The brewing of beer has long been ingrained in the history of Newark. The city was home to a number of breweries in the late 1800s, all of whom had wealthy owners who were trying to stand out on High Street. The Kastner mansion was once such home that stood out amongst the rest.
The land on which the mansion was built was purchased in 1890 from the Frelinghuysen family, one of the most prolific early settlers of New Jersey. The home took two years to complete.
The home was designed by Henry Schultz for Franz Kastner, one of the city's legendary brewers. The name Henry Schulz should ring a bell to regular readers of this blog, as he designed Newarks most iconic residence, the Krueger-Scott Mansion. The homes actually shared several architectural flourishes, including the staircase ballisturs.
In 1957 the home was purchased and used by a casket manufacturer for a short period of time. It was then sold to the Pride of Newark Elks Lodge No. 93. The Elks added a large meeting hall on the backside of the mansion, and appropriately enough they also added a bar on the first floor. Other than that they kept the interior more or less original.
Unfortunately the large home was quite expensive to maintain and had begun to fall into disrepair. Local resident Denise Colon stepped up and purchased the building from the Elks in 2007. Colon had a hopeful vision for the property, with dreams of restoring the mansion to its original glory and operating it as a community center. Such an undertaking required a massive financial investment, which Colon was up for. Unfortunately the projrct soon became unsustainable. Colon made several attempts to get a Tax Abatement to help ease the cost of the conversion. In the mean time she used the building as the headquarters of her income tax prep service.
Colon never ended up getting any help from the city. Five years and a few hundred thousand dollars later, the city ended up regaining possesion of the building. They threw up some plywood and never looked back. It wasn't long before some of the local unhoused population took up residence in the mansion.
A large fire severely damaged the building in October of 2019. The folks who were living inside the mansion when it burned ended up moving on to the nearby B'nai Jeshurun Synagague during that buildings brief period of disuse. We actually ran into them while we were documenting the synagague. The one gentleman explained to us they were using the vacant mansion as something of a boarding house. They all agreed to certain rules and made an effort to keep the digs as nice as possible. Unfortunately they ended up having to kick someone out of the squat, and that person returned later when nobody was around to burn the place down.
After several more years sitting vacant with no roof, a second large fire tore through the building one October night in 2023. This one was far more destructive than the last fire, leaving the mansion nothing more than a shell. It was also too dangerous to leave the facade standing, so the city came in and tore down what was left of the building.
I got to this one late as hell.
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