Iconic Anheuser-Busch eagle sign leaving Newark when brewery closes

Thursday's announcement by Anheuser-Busch that it will close its Newark brewery after 75 years will force 475 full-time employees to decide whether to accept the company's offer to relocate or lose their jobs.

But for countless nostalgic or aesthetically minded motorists, air travelers and residents of the city and surrounding region, the announcement raised a separate question that may be less sobering but one with a potential emotional hangover all its own.

"Is the Anheuser-Busch neon sign staying?" John Abeigon , a city resident and president of the Newark Teachers Union, asked after he learned the brewery would close. "That's been an iconic landmark for 75 years, both on the ground and for flights arriving and leaving from Newark. Coming home late at night, we knew we were close."

The answer to Abeigon's question, sadly for many, is that the sign will be taken down and sent to Anheuser-Busch's St. Louis headquarters, according to a spokesman for Goodman North America , the California-based subsidiary of the Australian Goodman Group.

"Anheuser-Busch will be retaining the eagle and all other iconic items and moving to their head office in St Louis," the spokesman, Ben Bytheway, said in an email on Friday, acknowledging the sign as "an iconic symbol."

Goodman plans to redevelop the site for other industrial uses, though Bytheway said the company had not yet determined whether the red-brick brewery would be demolished.

Anheuser-Busch , whose brands include Budweiser, Michelob and Stella Artois, did not respond to requests for comment on Friday.

The current version of the sign is 34 feet across and weighs 15 tons ,made from 4,500 feet of neon tubing and 2,000 incandescent bulbs. It was installed by the company in 2001 to celebrate its 50th year in operation and the Budweiser brand's 125th year in ice chests and refrigerators.

The region immediately took notice when the sign went dark in 2012 due to a malfunction, and stayed off for several months before being repaired.

A Federal Aviation Administration spokesman told The Star-Ledger at the time that air traffic controllers at Newark Liberty International would instruct helicopter pilots to look out for the eagle as they approached the airport.

To local historians, the eagle sign represents Newark's heyday as a malt mecca in the 19th and 20th centuries, when dozens of breweries sprang up to take advantage of the city's pristine water supply from its vast watershed property in Sussex County.

Ballantine, Pabst and Kreuger's are some of the biggest names from Newark's brewing past, whose beer barons built mansions on High and Washington streets, several of them still standing.

Unlike most of the city's other commercial-scale breweries, however, the Anheuser-Busch plant remains in operation — at least until early 2026, when the company said it will close and the property will be transferred to Goodman.

The brewery opened in 1951, and over the decades, the eagle sign has become a beacon of barley and hops, signaling to motorists and air travelers flying into nearby Newark Liberty International Airport that they were passing through or arriving in New Jersey's largest city.

The sign towers above the city's South Ward near the Elizabeth border, and at night casts an eerie red glow through the rising steam produced by the brewing process.

"It's a landmark — it lets you know that Budweiser is still there and everything's going alright," Newark City Historian Junius Williams said of the sign Friday, when a reporter told him of the brewery's closing. "I'm sorry to hear that."

On Thursday, the same day the closing was announced, Williams attended a press conference signaling the start of construction on a 300,000-square-foot film and television studio to be leased by Lionsgate. Like the brewery, the studio site is also in Newark's South Ward and would mark a leap forward for movie and TV production as an industry already growing in the city.

"As we gain a new business, we lose another," Williams said.

"Actually, it's the end of an era," he added, "because Anheuser-Busch was one of the last big breweries, I think the last big one. At one time, there were 75 breweries in the city."

Robert Sinclair Jr., a spokesman for AAA Northeast , a region that includes Newark and New York City, called the eagle sign, "one of those iconic roadside attractions."

"It might be up there with the Paul Bunyon statue, wherever he might be," Sinclair said.

Other, more specific examples include the Domino Sugar sign in Brooklyn, visible across the East River to motorists on Manhattan's FDR Drive. Another vestige of the region's manufacturing past is the Colgate Clock on the Jersey City waterfront, in view of drivers on Manhattan's West Side Highway across the Hudson River.

"It's one of those iconic signs that's part of the landscape of the tri-state area," Sinclair said. "These things are part of the charm of driving. The lure of the open road is a very strong one, and these things make it interesting."

"It'll be a little bit sad if it passes into history," he said of the Anheuser-Busch sign. "I'll miss it."

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