Nobody Beats The Manor
What Do You Think You're Looking At? #272
Well, here is yet another old postcard from Greg Gillette, the Hillsborough, New Jersey local historian—that’s actually his title—who posts wonderful bits of old roadside and town history on his Facebook page. Given the age of the buildings he posts about, many have interesting stories. I dug up one of them here, and I have yet another one I’m working on.
But for today, here is an old diner/lounge/music venue on the Somerville Circle outside the town of Somerville, New Jersey. Actually, it’s two postcards, showing the evolution/remodel of the original diner structure:
The owners, the Siliveradis brothers, sold the lot to The Wiz, then one of the major consumer electronics retailers, in 1988 (one article says 1989), and afterwards managed different diners. (Simon Siliveradis went on to manage the Amwell Valley Diner, which I remember going to as a kid, along a rural-ish stretch of New Jersey Route 31. Here’s another article on the post-Raritan Manor career of Simon Siliveradis.)
But anyway, the Raritan Manor was famous as a live, largely rock music venue. A retrospective on the Raritan Manor from late 1988 includes this amusing little bit:
But it was. Demolition happened in 1989, and the new Wiz store opened in 1990. It seems quite clear, from a number of contemporaneous and slightly later newspaper articles, that the Raritan Manor was, in fact, demolished. (The news items on the sale and construction job begin in late 1988; before that, the Raritan Manor was just mentioned in ads or to note which acts were playing.)
If we go through “Raritan Manor” references during the relevant years, we find many references to the planned, ongoing, and already-happened demolition.
December 15, 1988: “The Raritan Manor will be razed to make room for the new complex and 120 parking spaces, said Lon Rubackin, director of real estate for The Wiz.” (The article notes that the planning board review for the site plan had not yet happened.)
July 19, 1989: “The Raritan Manor has a date with the wrecking ball next week. The former nightclub on the Somerville Circle will be demolished to make for The Wiz electronics store and up to five other stores.”
August 12, 1989: “RARITAN MANOR CRUMBLES”:
February 11, 1990: “The Wiz, an electronics chain store, announced plans to open on the Somerville Circle at the former Raritan Manor site, which closed in December 1988. Rebuilding is under way; an opening is tentatively scheduled for May.”
April 17, 1990: Steel beams are going up on the site:
July 15, 1990: “M. Gordon Construction Co. has begun work on the 30,000-square-foot shopping center for The Wiz in Somerville Circle.”
October 4, 1990: “Cars — in particular, the thousands of them that take the traffic circle daily — are one of the main reasons The Wiz chose the site that had housed The Raritan Manor nightclub, a company spokesman said.” That article includes another construction photo:
November 13, 1990: “The store, which occupies more than 23,000 square feet on the site of the former Raritan Manor nightclub, is the fifth New Jersey store for The Wiz.”
November 15, 1990: The new Wiz store is “located at the site of” the Raritan Manor:
December 12, 1991: “There used to be a dance hall where Nobody Beats the Wiz now stands.”
December 14, 1995: “[I]n 1983, Bon Jovi performed at the former Raritan Manor, a club where the Wiz now stands.”
January 22, 1998: “[Sebastian] Bach is familiar with Somerset County. He remembers the mid-’80s when he played with Skid Row at Raritan Manor, a club formerly on the Somerville Circle in Raritan where Nobody Beats The Wiz now stands.”
Here is a history from a local blogger: “Again, in 1988 the prime real estate status of the circle sparked the interest of big business and the Wiz wanted the land. The bar closed, the building was knocked down, and The Wiz opened in 1990. By 2003 the Wiz had been beaten, (their slogan was “Nobody beats the Wiz”), and an Electronics Expo opened in that building. That would last till 2010. In 2012 the Guitar Center that we know today filled the spot.”
And the state of New Jersey’s GIS property entry gives 1990 as the build date for the structure, which is still standing. It is pretty clear that the old diner/nightclub was completely demolished and replaced.
Here, on Historic Aerials, is the building as it appears today, which is the same as what The Wiz built, just with different tenants:
And here is the old Raritan Manor, in an aerial image from Historic Aerials:
That’s a little odd—the building is in the same exact spot on the lot, which is unusual when you’re razing a structure to use the lot for something brand new. There’s also the fact that the original structure has an obvious additional segment, and the new Wiz building has what looks like an addition too in the exact same spot. Also note the way the back of the original building forms three “steps,” because of the decreasing depths of the segments. This is also exactly duplicated in the Wiz building.
From the air, the only discernible differences between the two buildings is the white-roofed addition, on the left on the new image; and an extension of the main segment, past the third “step” in the original structure, on the other end of the new image.
As you have perhaps guessed, this is, in fact, because they are at least partially the same building.
