrective Action Plan with the state Department of Education.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

UPDATE: The Township Council’s Sept. 22 special meeting deliberation on appointing a successor to the resigned Councilwoman at-Large Carmel Loughman will likely resume before their Sept. 30 public meeting. Loughman resigned 15 months into her four-year term Sept. 9.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GLEN RIDGE<\/strong> – Mayor Deborah Mans confirmed in a Sept. 8 email that there were indeed Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“The Glen Ridge Police Department was notified that Homeland Security would be in the area on an investigation,” said Mans. “Our officers were not present nor was there any assistance from GRPD requested or provided.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mans’ statement confirmed observations made by South End neighbors. One Washington Avenue resident took a photo of a “masked federal agent” along that street. The same resident said he saw federal agents rummaging through an SUV parked along Ridgewood Avenue in the presence of “several men” who were seated on a lawn nearby.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An ICE Newark Field Office, responding to a reporter’s Sept. 12 inquiry for details, said Sept. 15 that “nothing was turning up.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“GRPD will not assist in immigration enforcement except in those specific instances laid out in the (N.J.) Attorney General’s directive,” reiterated a borough statement, “or when there’s a request for back-up in an escalating situation.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BELLEVILLE<\/strong> – Township leaders may be checking their real estate maps and public works project list to see how they will apply $400,000 in recently received state funding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

State Assemblywoman Carmen Morales (D-Belleville) told Mayor Michael Melham Sept. 18 that Belleville will be getting the $400,000 from the State of New Jersey’s 2025-26 Budget’s earmarks – with half of the money going to flood mitigation. The other $200,000 would go to “public building improvements, open space preservation and brownfield remediation.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both Morales and Melham can see the earmarks’ first half going to improving stormwater sewers and channels to correct flooding. Parts of Main Street and its side streets in the Valley section have been consistently inundated by recent stormwater runoff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“From reducing the risk of flooding to revitalizing underused properties,” said Melham, “these funds will have a tangible, lasting impact on our township.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Melham and the Township Council will first incorporate the $400,000 into the 2025 Calendar Year Municipal Budget. How the earmarks are spent will be incorporated in future project resolutions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NUTLEY<\/strong> – Township police detectives are comparing notes with their Montclair and United States Postal Inspection Service colleagues to find the persons or persons who have stolen mail from USPS vehicles in both towns Sept. 12 and Aug. 7.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NPD officers said they had responded to a report of a man smashing a window on the governmental mail delivery truck along Centre Street Sept. 12. They found the damaged vehicle – but the letter carrier-driver was making local deliveries. When the career returned, he said that he did not know about the shattered window – but noticed that some mail inside was missing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 A Montclair reported a similar “smash-and-grab” while along that township’s Lorraine Avenue that same Friday. This letter carrier said that he returned to his parked truck, found a smashed passenger side window and a side door open – and “a bundle and two full trays of mail” missing. Witnesses said that they saw a black four-door sedan idling by the postal truck before the former drove away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another employee told USPS and Montclair authorities that he returned to his truck along Nassau Street, found a smashed window, two missing mail trays and his lunch missing. One witness said that he had heard the sound of a “crowbar hitting the pavement.”  A second said he saw a black car, perhaps a Mercedes-Benz, parked in front of the postal truck and a man dressed in black “throwing something” into the former before driving towards Valley Road.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The alleged person or persons are subject to federal charges for damaging and stealing from USPS vehicles. Those thinking they are mail theft victims are to call USPIS at (888) 876-2455.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

TOWN WATCH IRVINGTON – When patrons of Olympic Park left the 40-acre amusement park straddling Irvington and Maplewood Monday – Labor Day – June 6, 1965, many did not know that they would be leaving for the last time. 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