East Rutherford, NJ

East Rutherford is located in northern New Jersey, on the Hackensack River southeast of Passaic, NJ and north of Secaucus, NJ. The town is best known as the location of the Meadowlands Sports Complex, which includes Giants Stadium, home of the New York Giants of the National Football League. The complex was built on reclaimed marshland starting in the 1970s.

The complex tried hard to entice the New York Yankees to move from the Bronx to this new location, starting in the 1960s. They were proposing a purpose-built, state-of-the art ballpark to replace aging Yankee Stadium, and an area free of the crime and urban blight that characterized the Bronx in the 1970s and early 1980s. Future Presidential candidate Donald Trump was one of the main promoters of the potential move. In the end however, the Yankees decided to renovate their old ballpark thoroughly, moving back into the now sparkling digs in 1976. In 1987, a statewide referendum that would have authorized public spending to build a new ballpark failed. George Steinbrenner had supposedly a handshake deal to move the Yankees to the new facility had the plan gone ahead.

Further Reading

• John Brennan: "Grand plans for the Meadowlands that flopped", USA Today Sports, August 26, 2016. [1]