Locked Up
- Prudential Center’s Stanley
- Newark’s Paramount Theather
- Peter Francisco Park
- YouTube Rabbithole
Alright @YouTheReader,
Today’s tune is Akon’s Locked Up because he’s a Newark, New Jersey native. This was his first hit single which was released in April of ‘04.
For anybody who wasn’t around for the Akon Era of mid-2000s music, it was a moment. Many times he started with a Konvict line oftentimes repeating itself. The rumors were he spent time in prison for being the head of a grand theft auto organization. However, in the last few years, Akon admitted that it was fabricated for his image and he never went to jail for stealing cars. Anyway, I spent about a half-hour going through his catalog from back in the day… All of the songs may sound the same, but you gotta admit the man made hits…
- Smack That & I Wanna Love You: When Eminem and Snoop Dogg were at their peak.
- Soul Survivor & Sweet Escape: He was excellent as a feature with Jeezy and Gwen Stefani.
- Sweetest Girl (Dollar Bill): Great spring or summer song.
- Lonely: Alvin & The Chipmunk autotune went hard.
- Don’t Matter: 1 of Akon’s 2 songs to hit #1 on the US Billboard Hot 100.
- Out Here Grindin’: Not going to lie, thankfully hip-hop was saved by Drake, Kendrick, and Cole soon after this.
- Get Buck In Here: Just sounds like a Football Friday tune.
- He’s got loads of others as well like I’m So Paid, Right Now (Na Na Na), Belly Dancer, Hypnotized, Dangerous, and Troublemaker. Maybe I was just the right age, but these were hits back in my day.
On to some Stumblin’ Along Newark….
Prudential Center’s Stanley
Please ignore the fun facts above and focus on the giant hockey player instead. Created by sculptor Jon Krawczyk, Stanley is a three-story stainless steel skater. Krawczyk is a long-time Devil fan and figured he’d reach out to Michael Gilfillan, who was the former co-owner of the Devils at the time. Gilfillan and Krawczyk were former classmates at Delbarton, so it was a successful pitch, probably just a phone call. The statue took 8 months of melding to complete. Krawczyk made the sculpture all the way out in Malibu and it took him 4 days to drive cross-country. It was unveiled in ‘09. It looks cool, although it’s not The Bat outside Yankee Stadium.
(Source: NJ.com)
Paramount Theatre
Just a block over from the Prudential Center is Newark’s Paramount Theatre on Market Street. It sticks out like a sour thumb so figured it had to have some history behind and sure enough it does…
Originally opened in 1886 as H.C. Miner’s Newark Theatre, it was a vaudeville house. Therefore its first use wasn’t so much for Broadway-type plays but for circus-like acts. You’d have magicians, acrobats, comedians, trained animals, jugglers, singers, and dancers performing.
Henry C. Miner was born in New York City in 1842 and his first job was as a clerk in a drug store while he studied pharmacy. His older brother was the president of Brooklyn Medical College so between the drugstore clerk gig and the family connection, he got his foot in the door to pharmacy right in the middle of the American Civil War. He served as a pharmacist for the 1st New York Engineer Regiment, which was involved in capturing key forts in Charleston’s Harbor. When he came back from the war, not only did he start his own pharmacy business called H. C. Miner Company, but he was a police officer and fireman as his side hustle. From there, he would dabble in the theatre business and then politics in the late 1890s as he was an elected Congressman. Just a couple of years after getting political, Miner suddenly died in 1900 at 57 with a net worth of $5 million, roughly $187.7 million today.
(Source: NY Times - Sudden Death of H.C. Miner)
The Miner family kept the theatre until 1916 when they sold it to Edward Spiegel, who was already in the entertainment business from owning Strand Theatre nearby. As soon as Spiegel bought Miner’s spot, he demolished the large brick building to the right of it that you see in the postcard above, and he got Thomas W. Lamb to renovate. Spiegel spared no expense on Lamb’s expansion of the auditorium as he threw down $125,000 ($3.7 million today) for the project. Thomas W. Lamb would go on to architect another famous building, the 1925 Madison Square Garden which was located on Eighth Avenue between 49th and 50th.
