The waters between New Jersey and New York have been choppy at least since the Statue of Liberty arrived from France in the late 19th century and, confusingly, took up residence in New Jersey’s half of the Hudson River, but on an island owned by New York.
Anthony Lynn, a retired Verizon technician and son of Jersey City, is reminded of this historic dis whenever he gets a glimpse of Lady Liberty from the Jersey side. “All I know is,” he said, “its back is to us.”
That about sums up how New Jersey sees its treatment by New York. Forever getting the backside view.
Now comes the World Cup, a glorious global event that will reach its peak on July 19 with the final match being played at a stadium that sits squarely and indisputably in New Jersey.
A nice moment for New Jersey. And a ripe opportunity for a fresh dis from New York.
New Jersey and New York City won a bid to host a total of eight matches, all to be played at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J. But the international soccer federation, FIFA, decreed that stadiums hosting World Cup matches had to temporarily shed their corporate names. The New Jersey stadium was renamed NYNJ Stadium. NYNJ? The unkindest abbreviation of all!
It appears to be a bit of an own goal, since the North America bid for the World Cup way back in 2018 referred to MetLife as the stadium for the “New York/New Jersey” host city.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has gleefully rubbed it in, declaring recently: “New York is not just hosting the World Cup, New York is the World Cup.”
New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill was having none of it. “For those keeping score at home, the World Cup is in New Jersey,” she said. On Saturday, the first match day in the Meadowlands, she welcomed people to “New Jersey-New York Stadium.”
It may all sound petty, but you don’t have to dig deep before you hit the Jersey vein of resentment.
Casually mention the name change to Shani Adams, a Newark native working the check-in desk at the La Quinta hotel near the Meadowlands Sports Complex, and you’ll get a taste of the bitterness: “We don’t have a basketball team. We don’t have a football team. All we have is a stadium. And now they took that.”
She was of course referring to the New Jersey Nets, which went twice to the N.B.A. finals when they played at the Meadowlands before moving to hipper Brooklyn, from which they never returned (to either New Jersey or to the N.B.A. finals).
Then there are the football Giants and the Jets, which are hanging onto their New York names like so many ex-New Yorkers who just can’t quite admit that they now live in New Jersey. (Let the record show that one football team owner did adhere to truth-in-geography: Donald Trump, when he bought the New Jersey Generals of the United States Football League in the 1980s. He later developed a serious case of the renaming bug.)
Zachary Shemtob, the executive editor of SCOTUSblog and a New Jersey native who has written about the litigation between the two states, said New York has typically been the aggressor. In 1831, even legendary Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall cited what Mr. Shemtob characterized as New York’s “recalcitrance” in a territorial dispute with New Jersey.
The Meadowlands is an unlikely field of battle. A journalist in 1867 wrote about the Meadowlands: “Swamplands are blurs upon the fair face of Nature; they are fever-breeding places; scourges of humanity; which, instead of yielding the fruits of the earth and adding wealth to the general community, only supply the neighboring places poisonous exhalations and torturing mosquitoes.”
About 100 years later, The New York Times described the Meadowlands more succinctly: “probably the world’s biggest garbage dump.” It was a favorite of illegal dumpers from both states and was famously rumored — with no proof — to be the final resting place for the mob-connected Teamster president Jimmy Hoffa who vanished in 1975.
The Meadowlands has undergone a thorough reclamation in the last 60 years. While no one would confuse it with the gardens at Versailles, it has its charms. On Sunday, Mr. Lynn, the retired Verizon technician, was birding at the Richard W. DeKorte Park, which the state Audubon Society describes as “bursting with song.”
“This is the first place I saw an eagle,” he enthused.
As the crow flies, its less than a few miles to the cacophony around the rebranded stadium. The stadium is next door to a disorientingly large mall, food court and entertainment emporium humbly named the American Dream.
A group of fathers from New York were hanging out in front of the Escape Game, which offers your choice of fun challenges like Prison Break and Cosmic Crisis.
One of the men, a software consultant and football fan named A.J. Tejeda, was extolling the virtues of the American Dream — skiing the actual indoor slope, surfing at the actual indoor water park. “You can come here every day and not do the same thing twice,” he said.
After all, isn’t creating your own reality, your own story, the promise of the American dream?
That’s why Mr. Tejeda, when asked about NYNJ Stadium, can say with the typical swagger of a die-hard New Yorker, “It’s technically ours, but it’s in New Jersey.”
The post What’s in a Stadium Name? A World Cup Snub for New Jersey. appeared first on New York Times.
