The iconic Budweiser eagle taking flight from its perch next to the Turnpike earlier this month is the definitive end of an era in Newark. For more than 75 years, the 87-acre Anheuser-Busch Brewery, with its 15-ton eagle, sat at the nexus of Newark Liberty International Airport, I-95, I-78, and U.S. 1-9, at the heart of the busiest corridors in the country, embodying the cultural and economic heritage of Newark in the 20th Century.
National brands in the beverage industry, including Ballantine, Pabst, Krueger, and Hensler, were among the more than 25 breweries that called the city home in the early 1900s.
When Anheuser-Busch opened its 3.2 million-square-foot facility, it arrived as the beverage industry reached its peak in the city, employing thousands of blue-collar residents from Essex, Hudson and Bergen counties. The brewery opened in 1951 and was the second-largest Anheuser-Busch facility in the country outside of the company’s main brewery in St. Louis, Missouri.
The facility employed more than 500 workers by the time it closed in late 2025. It was the last survivor of its kind in Newark, and the sale of its building and massive campus will give way to data centers and additional light manufacturing space. Multiple sources reported that Goodman Group, an Australia-based global asset management firm with an $86 billion global portfolio of real estate for industrial and data center use, intends to repurpose the brewery to better serve the needs of the modern economy.
Goodman Group invests on behalf of institutional investors, including Canadian pension plans and Australian superfunds. In the Garden State, it is known as the firm that recently purchased the New York Daily News printing plant next to Liberty State Park in Jersey City – a property that it intends to turn into data center space – but the firm also has a substantial industrial footprint in the Meadowlands and in the New York City area.
The group’s acquisition in Newark is somewhat similar to a development it is carrying out in Long Island City, just a few miles from LaGuardia Airport. There, at 30-02 Northern Blvd, it is also building a facility for logistics and data center use. That project will span over 650,000 square feet across 5 stories.
Goodman Group’s Ben Bytheway, the group’s North American marketing director, did not return a request for comment from Jersey Digs.
Although the sale of the brewery to Goodman signals the end of an era, it also signals a more subtle shift in Newark’s economy over the last 50 years. Instead of blue-collar jobs driving the city’s economic engine, as they did in the past, financial services and public sector jobs now make up the majority of jobs in the city, as private investments in the digital economy continue to grow. Newark recently broke ground on a 300,000-square-foot film studio in the South Ward. That facility will be operated by Lionsgate and is expected to employ more than 600 workers in the long term.
Like the Ballantine brewery in the Ironbound, or the Pabst brewery in Newark’s West Ward, and the former Edison Rail warehouse downtown, the Anheuser-Busch facility represented a moment of economic prosperity in the city’s 360-year-old history. While the data centers may bring a windfall in tax revenue to the city, the repurposing of the facility reflects a visual transition from manufactured goods at the heart of Newark to the digital economy and financial services.