(Source: After the Final Curtain)
Once vaudeville houses ran out of popularity, the theatre would be sold to Paramount-Publix (Paramount Pictures today) around 1930. The new owners changed the use of auditoriums from live acts to sound motion pictures, otherwise known as movies. On September 3, 1931, Paramount Theatre would officially open. It is said that Newark’s own, Jerry Lewis, was an usher for the movie theatre as one of his first jobs before the entertainment business.
(Source: NJ.com)
Paramount Theatre would close its doors on March 31, 1986, due to increases in insurance rates. The lobby of the theatre would be put to other uses such as an Army/Navy surplus store and other retail pop-up shops. Perhaps its final bit of entertainment will be as the setting for a scene in The Joker (2019). In 2021, the roof of the auditorium is said to have collapsed.
Honestly, from the outside the Paramount Theatre is sorta creepy, but the pictures from the inside are straight-up chilling. Although there have been efforts to restore the theatre, nothing seems to have changed since it was abandoned nearly 4 decades ago. Somebody should really get on that, it’s a cool landmark laying waste.
JFK Monument
In between the pints of Guinness, a JFK figurehead was stumbled upon. President Kennedy stopped by Newark twice during his 1960 presidential campaign. His 2nd trip on the trail was actually on November 6, 1960, which was just 2 days before election day. While he was in office, JFK returned to Newark on October 12, 1962, for Columbus Day. Hypothetically speaking, Tony Soprano (born 1959) would’ve been just a toddler, but I’d like to think he’d be in attendance, hypothetically speaking.
(Source: Guy Sterling - Newark Historian)
Peter Francisco Park
After having my final pint of Guinness on my journey through Newark at Bello’s Pub & Grill, there was a park next to Penn Station in Newark. The Peter Francisco Park was built in 1966 by the Municipal Council of Newark. They decided to officially give Peter Francisco a monument in 1976 to honor the Bicentennial of the United States.
Historians can’t tell for sure, but most accounts believe Peter Francisco was born in the Azores, Portugal around 1760. He was indentured to a sea captain after his parents gave him up, but by the age of 5 in 1765 was abandoned on the docks of City Point, Virginia. He was just 15 years old and working as an apprentice to a blacksmith when the American Revolution got underway. By 1776, Francisco enlisted into the 10th Virginia Regiment, which got a kick out of his size and strength. Standing at 6’6”, Peter Francisco was known as the “Virginia Giant” and the “Giant of the Revolution.” George Washington said of Francisco, “Without him we would have lost two crucial battles, perhaps the War, and with it our freedom. He was truly a One-Man Army.”
Peter Francisco’s Revolutionary War hero legend first grew at the Battle of Camden, South Carolina. During the battle, the British were about to capture an American cannon. Francisco is said to have fended off British attackers and then was able to carry the 350-pound cannon barrel over his shoulder. This earned him nicknames like the American Hercules and American Hulk. During the Philadelphia Campaign, he sustained quite a few injuries. Therefore he got to sit out much of Washington’s Army training at Valley Forge. It’s almost like not having Derrick Henry practice during the week when you know he’ll be ready for a full Sunday workload.
One of the injuries sustained was his right thigh from a musket ball at the Battle of Monmouth in 1778. He was never able to fully recover from the injury but was still always able to fight. On July 16, 1779, Francisco played a part in the assault on the British fort at Stony Point, New York. A key fort along the Hudson River, the American Hulk was said to be one of the first soldiers to scale over the British walled perimeter after some close hand-to-hand fighting, he ended up with a 9-inch wound across the stomach but still was said to have captured the British flag in the process. To this day, Rockland County thanks Peter Francisco for his heroics.
