Rising above Newark, New Jersey, on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard, the exquisite Victorian-period Krueger-Scott Mansion is a long-neglected reminder of the city’s mighty industrial history.
Gottfried Krueger (1837–1926), the creator of the Gottfried Krueger Brewing Company in Newark and the owner of many additional breweries, constructed the 40-room home in 1888. At the time, the building cost was $250,000. In 1926, the home was sold for $100,000 to the Scottish Rite Freemasons in the Valley of Newark. The mansion was expanded to include an auditorium with 700 seats to suit diverse gatherings. For $85,000 in 1958, Louise Scott bought the home. Scott kept the top floors of the estate as her own home and used the ground floor as a beauty school.
Following Scott’s death in 1982, the city of Newark became the owner of the home. A $625,812-bond was authorized in 1991 by the New Jersey Historic Trust in order to strengthen the building’s façade. The city of Newark matched that sum, spending approximately $4 million over time to transform the house into a center honoring the role played by Black people in the growth of Newark. The federal government gave an extra $1.5 million, but the city’s Municipal Council declined to provide any further funding for the project, thus after ten years of labor, plans to convert the mansion into an African-American cultural center were shelved.
A rehabilitation plan for the Krueger-Scott Mansion was unveiled in 2017. A new neighborhood known as a “Makerhood” would be built behind the building and include an urban farm, a plaza, 16 affordable apartments, 50 market-rate apartments, 36 parking spaces, and 16 to 20 shops, including restaurants, an artist’s space, a potential pub called Krueger NanoBrew, and possibly a dining facility created in partnership with the Rutgers Food Innovation Center. Seaview Development plans to renovate the mansion “in a historically respectful and accurate manner.” Three different building types would be included in this community: five-story, seven-story, and ten-story.