There are also some newspaper articles suggesting that The Wiz did a major renovation, not a complete demo/rebuild.
For example, a December 15, 1988 article notes: “Representatives of the buyer, The Wiz, said at the closing that they plan to open a retail store at the site in several months, after renovating the building, according to the attorney for Raritan Manor.”
A January 2, 1989 article rather unclearly discusses a plan to “slice up the interior space,” for which permits had been granted to a previous developer—which is strange, because that previous developer, which is reported to have planned a minimall in the renovated Raritan Manor structure, isn’t mentioned in any of the other Raritan Manor/Wiz stories. This story also notes that The Wiz had just recently received “preliminary and final site-plan approval from the Planning Board.”
Did the planners nix the idea of a total demolition? What exactly happened at the Planning Board meeting was never reported, as far as I can tell. But if The Wiz received approval of a site plan, that suggests that the renovation was part of their plan. Otherwise, it would not have been approval but back to the drawing board/revision.
Then in April 1989, we see another reference to the original building being converted rather than demolished: “The Wiz of Brooklyn, New York, a leading distributor of electronic products purchased a single-story commercial building on 2 acres in Somerset Country [sic] which will serve as a new retail store. The property is situated at the Somerville Circle….”
And then on June 10, 1990, we get something more explicit: “The M. Gordon Construction Co….recently started converting a diner and entertainment center into a 30,000-square-foot center for The Wiz.”
A week later, on June 17, 1990, this is mentioned explicitly again: “[T]he new shopping center will be a conversion of an existing dinner [sic]/entertainment center.”
Here is a tantalizing Facebook comment: “Restaurant bar on the circle was called The Raritan Manor. It was sold and turned into a Wiz electronics store.”
Finally, in one of the last newspaper references to the Raritan Manor, in a December 1991 article about local history buff and collector Bob Strauss, we learn of The Wiz: “The CD room is one of the last remaining vestiges of the old rock-and-roll warhorse, its ballroom. Part of the store’s basement is left over from the Golden Triangle Restaurant [the Raritan Manor’s previous name].”
After 1991, there are just a handful of references to the Raritan Manor: an obituary of a former owner, another profile of the Amwell Valley Diner, and a brief reference in an article about the disappearance of live music venues.
One more thing: this is the back of the current structure, on Google Maps, which, even given turnover in tenants since The Wiz, looks like an old building that has been worked on a lot over a long time:
If you look closely, part of the back has this mottled texture, which kind of looks either like stones—of which the Raritan Manor facade was made—were either stripped or plastered over:
I remember visiting that Wiz store as a kid; we even went to their going-out-of-business sale in 2003. Somehow, they still had sealed Nintendo NES games for $1 that they were clearing out. It’s cool how older stores used to be like that. I remember the building being made of distinct wings/rooms, with one room kind of down a few steps. That must have been that middle ballroom segment!
It is absolutely wild to me that something as simple as “Did a major chain store tear down, or renovate, a famous diner?” is not clearly answered in the newspaper reporting of the time. You can’t treat a discrete news story as necessarily recording the truth. There is sometimes a margin of error, an irreducible amount of guesswork, involved in ultimately determining these things.
This story is so interesting to me because this is the first time I’ve encountered documentary evidence that is on balance wrong. Memory is fallible, reporting is fallible, and even official records—like the property record giving this clear renovation/conversion a build date of 1990—are fallible. For older buildings, records can be missing. If a business happened not to be covered by a newspaper in the pre-internet age, and was missed by or remained unlisted in the phone book, there could conceivably be literally no evidence that it ever existed.
That is usually not the case—there is usually at least something to pin these stories down—but these bits of knowledge are much more contingent than they feel like they should be, or than most people probably think they are.
So what was actually being demolished, in that photo of the rubble, and in the article talking about the wrecking ball, and in the steel beams photo? My guess is that the shell of the building and certainly the footprint were retained (with the exception of the expansions), while internal and some external walls were torn down. Since part of the existing building was extended, the rubble pile is most likely the original wall, or maybe multiple walls or parts of them, and part of or all of the roof, which must have been partially raised with those beams. You can see that with the Google Maps 3D satellite image:
A segment of the original building must have been torn down and rebuilt along the same footprint. But I have to imagine something original remained, and in any case the old building’s extension, which must have been the ballroom, does not seem to have been touched much at all.
Why did The Wiz not tear down this multi-part aging structure and start fresh? Perhaps conversion was cheaper. Or perhaps, as one reader suggested of another wild conversion job, the permitting for a major renovation/effective rebuild is easier than an actual demolition.
What I find fascinating about researching and assembling these stories, broadly, is that this is truly doing history. The stakes might ultimately be very low, but most of the stories of our mundane built environment, including those of many buildings still in existence, have truly never been fully pieced together. So I’m doing my little part.
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