Last Sunday’s Super Bowl in which the Seattle Seahawks defeated the Denver Broncos 43 to 8 was played less than 50 miles from here. But to understand something about where it was played, you have to look back — a long way back. Though the stadium opened in 2010 as New Meadowlands Stadium in the well-established Meadowlands Sports Complex, the meadowlands area itself has a long and varied history. Some of it was not much different from what you once found in West Windsor; say in Upper Bear Swamp, for example.
I first became aware of the meadowlands area as a kid growing up in Brooklyn. When my father took us on Sunday afternoon drives to New Jersey via the recently opened Holland Tunnel, we would sometimes drive up the only north-bound highway (Route 1 & 9) as far as the Palisades, turn around and come back through the tunnel.
When the George Washington Bridge opened in 1931, we could go there on the Jersey side and come back to New York by crossing it — if enough lanes were open, of course. Then home to Brooklyn via Broadway and the Manhattan Bridge. (This was also before the West Side Highway was built.)
What we now call the meadowlands was then usually referred to by New Yorkers as the Jersey swamp. There was not much there except murky water from the Hackensack and Passaic rivers and Newark Bay, all overgrown with weeds. To an outsider it was a very unattractive area, and “swamp” fitted it perfectly. Besides, it had already acquired a reputation as a dumping ground for the bodies of one-time gangsters from New York.
Central features of the area were a Ford assembly plant, the Benjamin Moore paint factory, and the Koppers Coke plant where they made coke from coal. All of these featured large illuminated signs that you could see from Manhattan at night across the river.
Coke, which was a relatively clean burning fuel for your home furnace (we used it), was made by the “destructive distillation” of raw coal. The process released the element sulfur as a by-product. Sulfur is a powdery crystalline element that is yellow in color. For decades, a huge pile of bright yellow sulfur accumulated next to the Koppers plant and just sat there in the water — a crown jewel of the meadowlands-to-be.
Finally — probably in the ’50s or ’60s — when some people started to talk about “pollution” and its consequences—the sulfur was removed. I don’t know what Koppers used it for, but at least it disappeared from the Jersey swamp. One small step toward the meadowlands.
Now we have a much different picture of that area. What was once called “swamp” has been upgraded to “meadow,” and buildings have been built there where people can actually live. And there are now plenty of roads through the area, including the New Jersey Turnpike. Route 9 is still there, too, though its northern portion is called 9W on the Jersey side of the Hudson River to distinguish it from Route 9 on the New York side.
On the New York side Route 9 is just an extension of Broadway in Manhattan and goes all the way to Albany. Route 9W also goes all the way to Albany on the west side of the Hudson, and passes through the U.S. Military Academy at West Point on the way. (Once on a Princeton team bus on the way up 9W from Princeton to West Point, a teammate saw that we were on 9W and spontaneously remarked — in a German accent: “Und do you spell your name mit a V, Herr Wagner?” To which the answer was, “9W.” That was in 1949, and it was an old one even then.)
Today the stadium where the Super Bowl was played is called MetLife Stadium, mainly because that insurance company paid a lot of money for the naming rights. They have no particular interest in the sports events played there, nor in the teams that use it or the history of the area, but they think it’s good advertising to have their name in front of such a large audience.
Maybe so, but I’m old-fashioned enough to believe that sports stadiums should be named for the team that plays there (Yankee Stadium and six others), an individual owner of the team (Shea Stadium, Wrigley Field, and Turner Field, for example), or its location (Fenway Park, Oriole Park at Camden Yards).
But today, at least six major league baseball stadiums are named for banks. Why banks? Because that’s where the money is. (Speaking of banks, West Windsor now has seven within about a mile or so of each other, just in the Princeton Junction area. Yes, I know that banking is a competitive business. I’m just puzzled by all those nearly empty parking lots.
Back to the Super Bowl. This one was number XLVIII — that’s 48 in English. The Seattle Seahawks, champions of the American Conference, played the Denver Broncos, champions of the National Conference.
When the first Super Bowl was played in 1967 there were two separate leagues, the American (AFL) and National (NFL) as there still are in baseball. Since the NFL had been in business since the early 1920s they looked upon the AFL as an upstart that needed to prove itself. But the NFL did agree to play a championship game against the AFL. The NFL champion Green Bay Packers won the first two “World Championship Games.”
The AFL gained credibility in the third World Championship Game when the New York Jets with Joe Namath defeated the Baltimore Colts in 1969. But starting with the fourth game in 1970, it has been called Super Bowl. The use of Roman numerals began with Super Bowl V the following year.
As to the outcome, I was rooting for Denver, mainly because I admire their quarterback Peyton Manning, who has overcome serious injuries in his career and still remained productive. Manning’s father, Archie, was also a star quarterback in the NFL and at Ole Miss, a college that I have family ties to. But Super Bowl XLVIII was not a Manning game.
